A simple yet powerful tool to improve your life.
Use this tool to improve your focus, clarity, and productivity.
Do you remember when your school teacher told you to write essays about your father or mother?
I hope you do remember them.
This is the first time you wrote from your thoughts.
After that, a belief was instilled in you that writing is a way of communication.
Letter writing, notice writing, paragraph writing, writing answers to questions, and so many forms of communication by writing. It seems boring to write and communicate.
But if I want you to remember one thing, it will be that writing is not just for communication. It’s way more than that.
Writing is a powerful tool to improve your life.
Writing helps you improve your focus, clarity, and productivity.
Writing isn’t reserved for writers, authors, or other professionals only. Writing is for everyone who needs to focus and concentrate.
Writing is a tool, a tool to improve your life.
Improve your life and help you focus, gain clarity, and stay productive.
James Pennebaker, a health psychologist, along with Stefanie Spera and Eric Buhrfeind, conducted a study when a computer company laid off 100 senior engineers.
To improve the situation, they divided the engineers into two groups. In the first group, the engineers were assigned to do nothing, and in the second group, the engineers were assigned a task to write for 20 minutes every day.
In their journal, they pour out their deepest thoughts and feelings; they describe their emotional challenges of searching for a new job, relationship problems, financial stresses, experiences of being fired, feelings of rejection, and all.
Eight months later, only around 19% of the engineers from the first group were reemployed full-time, compared to 52% of the engineers from the second (writing) group.
Writing isn't just about putting words on a page. It's a powerful tool that can improve our focus, clarity, and productivity.
When we write, we're forced to organize our thoughts, which can lead to deeper understanding and insight.
Why writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings helps you improve your life.
Suppressing negative feelings and experiences can create more stress, while expressing them can actually free you. You can hide your feelings and thoughts from the world, but it creates trauma, and you can’t bear it, so you get stressed out.
I believe you can’t talk about your deepest feelings with people around you. I can’t do that either. And that’s where writing them down helps you express and acknowledge them.
Although the above experiment has already shown the results on how writing helps people make sense of their bad feelings and experiences. Still, let’s look at the science behind it.
The science behind writing about your deepest thoughts and experiences is that it helps you understand the things coming from you clearly and better. Studies show that accepting the negative events and emotional impairs within us helps us to improve our psychological health.
The effective way of accepting and understanding them is writing them down.
Writing about what happened and how you feel about the experience opens up a clearer map of your thoughts and feelings. It makes it easier to gain insights and become aware of the happenings within you.
In short, writing and journaling help you see logic in your thoughts and experiences, making it easier to summarize and move on.
Two types of journaling habits you should add to your lifestyle.
1. Expressive journaling/writing:
Expressive writing is what we discussed earlier, i.e., writing down your deepest thoughts and feelings. Pour them out, whatever comes to your mind, every tiny detail. Acknowledge them clearly and understand what your writing is telling you.
Here’s the challenge: Take out your journal or some pieces of paper today and be ready before you go to bed. Start brainstorming whatever comes to your mind. I bet you’ll have better sleep.
2. Gratitude journaling:
Gratitude journaling is a practice you do in the morning when you wake up. You show gratitude for who you are in the moment and what you are grateful for.
Here’s the challenge: Wake up and freshen up. Take out your journal or your device where you keep your notes. Start writing:
3 things you are grateful for.
3 things you are going to do today.
A short affirmation to do them.
Keep these two journaling habits aligned with your lifestyle and stay consistent with them. I can assure you you’ll start seeing results within a few days. You’ll see how your mind is clear and how every feeling or thought makes sense to you. You will feel better, which we all look for.
5 ways to improve your writing to focus better and stay productive with clarity.
Go with Clarity: Start early. Start writing things down early, without waiting and delaying. Write what you have to tomorrow today before you sleep. This helps you gain more clarity on what things you have to do when you wake up.
Go for Awareness: This is what AI writing can’t do. To make yourself aware, you have to write; write what is happening, what is going on in your head, your feelings, thoughts, and whatever you want to. It is one of the key ways to improve your focus.
Go with the Problems: Write about the problems you are facing. Braindump everything about them. Research has shown that writing down your problems often leads you to solutions. So it’s worth writing them down and improving.
Go for Simplicity: Don’t use complex words. Go for simple ones. Forget about the rules and grammar. Try to write as simply as you can so a five-year-old could also understand. Writing in simple and plain language helps you focus with clarity to stay productive.
Go for Reading: After writing everything, read it thoroughly. Reading what you wrote helps you gain more clarity on your thoughts, and so you focus better. It also leads you to write down more.
Final Thoughts: Don’t remember things.
Don’t remember things. Write them down. Your brain is worse at remembering things. Don’t let it do that. Note down whatever pops up into your mind that you want to remember.
I am repeating: Don’t let your brain remember things. It is weak to do that. Instead, note down everything that comes into your mind that you want to remember (ideas).
When you note them down, your life improves because you are not pressuring your brain anymore. So, it helps you to be focused in life.
Your brain is a powerful thinker, but worst in memorizing what you think.
Writing is a powerful tool to improve your life with focus, clarity, and productivity.
Sumit,
Curator of Simple Digest
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