Writing, writing, writing

04 Feb Writing, writing, writing

Life can present somewhat challenging situations, to which we react in a variety of ways. One of these is the accumulation of thoughts, speeches, reasoning that at times during the day we find ourselves replaying, as in an endless loop, within our minds. We spend minutes, even hours, repeating phrases like “He said those words, I can’t ignore it, but I don’t want to argue, maybe it’s just my paranoia…” Nevertheless, admitting or not that it is just paranoia does not prevent that little voice from reappearing and continuing with the same old thing. Fortunately, there are techniques that can help us clear our minds and improve our moods.

A very simple technique to quell our stream of consciousness is the following: take a pen and paper and write down all the thoughts crowding your head. Too easy? Let us look at some little rules that might be useful for a satisfactory result:

1. Write down your thoughts exactly as the voice in your head dictates them. Act as if you were at primary school, when the teacher did the so-called dictation: your job is to transfer your thoughts to paper exactly as they are, you do not have to do any thinking or draw any conclusions.
2. If you feel the need to write the same sentence several times, do so.
3. Grammatical errors are welcome, it is not a competition, we are not looking for perfection, we just transcribe what we hear in our head.
4. You do not need to have impeccable handwriting, we can go ahead as fast as we want, the important thing is to write everything down.
5. Avoid abbreviations, the technique is effective precisely because you are going to write down all your thoughts in full.
6. You can use white, colored, or draft sheets, and any kind of pen.
7. Do not use a computer, use pen and paper.
8. If your thoughts are about multiple situations, you can devote different moments to each of them. Once you have chosen a context that particularly gives you food for thought, take your time to start and finish. For instance, it happens that I spend a couple of hours in which I fill pages and pages until I transfer all the words in my head to black and white. If you do not have such a chance, feel free to complete the exercise over more days.
9. It is possible to feel a sense of inadequacy, embarrassment, guilt or fear in writing something we have been taught to judge as wrong. If you happen to experience such emotions, know that they are perfectly fine. The important thing is to continue the exercise, because in the end we are not the thoughts we produce, we are the ones observing our thoughts, we are the ones playing with our thoughts and, in this case, we are the ones simply transcribing them.
10. Therefore, let go of any form of judgment that may arise during writing. Or even better, make a nice parenthesis and put it in writing.
11. The following is not a guideline but an optional ingredient: where you feel it is most impactful and liberating, go overboard! Swearing, like anything that is considered taboo in our society, has a great impact at a subconscious level. Using these elements in reporting our thoughts can give a great therapeutic sense of freedom. For example: “That b*****d of a colleague! He could move his a** once in a while, couldn’t he?” or even go further. Personally, I use this cue to great extremes.
12. When you are done, do not reread anything. Take five minutes to rest and then burn everything you have written!

Why should you try this exercise? The technique in question brings its benefits since the problem is not the problem itself, but rather the emotional state in which we find ourselves. In other words, in non-limiting situations, it is not our job or the behavior of our partner that constitutes the real obstacle, but rather how we feel about it. Repetitive thoughts that crowd our minds and consume our energy keep us within well-defined emotions, and these emotions are what we wish to deal with. What happens by following the 12 rules above is a change in our emotional state. By writing our thoughts we do not change the world out there, we change how we feel, and it is this feeling differently that will originate eventual solutions. Our goal, then, is to enter a different emotional register, being our emotions that determine our response to life events as well as the quality of life itself. By putting one’s internal chattering on paper, feelings change, and it is the following sense of lightness and relief that then makes all the difference.

The technique we have seen can be applied in a variety of areas:

• When we notice that a person with a certain emotional role towards us (ourselves, our partner, a friend, a relative, our boss, a colleague, …) is adopting a recurring behavior not quite to our liking, a chain of thoughts may come to form, which slowly gets more and more articulated, and then repeated, and repeated, and repeated. This is an excellent opportunity to experiment with the exercise of writing.
• It may happen that you are in bed and cannot get to sleep because of thoughts constantly overlapping in your head. To apply the technique you have just learned, these thoughts need not be necessarily about problems. In fact, I sometimes lie awake watching my mind reflect on the movie I just saw or the book I just read. When the time gets biblical, I get up, invest half an hour transcribing my thoughts on paper, go back to bed, and magically fall asleep.
• It is possible to plan ahead. If we go through an event that we know has a high probability of making us suffer in terms of overthinking, we can start writing down all the thoughts that might form about it. In this regard, some time ago I met someone I had not seen in a while. The meeting was brief, however, many emotions were involved. So, as soon as I got home, I did not wait to be flooded with thoughts such as: “Did she feel anything by seeing me again?”, “No, I shouldn’t care”, “Yes, I should, she could have avoided talking to me”, but gave free rein to feelings and fantasies, reporting in advance any possible paranoia that might occur to me. Result: empty and relaxed mind.

In conclusion, this simple strategy of handwriting your thoughts on a piece of paper is an effective way to clear and change your emotional state. Test it yourself, and let me know what are the first differences you notice between before and after.