I think a lot of people put too much pressure on themselves when it comes to the advice "writing your thoughts down". Perfectionism, or the memories of being forced to take notes in school, kicks in and you start to look for how-to:s, format and guides.
Very similar to meditation. The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored. Not some breathing techniques, how to focus your mind, posture etc. That comes later, very naturally, after you get curious about improvements.
Same goes for writing down thoughts. Just take a blank A4 paper from the printer and write away. Not sure what to write? Write about that, the fact that you're not sure what to write. Throw the paper away if you don't like the thoughts you see, or at least do it with that mindset. It's not about writing something novel, just as meditating is not about reaching some enlightenment
Oh awesome! I have Atisha's lojong, and also Chogyam Trungpa's mind training (which is more of a commentary), but these look great. I'll definitely pick it up, thanks again!
There was an app or site I remember using that, every time you typed a sentence, it disappeared so that you only focused on the sentence in front of you. After you're done, you could export the entire document. I wonder if we could add some LLM features to that too.
Hey hey, author of Enso (write.sonnet.io) here -- thanks for the mention! I actually wrote an article about a similar subject and shared it here yesterday:
Before I graduated from college, my aunt gave me the book, The Artist's Way, which prescribes this basic task as you've described as the foundational exercise for creativity. The suggestion given was 3 pages a day no matter what.
Bingo. The Morning Pages technique is also the cheapest therapy on the planet. The effect, for me anyways, is virtually identical to the catharsis I feel from a $200 therapy session.
Not OP, but I went through the Artist's Way a while back and kept morning pages up for two or so years after it. I'd still probably do morning pages every day if I didn't move on to sitting at my piano in place of them (and would do both if I had time in the morning). So in that regard I think it was a success -- it got me back to having a healthy relationship with music making and artistic practice.
The content of the workbook at places doesn't totally resonate with me, but I'd say there's enough in there that it's worth trying out. It definitely asks you to confront and reflect on a lot of things that have happened in your life, so it can be uncomfortable and bring up a lot. But that's of course an important part of art making.
I'd say just try it out, it's only 12 weeks and you can always bail if it doesn't work for you!
No one can be told which stock to use. Buy reams from at least 3 different manufacturers, take a random sample from each, and have a neutral third party number and randomize the specimens. Sharpen your pencil and write one full page, noting how the graphite glides against the wood fibers. Leave a margin of at least 3 centimeters, and if you must erase, use only natural rubber.
> Very similar to meditation. The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored. Not some breathing techniques, how to focus your mind, posture etc. That comes later, very naturally, after you get curious about improvements.
Chilling != meditation. Like I get that chilling is helpful for you but words have meaning and that is not meditation.
Chilling is not “doing nothing”. When people use that word they usually mean consuming content (listening to music, watching shows, reading book) or doing some other relaxing thing (knitting).
You’re right that words have meaning, and purposefully doing nothing at all to the point of being uncomfortable with it is antithetical to “chilling”.
> The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored
Without any proper technique or guidance, this is just chilling. What does it mean to "focus on doing nothing here?". I can apply this sentence to binge watching 10 episodes of Friends, getting stoned, just slouching on the couch, staring at walls etc etc. That is what it means to chill.
OTOH, to meditate is a very explicit, focused action which requires technique and discipline.
Watching Netflix or getting stoned is clearly not doing nothing. If you take it literally then it becomes clear what is meant: just being, without indulging in anything, not even our thoughts. I agree this requires focus, but i don't think it requires technique but rather practice. As for discipline, i don't even know what that is
> I agree this requires focus, but i don't think it requires technique but rather practice.
Tell me how you would do this without a technique. Your mind wanders and a random thought appears, what do you do? Whatever you are going to say next is by definition a technique. The fact that there a multiple answers to this questions means that the problem is open to a variety of techniques that have a range of effectiveness. This implies teaching and guidance.
I guess I agree with you when you put it like this. I think I don't like the term "technique" here because it makes it sound as if there's something you need prior to starting meditating; as if there are some requirements to meditating; whereas I would argue meditation is not that different from the non-meditative state. Sure there are techniques like counting your breaths or body-scanning but I think this is all secondary to just sitting still and noticing whatever appears.
There is no one true meaning to the word meditation.
We can say there's real meditation, and we can discuss what that means to no end.
