- A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
Chapter 1: Something to Express
- The Hang-Up is a strange and looming sense you have that something is not right
- The most important, most valuable, most deeply enriching and satisfying thing you could ever own: your voice
- Our brains have mastered the skill of automating behavior to make it as easy as possible
- We often feel ourselves bumping up against the “rut” of an old habit or pattern. Not because we’re lazy or undisciplined people, but because we are, quite literally, fighting against the deep pathways that were carved in our brains a long time ago
- Every day, you write a host of text messages, emails, grocery lists, birthday cards, Instagram captions, Facebook messages, Tweets, and who knows what else
- Writing is communication, self-discovery, creativity, spirituality, and self-expression
- Research shows that writing for as little as twenty minutes a day for four days in a row can measurably improve your mood
> What Writing Can Help Us Do
1. Name our experience so we can more fully understand it.
2. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable.
3. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create.
4. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience.
5. Find perspective for life’s challenges, large and small.
6. Invent brand-new solutions for age-old problems.
7. Build our confidence.
8. Increase our working memory and overall cognitive power.
9. Cultivate more gratitude and contentment.
10. Provide clarity for our decisions.
11. Increase satisfaction in our romantic partnerships.
12. Level up our immune system, help us sleep better, etc.
13. Combat and curb anxiety, stress, and depression.
14. Tune out the well-meaning and critical voices around us so we can finally understand what we think
- To find your voice means you begin to see yourself more clearly—who you are and what you’re here for—and to have the strength and confidence to begin to become that empowered version of yourself in the physical world
- What if there is no one else on the planet who can express the thing that’s trying to be expressed through you?
- The thing in you that wants to be expressed can never be expressed through anyone else
- Dr. James Pennebaker, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin
- Michael White and David Epstein’s psychotherapeutic approach, narrative therapy, which has been around since the 1980s and uses the power of storytelling to help people reframe their experiences
- Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work and began to understand why our brains are more powerful than even our genetics and what it takes to change them
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van ker Kolk #book
- Writing Ourselves Whole by Jen Cross #book
- Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo #book
- Rewrite Your Life by Jessica Lourey #book
- Writing heals your past trauma, strengthens your immune system, and helps you all-around feel better
- Pennebaker’s research shows that writing for as little as twenty minutes a day for as little as four days in a row can cause a measurable improvement in your mood. In a time when we’re ingesting more mood-stabilizing drugs than ever before in the history of the world, I hope we pay attention to this small piece of data
Chapter 2: But I'm Not a Writer
- Writing is not just writing. Writing is prayer, spirituality, self-discovery, communication, therapy, connection. It’s an invitation to take ownership of our lives. Writing helps us gain confidence in ourselves, our ideas, and how we move through the world. The invitation to write is an invitation to find your voice
- The written word hasn’t always existed. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were considered the first true writing system, and coherent texts didn’t appear on the scene until about 2600 BC
- If you don’t have a captive audience the spoken word is rendered useless
- Some of the earliest texts included ancient Egyptian religious texts, Greek and Roman literature, and the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Then came Buddhist religious texts, Chinese religious texts, and eventually (skipping centuries) Old English texts—Beowulf, for example
- As we began to put words on the page, we also began (however slowly) to understand those who are different from us, to have a reliable way to remember details, to clarify our thoughts and ideas about things by expanding our vocabulary, and to pass our cultural and religious identity to the generations that followed
- Writing offers us a powerful way to ingest what takes place in our lives—whatever that may be—to break it down into pieces, to absorb the parts that are nutritious and good for us, and to discard what doesn’t serve our growth. Like a digestion process, this gives us the ability to assimilate all kinds of experiences (not just positive ones) and use them for our benefit
- Writing helps us choose a different vantage point than we’ve ever taken before; it helps us persuade an audience toward an action or set of actions; it affords us the ability to make a way where there wasn’t a way before. Writing gives us power
- Your ability to regulate your emotions regarding two different experiences is as limited as your vocabulary
- When you can finally put the exact right words to something you’ve been feeling or living through, a deep relief comes
- “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is . . . the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.” - Mark Twain
- Memory are buried in our subconscious, and we don’t often find what’s in our subconscious until we write about it. We don’t see the connections that set us free until we take the time to write them down
- Expressive writing is the act of sharing your deepest thoughts and feelings about a subject on the page
- What you have to do is to consider what you think and how you feel about a subject, scribble a few words down on the page, and slowly, over time, watch your perspective and your life transform
- Writing practice is life practice. Where we get unstuck in our writing, we get unstuck in our lives
- When people write—something magical takes place. They not only record their message, they become their message. When they tell the truth, they embody the truth. They rise above their personal problems and find a way to metabolize their experience for themselves and, sometimes, for a small group of readers. They’re becoming the heroes of their own stories, their own wise and trusted narrators
Chapter 3: The Sacred Act of Making Space
- Creative energy fills the space we make for it
- Smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory
- Feng shui is a traditional Chinese concept of design that emphasizes how our environment connects to our emotional state
- Having a space to call your own is symbolic of something much more important—space to think, to dream, to reflect, to create, and to contribute a part of yourself to the world
- Time is the resource most limited to us on this planet. Far more than financial resources, once our time is gone, it’s gone
- Time is limited and precious. Why are so many of us wasting it?
