22nd STATION
TO WRITE IS TO SELECT
The power of putting pen to paper
Writing is one of the most effective therapies there is. The patients treated by the psychotherapist Shoma Morita (1874-1938), to whom we devote a chapter in Ikigai, expressed their emotions on paper every day.
When we allow what is inside of us to come to the surface, not only do we clarify and order our thoughts and emotions, we also clean our subconscious of unnecessary burdens, which helps our life to speed up and head in the right direction.
Medical benefits of writing
Modern science has shown the positive effect writing has on our health. UCLA’s Doctor Matthew Lieberman used FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) in his experiment to scan the brains of his subjects, who were divided into two groups:
1) Those who wrote about their emotions every day.
2) Those who either did not practice this habit or only wrote about some neutral issue (such as work reports).
After a few days, amygdala activity among the people in the first group began to drop, which was a physiological sign of good health and low stress.
The study concluded that writing about our life and emotions helps to regulate the amygdala’s activity, which in turn regulates the intensity of our emotions.
Creating yourself
“In my diary, I not only express myself more openly to how I would talk to another person – I create myself. My diary is a conduit for my personal identity. It represents me as an emotionally and spiritually free person. So, it is not a simple account of my everyday life. It is something more. In many cases, my diary offers me an alternative.”
SUSAN SONTAG
A logbook of your life
The important thing about keeping a diary is that, as its name suggests, you write in it on a daily basis. There is no need to do anything sophisticated. Simply…
• Sit down at the beginning or end of the day and write the first thing that comes into your head.
• Write about something exciting that has happened to you today, or about plans for the near future that may be taking shape in your head.
• Try to bring to light the positive side of things.
Regarding this last point, of course we also experience unpleasant things in life. Write about them but ponder what you could have done better to stop them from happening. The fundamental questions are:
1) What have I learned after this bad experience?
2) What changes do I need to carry out in my life for other kinds of things to happen to me?
Create a 5-minute diary
Grab yourself a notepad whose color and design inspires you. If you do not have one to hand, buy one that you will use solely for this mission.
Start a new page every day. Draw a horizontal line through the center.
1) Write for three minutes in the top half straight after waking up in the morning.
2) Write for two minutes in the bottom half before going to bed at night.
Now you have created the sections, let’s get to the writing:
In the morning (1 minute for each item):
• Three things I should be grateful for at this point in my life:
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
• Three things that will make the day that is about to begin special:
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
• Statement of the day, TODAY I AM GOING TO:
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
Try not to think too much about what you write. As in the art of haiku, which we will see in another chapter, it is about writing the first thing that comes into your head when you open the notebook. The exercise is not called the 5-minute diary for nothing.
Let’s carry on with this express diary:
At night (1 minute per item):
• Three great things that have happened today:
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
• How could I have made today better?
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
In the three great things, write the most exciting or significant thing to have happened to you that day. They can be trifles, but things you were not expecting when you woke up that morning. For example: “A friend who hadn’t written to me for a year messaged my cell phone and that made me feel loved,” or “Strolling through the park, I had a fantastic idea for my next personal project.”
When explaining what you could have done to make the day better, you might be tempted to go into lengthy explanations, but it will be much more useful if you are brief, so as to let your subconscious learn while you sleep. It could be something like this: “Today I was swamped with urgent things in the morning. I should have taken control and prioritized the important stuff at the start of the day.”
For further information about this technique, see www.intelligentchange.com/blogs/news/five-minute-journal-tips