But simply the word meditation means different things depending on which stage you're at. The trick is not to be contrarian like you're coming off despite your probably best intentions, but rather to accurately assess what each meditator needs at their stage of the practice, and see how your words can propel them like the wind on a sail.
I like writing because it forces you to turn vague feelings into concrete ideas. You can barf your thoughts onto paper and then read it with a critical eye, allowing you to evaluate your own thoughts. It helps me to find the gaps in my knowledge, notice sloppy arguments, etc. Sometimes that leads to a better understanding of the topic, but most of the time I realize that I have no understanding of the topic, which is still useful information. For example I've found myself eager to drop a hot take on a recent international event, but after writing out my comment I realize that I'm an idiot, so I make a mental note and post it anyway.
They say you don't truly understand something until you're forced to explain it to someone else. Writing your ideas down is essentially “rubber duck debugging” applied to your thoughts: you can get clarity without needing a human third party.
I don't like it because I feel my vague ideas "disappear" when becoming concrete. It feels like trying to project a multidimensional creature into 2D; you inevitably lose some of it. In contrast, in my brain I can rotate or pinch the idea anyway I like and even turn it into further ideas.
Well that's the gist of it, and that what makes artists admirable. It sounds like you have a preference for fantasy over reality, and ultimately it's up to you if you feel your ideas are worthy of the friction of bringing them to life satisfactorily.
An idea is like a seed, you need to care for it in order to bring it to fruition, and you might have to face many frustrated attempts before you're successful. But if you don't then they're worth pretty much nothing.
That's exactly the point. You can do that in your own head, but you can't communicate that to other people. For every amazing thing you've ever seen in a movie screen, imagine how much MORE amazing it was in someone's head before that. But you can't capture that in full.
And, much like the scientific method can take something that "everyone knows", and turn it into the basis for a branch of science, the process of getting this down in paper forces you to document all the nuances in your head, making that final idea even richer and fully consistent.
I enjoy writing but I also feel this strongly. For me it feels like writing is forcing me to carry on one particular train of thought much longer, and in a more focused way, than I do in my head.
Thoughts sometimes have a parallel aspect to them, and since writing cannot capture this, it's necessarily a pale imitation. But that's what makes it challenging, and rewarding if I'm actually able to get something across.
I did this one time when I saw a particularly beautiful scenery. I could remember the elements mostly, but didn't quite manage to capture the beauty of it.
I try to paint them as soon as possible after waking up.
Usually I just write down a list of keywords, that seems enough to keep my brain from erasing them. I don't think it's really possible to capture a scene in text. The text only serves as memory aid.
To add, it helps to have some record of inner thoughts to look back and reflect with greater fidelity than memory.
Done enough, one can start to make connections at a greater rate than if one was to try to keep it all in one's head. I've had several experiences in therapy where I had the spontaneous thought, "I've written about this before!" I was able to go back and thread through all previous reflections in a way that was much more than the sim of their parts. It really accelerates self discovery and growth.
On a similar note - I often have the sense that I'm a very different person today than I was in the past.
Reading old writing of mine is fascinating, because it will sometimes confirm this - I often have very different beliefs - but it also shows how similarly my thought processes were in the past.
I do recommend it, with the caveat that if you journaled during dark times, don't reread those parts if you're struggling again. Can be contagious.
I have a pretty strong natural filter. Years of therapy and three different therapists have yet to get me to a place where I can truly open up, even when writing on a page I know no-one else will see.
Two days ago I did weed for the first time. I accidentally took a much larger hit than I meant to. For the first 15 minutes I had a complete out-of-body experience; nothing seemed real, I felt like I was floating through space, able to peer into reality at will, still not quite trusting that it wasn't all a dream. I'm pretty sure the term of art for what I experienced would be a psychotic episode.
After that... I lost my filter. Like, it was gone. And my mouth was a conveyor belt connected to the emotional part of my brain. No logic, just uninhibited speech, for 45 minutes, all while sobbing harder than I have in my entire life.
I exposed every last deep, dark secret I possessed. My fear of never being good enough. My fear that everyone in my life will leave me at some point. My fear that I've done so many hurtful things over my life that I'm unworthy of love and of the friends I have. And many more things I won't be sharing with the world, at least not yet.
Inside, it felt like my brain and my mouth were connected by a pipe, and all I could do was sit back and watch in horror as the very depths of my mind were laid bare for all to see.