- Make a list of all of the things on your calendar to see what your true religion is
- What do I spend most of my time doing?
- Why am I doing these things?
- What is my “religion,” according to my calendar?
- When I come to the end of my life, will I feel I spent my time well?
- Where can I make space for writing?
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” - Arthur Ashe
- Writing down a commitment makes it more real to us. Writing down anything makes it more real to us
- Our minds are packed with thoughts that are scattered, disconnected, contradictory, unhelpful, and impossibly loud
- Sitting down to write helps us begin the process of slowing down our thoughts with the lofty goal of being fully present—to the page, and to ourselves
- While the prefrontal cortex is indeed the “higher-level thinking” part of our brain (and we need it), what this doesn’t accurately represent is that the limbic brain is much better at creativity, emotion, imagination, and play. This is the “muscle” in your brain you’re exercising when you spend time in your limbic system.
- The words that fill the space you are making will become your voice. They flow from the truest part of you, they guide you, and they help you clear out the “noise” and the clutter, so you always know how to come home
Chapter 4: The Drama of the Blank Page
- Far too many of us are waiting for someone to show up and tell us what to do next, to answer our big questions for us, to give us a set of rules to follow that make us feel safe. We love safety and security. But innovation and creativity happen outside the boundaries of safety and security. The act of writing invites us to this process. It invites us to the table of creativity, to the table of our own lives.
- Nobody else is going to solve your problems for you. After all, you’re the CEO. Even if things are in bad shape, it’s your job to help improve team morale, try something new, quit what’s not working, pivot and go a different direction
- The act of focusing our attention on a single thing (or at least attempting to do so) reveals to us how distracted we’ve been all along
- If we’re going to let outside drama pull us away from our writing, is it to do something productive to help or is it to panic unnecessarily about the worst-case scenario?
- Writing is your invitation to discharge some energy that’s been pent-up for too long. You know that feeling you get when something is eating you up, and then you vent to a friend, and you feel better? That’s the power of writing it down. You get to leave your fear, frustration, stress, and anxiety on the page, and come away a little lighter
- Engaging with the blank page is a reminder that we do get an opportunity to start from scratch every day. In a physical sense, this might not feel true. But in a spiritual sense, it’s true. Each day we start over so don’t get too attached to what we did yesterday, be it good or bad. Just put some new words on the blank page
- The drama of the writing practice is not just about getting more writing done. It's about who we are becoming
- Writing call us back to ourselves. It will make us the strongest, most resilient, most beautiful versions of ourselves—the truest “us” that’s been there all along
Chapter 5: Out of the Chaos
- Good writing always starts with good questions
- Am I okay? Can I be myself? If I am myself, will people reject me? What do I do with a faith that no longer fits me? Can I make peace with the parts of that faith I still love? Can I make peace with the people in this world who will not accept me?
- The reason her writing was compelling, was because these questions are interesting and universal. Who isn’t asking these questions about themselves and their lives?
- Our brains are wired to ask questions and look for answers. From an evolutionary perspective, this has helped drive our behavior to support our own survival
- First, if you’re wondering what to write about, always start with questions. Second, if you’re wondering why you feel like writing about something in particular, ask yourself, What’s the question that’s under the topic?
- Start with questions and everything gets more interesting
Chapter 6: Stories Worth Telling
- Research shows there are three elements your writing needs to cover in order to have the powder of change: facts, thoughts, and feelings. The facts of whatever story you’re writing, your thoughts about those facts, and then your feelings about those thoughts
- The modern talk therapy model operates on the assumption that if we can get past the events of our lives to our thoughts and feelings about those events, we can discover why things are happening the way they are happening. Not only that, but we have far more leverage to create change in our lives
- We can change the story we’re telling ourselves. In doing so, we can predisposition ourselves to the memorized feeling of joy rather than the memorized feeling of dread
- 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. We see things as if they were happening to someone else
1. What are the facts of the story? What happened?
2. What are my thoughts about those facts? What is the story I am telling myself?
3. How did it make me feel? Where did I experience that in my body?
4. What did I do because I felt that way?
5. What happened next?”
- You’ll need to pick a circumstance from your life that you’d like to write about
- The right-left (bilateral) motion of walking helps you think and even activates your limbic brain, where old memories are stored. Don’t try to force yourself to come up with something. Trust that the right circumstance will come if you give it a little space and time.
1. Facts: What are the facts of what happened?”
- Facts are the objective details of what happened: who, what, where, and when
2. Story: What is the story I am telling myself about what happened?
3. Feelings: How do I feel about what happened and about the story I’m telling myself?
- Take a minute and go over what you’ve written above—the facts and the story. What do you feel in your body?
