.product_section .product_form, .product_gallery { opacity: 1; } .multi_select, form .select { display: block !important; } .image-element__wrap { display: none; }

Stop Thinking, Start Journaling

Michael Archambault

August 15, 2024 | 4 min read

How do you disconnect from a world always fighting for your attention — worlds both internal and external? The antidote may lay in the humble act of journaling.

When you write, different parts of your brain, including your motor, visual, and prefrontal cortexes, combine to produce something new and wonderful. It’s like magic.

And the beauty of it is that you don't need "something" to write about. One of the most therapeutic things you can do is write about you.

The Science Behind Journaling vs. Thinking

Journaling engages large regions of the brain to allow us to process our emotions. Journaling takes the mental strain out of your head by placing it on paper. There is a reason so many therapists recommend journaling as a therapeutic activity. Science approves journaling as a therapeutic device that images our brains.

When you journal, you take part in a process known as cognitive reappraisal; that's a complicated way of saying that writing about stressful everyday situations can help you reduce unwanted emotional intensity. This method also allows us to gain new perspectives. New thoughts are gateways for new creative ideas.

This all sounds great, but … doesn’t that sound like thinking?

"All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still."

Barbara Kingsolver

Of course journaling requires a bit of thought, but not the same type that has you sitting around rethinking the same ideas within the confines of your own head like a whirlwind.

Journaling is linear and focused. By turning jumbled thoughts and feelings into words through writing, we create more concrete ideas with direction and structure, which allows us to more easily analyze and expand upon them.

By writing, we create a physical expression of our thoughts with several benefits:

Better problem solving: Writing down ideas can assist with creative problem solving, providing new perspectives on a problem.
Emotional release: Journaling allows us to express ourselves as individuals and gain control of big emotions.
Greater clarity: By putting our thoughts into words, we can give structure to our pondering and make our thoughts easier to understand.
Self-discovery: Writing can help us express our thoughts and feelings, leading to personal growth and greater creativity.

What's more: exploring your relationship with the world around you is critical to becoming a better writer, and learning to journal for personal growth is a powerful tool in the writer's toolbox. As author Christina Baldwin once said,

“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.”

Rewriting Your Personal History

Human memories of past events are imperfect; they can quickly become distorted or completely disappear.

When we journal about our days, we not only create a physical record of our experiences, but the process of putting words onto paper or a computer screen can also help our memory recall.

Most importantly, journaling allows for cognitive restructuring; this is a process in which we can change negative thought patterns into something more positive.

Through our internal journey of memory, we gain new perspectives on ourselves and the situations we have encountered. These new ideas help shape new thinking patterns and exercise our brain. Of course, another activity benefits from these acts of mental strengthening — the writing process.

Crafting our own narrative of our life’s events not only enables us to shape our own identity but also creates a practice for putting ideas into the world. As we grow through journaling, we practice being better writers through a process that helps relieve mental strain and encourages new ways of thinking.

And that’s creativity.

“A writer is someone who pays attention to the world — a writer is a professional observer.”

Susan Sontag

Freewriting Your Journal

Prepare for your journaling journey by organizing the right tools. Start by grabbing a journal that works best for you; it can be a physical notebook, a leather-bound diary, your smartphone, or a digital typewriter like Freewrite. If you go the digital route, you can back up your journaling to the cloud so it's never lost.

Call us biased, but we believe the best way to journal is through freewriting.

Freewriting — allowing yourself to write with abandon — enables us to let go, tapping into our subconscious to explore our thoughts more deeply.

Here’s how we recommend you begin freewriting your journal:

Sit down with your journal and set a timer for 10-15 minutes.
Write continuously and don’t stop; the goal isn’t to create a work of art but to empty every thought into your journal.
Ignore any grammar or spelling mistakes, and don’t allow yourself to go back and make any edits; once written, it is done.
Stop when the timer goes off, and take a moment to reflect on your journaling process.

By freewriting your journal, you can break down common obstacles that many writers face, such as overthinking and critique from your inner critic.

The freewriting process does not apply only to journaling; it's an excellent way to create a flow of ideas from your mind into your journal, but the same applies to any form of writing.

By freewriting with a device like the Smart Typewriter, you can focus on the creative aspect of writing, handling the technical aspects, like grammar and spelling, later down the road.

As American author Robert Cormier once said:

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

To learn more about freewriting and how it can transform your creative process, whether you're writing a journal entry or diving into your novel's first chapter, subscribe to our free newsletter.

Michael Archambault

Writer

Michael Archambault is a content writer who’s been connecting with readers across the web for over a decade. At home, he loves cuddling up with a good mystery-thriller novel and, of course, snuggling with his cats.

"In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation."

So we decided to go on a mission to learn from some of Ireland's greatest writers.

Here are just a few of the quotes that struck us:

"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."

Oscar Wilde cuts right to the heart of creativity here. What is creativity but the mind striking out of the grooves of regularity?

"I love communicative problems. They always introduce just enough friction for me to feel drawn into a scene, when there’s some slippage between what somebody is trying to say, or feels capable of saying, and what the other person wants to hear or is capable of hearing."

If you've read any of Sally Rooney's award-winning books, you'll recognize this device in her plots. Try the same in your work when things are feeling a little dry or slow.

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

Nobody presents writing truths as concise and witty as Oscar Wilde. Who among us hasn't agonized over a comma for hours?

Sounds like Oscar needed a Freewrite.

"I don’t ever plot. And I do very little research, as little as possible. I prefer to use my imagination. Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self."

Claire Keegan's a freewriter! In this interview, Claire explains that the main character in her award-winning book, Small Things Like These, completely changed over the course of rewrites and revisions.

"The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize."

Colm Tóibín perfectly sums up the disembodied experience of writing here. The writer disappears and the characters take center stage.

"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously."

James Joyce was certainly an adventurer, and though his notion to a "modern writer" predates ours by about a century, we don't think all that much as changed. Writers still need to take risks!

"I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare.’ I say I ‘walked down the road.’ I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning.’ I say I ‘passed a school.’ You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

Maeve Binchy's own voice is apparent in every book she wrote. Her characters speak like real people, and that makes them all the more endearing.

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

What a poetic way to encapsulate the experience of writing poetry. Yeats certainly knew a thing or two about using that internal quarrel to create beautiful, timeless work.

Learn more