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

The reason writing is such a powerful tool for change is because it helps us begin to see things more objectively than we’ve been able to see them before.

Awareness changes things. It’s not only discipline or effort or willpower or efficiency or productivity that brings progress, but also a gentle noticing of yourself. Contemplation. Looking at a thing for a long time.

Expressive writing is the act of sharing your deepest thoughts and feelings about a subject on the page.

Framing is when you direct someone’s attention toward a specific detail. As the narrator of your own story, you get to do the framing.

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.

writing is diagnostic.

Writing is communication, self-discovery, creativity, spirituality, and self-expression.

the early stages of growth happen under the surface.

There’s a writing exercise I give to clients where you just literally list what’s true right now. It can be just a simple list, and none of the “truths” have to be connected. The only requirement is that the elements on the list have to actually be true.