Science sheds a light on the drastic benefits of writing daily.
Write Every Day – Alexandre Porto · 4 min read
There are many angles in which we can examine the benefits of sitting down to write every single day.
Humanity has known of the benefits of expressive writing since the first humans started to express their life experiences in writing.
Now that we have the benefit of scientific scrutiny to reveal to us the evidence of how beneficial writing every day actually is, we can better understand how important is the exercise of writing daily.
If you post online, then posting every day has the advantage of getting your word out there consistently and steadily building the base of your “content pyramid”.
Aside from this, I’d like to discuss the physical and mental benefits of writing every day.
Physical Benefits
Expressive writing means that the person will write about something that happened in their lives and how they experience the world.
This can mean writing about early traumas, happy moments, or even future hopes.
In research, people who wrote expressively for — only! — two minutes a day showed improvement in health.
Writing every day has shown to reduce stress levels by lowering blood pressure, reducing cortisol levels — the hormone of stress, — and increasing dopamine production.
Writing is like praying.
It has been shown by scientific experiments that praying, just like writing, is an excellent exercise for clearing the intellect and relaxing the body, especially during stressful situations.
I believe that this happens because the moment of prayer is one in which the person has the ideal context to talk with themselves as if they were talking to somebody else.
When we talk to other people we don’t use logical shortcuts.
Writing has the same effect on people. Even when we write just for ourselves, we structure the ideas we put on paper in a way that would be understandable to others if someone else came to read it.
Mental Benefits
Writing every day has shown to increase focus and attention, enhancing the ability for someone to learn new skills more effectively.
In research, patients have discovered in writing an effective exercise to fight depression.
With the patients of the mentioned research, the effects of writing to fight depressive disorder persisted for at least 4 weeks.
By writing every day you have the opportunity to set your cognition in expressive mode.
You are capable of doing this without sitting down to write every day, but when you do write often you may feel like the moments you experience in real-life flows slower than when you don’t write every day.
Your observation skills increase drastically because your mind is set on understanding and expressing.
Not to be repetitive:
When I write every day, I get myself used to mentally organize the things I experience as I would organize them on a piece of paper.
It’s a powerful exercise to practice expressing our deepest ideas in a way that other people can understand.
This means that the usual abstract mental shortcuts I take to navigate my mind must give way to well-structured concrete logical sentences.
I write every day…
It simply makes my life better because the principle that makes a good text is the same principle that makes life good.
I recommend that you practice by mentally structuring your personal and intimate experience in a way that other people would understand if they could read your mind.
Write daily and notice how much easier it becomes to be understood when you express yourself.
The best way to practice is by sitting down and writing every day.
The reason I wake up every morning and sit down to write is that this exercise makes my experience in this world easier to share, and as far as I am concern, this is what life is all about.