The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life

Facts: What are the facts of what happened?

Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explores this in The Body Keeps the Score, addressing how if we only talk, we’re accessing one part of our brain, and we miss out on what the other parts of our brain have to teach us about ourselves. How do we access these other parts of our brain? Yoga, meditation, experiential therapy, neurofeedback—and of course, writing

We cannot heal our wounds until we understand them.

Dr. Pennebaker commented on how some of his research participants experienced emotional relief through their writing process: When people were asked why writing had helped them, many spontaneously said that they came to a new understanding of the emotional events themselves. Problems that had seemed overwhelming became simpler and more manageable a

Writing practice is life practice.

A narrator can notice things that a protagonist cannot. They can notice patterns—the facts, thoughts, and feelings that repeat again and again and again.

Somewhere along the way, we were sold the idea that writing is only a commodity.

What Writing Can Help Us Do: Name our experience so we can more fully understand it. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience.

Is it possible that we are stuck in our writing because we are thinking about it too much?