Hofwil Moment | via Gymnasium Hofwil
You create the space for your thoughts. Hundreds, possibly thousands of thoughts pop in and out of our head every single day. They show up when we’re getting ready for work, on the bus to school, while we’re in the middle of a conversation with a friend. But there’s no time to really consider what they are about really, how to label them (positive/negative/useful/nonsense/encouraging/disparaging), and whether they are meaningful to us. Writing our thoughts down gives them an address where they can live.
You give them more structure. When you’re busy going from place to place and from one task to another, the thoughts can come out all jumbled and chaotic to the surface of our consciousness. Sometimes a thought is just one word. Fear. Sometimes it’s a phrase. I don’t know what to do. And sometimes it’s a long string of words. Interesting article! I was thinking the same thing. But last week when I tried getting up earlier, I fell asleep at 3 in the afternoon. Maybe I should go to bed at 10:30. But then there’s that TV show I really want to see… When you write your thoughts down, you can put them in any order that makes sense to you. It can be in paragraph format, an outline, or a list.
You start paying attention. Often times we identify ourselves with our thoughts, but that’s not accurate. We are not our thoughts; we are much bigger than our thoughts! By writing them down, we can look at our thoughts in a more objective way because now they’re not in our head any more — they’re down on paper. The act of writing them down creates a separation that is necessary in order to understand what’s going on in our mind. The new structure of words you put on a page makes it easier to look at each thought, each phrase, each sentence one by one.
You can choose to agree or disagree with them. Think of it as a dialogue you’re having with yourself. When you wrote your thoughts in a notebook last night, you were in a despondent or perhaps bad mood. But this morning you want to write more, and you glance over what you wrote yesterday. Some time has passed, and now you’re feeling a bit better after having a good night’s rest. You can choose to react any way you want to a thought you had. Maybe you’re thinking, I thought there’s no way I can study for six hours today, but that’s not true. I’ll plan my day better and I’ll study for four hours in the morning, so that will make me feel like I’m on top of things.
You learn more about yourself. Creating a habit of writing down your thoughts can be a life-changing thing. Instead of rushing from day to day and getting distracted by a million things, you make the time to think about you and your life. It’s not just about life in general — it’s more than that. You keep a record of your thoughts and feelings. You write down what you want out of life and create goals for yourself. You try out different habits and some of them stick while others go away after a few days. You have conversations with people, and there’s a sentence someone says that really makes you think. So you write it down. In all of these ways, you grow as a human being. You learn about who you are and who you want to be, with each new day.
via quora