4. Actions: What did I do to engage or disengage with what I felt?
5. Result: What was the outcome of my chosen action?
Chapter 7: Getting Stuck (and Unstuck)
- Where you are stuck in your writing, you are stuck in your life. The only way to get unstuck in your writing is to get unstuck in your life. And a fabulous way to get unstuck in your life is to get writing
- The limbic brain thinks in images, responsible for physical sensations, most active when we're dreaming or moving our bodies, doesn't keep track of time, good at creativity, asking questions, and play, memorized responses, makes connections between disconnected images, thrives on guessing, follows one thought at a time
- The frontal cortex thinks in words, responsible for logic and reason, most active when we're sorting, evaluating, judging, or solving a problem, concerned with productivity, efficiency, and time management, concerned with answers rather than questions, skeptical of creativity and play, carefully thinks through each action, connects things in logical, linear order, thrives on certainty, juggles many thoughts at once
- You’re limbic when you see the movie in your head. I tell writers to “imagine what this would look like on a movie screen” because this helps them get limbic
- Get outside and go for a walk. Go in the backyard and do some yoga. Stand up next to your desk and do some jumping jacks
- We've made it virtually impossible to connect to ourselves—to our intuition, that inner knowing—and to create new possibilities out of thin air
Chapter 8: Write Note, Edit Later
- The point is to discover your own truth, so you have a clear plan for moving forward
Chapter 9: Becoming Your Own Narrator
- The words that change our path almost always come from inside us
- Where is my life headed?
- What should I do next?
- Write for 5 years in the future
- You response to your circumstances is within your control
- As you put words on the page, you’ll suddenly begin to see, This is who I am. This is what I want. This is why I’m here
- “When dealing with upsetting experiences, our working memory is reduced, and at the same time, our focus of attention is narrowed. We tend to think more narrowly and rigidly . . . [our] mindlessness . . . alleviate[s] the pain [of our emotional experience] at the cost of becoming temporarily stupid” - Pennebaker
- “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 after seeing them on paper. Writing helped to resolve problems. Once the issues were resolved, there was no need to think about them anymore” - Pennebaker
- No matter who you are, there is a voice inside you that is truer than the voices you hear most of the day
Chapter 10: The Passage of Time
- Careful reflection and attention to our behavior and our bodies is the only way they ever change. And writing is an absolutely foolproof way to curate awareness
- How can we ever hope to change if we don’t know how or why or even that we need to change? We cannot heal our wounds until we understand them
- Contemplation is the action of looking thoughtfully at something for a long time.
- Somewhere along the way, we got the impression that we should never have to feel any pain at all, so we learned to numb our pain. But pain is not inherently bad. Pain just points us toward what’s wrong
- You get to choose between staying comfortable but stuck in the same old loops and pushing through discomfort to your own breakthrough
- If there’s a pattern in your life that plays out over and over again, you cannot “positive affirmation” your way out of it. You have to face the facts of the situation
- The early stages of growth happen under the surface
- One of the main reasons we struggle so much with creativity is that the culture we live in is obsessed with productivity. We want to see a measurable return for every single minute we spend working toward something. Unfortunately, this measuring metric is contradictory to the human soul and how it operates. The paths that offer the most “progress” to the soul—therapy, art, dance, music, writing, yoga, meditation—cannot be taken without wandering and dead ends and failures and blank space and plenty of things that feel like a waste of time
- The human soul does not crave productivity the way the human mind does. The human soul craves depth, not width. The human soul couldn’t give two rips about ROI. The human soul is concerned with contribution, legacy, impact, generosity, and value. The human soul is much more concerned with what it can give than what it can get. The human soul wants to understand who it is and why it’s here
Chapter 11: Write It Like a Love Letter
- Secrets kill. Literally. Keeping secrets is physical work
- “When we try to keep secrets, we must actively hold back or inhibit our thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. Keeping secrets from others means that we must consciously restrain, hold back, or in some way exert effort to not think, feel or behave.” - Pennebaker
- Many people don’t have anywhere safe, stable, or private where they can share what’s really on their minds
- Writing to someone you love will move you in the direction of love. Love for yourself. Love for others. Love for the world
Chapter 12: The Ending That Hasn't Been Written
- Stories require transformations, so if you can get clear on the transformation you’re after, charting the path gets easier
Chapter 13: The Beauty of the Writing Life
- No matter how much other people love you, if you don’t love yourself, you’ll feel empty
Chapter 14: The Gift You Leave Behind
- For all the energy and effort and love and passion we put into this world, words are the most lasting thing we get to leave behind
- Words can be like time capsules. What is true at a certain point in time doesn’t necessarily stay true. As our words evolve, so do we. As we evolve, so do our words. And as we read back over words we’ve written, we get to see how far we’ve come
- The only way we will ever have a shot at speaking to other people is if we start by speaking to ourselves. To our kids. To the people who are closest to us. To the ones we love the most. You might find yourself feeling like it is too tender and personal a thing to do—to share the most vulnerable details of your life. To that I say, those are the only words I want to read. They’re the only ones that matter
#SharedFromTwos ✌️