A good friend of mine was with me while I did it. She heard everything. It's a mark of our friendship that she held me, reassured me that she loved me for who I am, not who I want people to think I am. Our friendship is even stronger now, something I would never have thought possible before having that experience.
It was terrifying, and yet oddly theraputic. I'm seriously considering cannabis-assisted psychotherapy now.
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I guess what I'm trying to say is: there are a number of substances that induce mind-altering states in ways that are relatively safe and free from long term effects. If you're someone who can't seem to open up naturally, don't be afraid to try them. They just might change your life.
(As with everything, consume appropriately and safely. Have someone experienced in the substance you're consuming keep an eye on you. And for god's sake, don't do anything known to be addictive or to have severe negative side effects.)
Also, find friends who you can truly be yourself around, who love you even when they know the absolute worst about you. It makes all the difference to know that someone loves you not for who you want the world to think you are but for who you actually are.
I remember I was at a party few years back, some guy did way more acid than what he could handle and had a breakdown. I remember there was another guy there who was “tripsitting” but just something about him seemed kind of off, like he was trying to control the whole situation
So here was this one guy having a mental breakdown, really suffering, and there’s this other guy who keeps aggressively “checking in” on him every other minute, nobody stepped in to stop him because he was “tripsitting”.
(I know normally tripsitters can do this, but the way the guy was doing it was just awful, like he was invading the guy’s space and pestering the shit out of him, it freaked him out even more)
You’re definitely fortunate to have had a good friend nearby, some people are too fucking crazy to ever get high around
I've been using marijuana for too long for it to have that effect on me unfortunately, but actual psychedelics are great at expanding the mind. If you can find someone that you trust to be a 'sitter' (at least for the first couple of times), it can be a life changing experience with positive long-term effects. Micro dosing psilocybin has been starting to show positive results in trials in recent years.
I tried weed once a few years ago and took a bit too much as well. When the euphoria hit, I realized I had never felt that good in my entire life and I became scared of the idea that I would lose control. My thoughts also sped up and I would get into these metacognitive/self-analytical loops. I'd start thinking about something and before I could finish I'd have another thought analyzing what I had just thought, and so on. And I experienced the loss of filter. At the time, I was with a friend in his basement and we were surrounded by his mom's amateur paintings. I've never been an art person but I remember looking at one of her paintings and talking nonstop about all the different visual details that kept popping out at me.
I didn't have as complete as loss of inhibition as you described however. The friend I was with wasn't someone I completely trusted - many of my thoughts I decided not to share. Still, I think the experience was valuable and I'm glad I tried it. Although, in retrospect any self-insight I gained I don't think I truly took to heart, as it didn't lead to any meaningful behavioral change. It's only been two days, but I wonder what kind of long term changes you will see. Has the loss of filter persisted in any way or did it wear off when you came down?
Either way, your story, outside of being well written and incredibly personable, gives me hope for my own healing. I'd love to connect and hear more about where your experience takes you, especially if you end up trying cannabis assisted therapy. I'm planning on trying psychedelic assisted therapy at some point so it would be cool to have someone to discuss with. My email is in my profile if you're interested.
Writing is one of my favorite things to do high. Nothing that interesting just whatever pops in my mind. Pen to paper so I don’t get distracted by shiny internet things
I, too, have had the experience that cannabis 'removes repression'. In my case, it caused me to consider a pretty-good plan to try to improve my life that I was previously unwilling to entertain because of shame or embarrassment or painful memories.
Jokes aside, this definitely helped when I was in college, especially when I had a follow up session where I could ask questions to my professors or the TA
It's unbelievable how that campaign and even the hint of something like it here with internet mobs can obliterate the creative capacity of huge numbers of people. I write and make to understand things, and by example, I recently wrote about 12,000 words to get a yield of about 3,000 words of my best work. The stuff in that other 9,000 words will probably never see a screen again, but it had to come out to mine it for the single ideas and turns of phrase that become like library functions for dense, concise writing.
If you can't produce the raw material, you can't make anything new or good.
There’s a black mirror episode in the future about how LLMs trained on people’s discarded drafts start outing them for having disfavored opinions.
Maybe through people’s digital AI ghosts (AIs made from people’s content after they die) start spouting racist stuff.
So people are surprised to learn their friends and heroes were racist/capitalist/nickel back fans/etc
Ends up being a programming error that didn’t properly account for boundaries.
That’s the end of my expected story idea. But I best google and Microsoft are training off every character written, not just what makes it to your final 3,000.
The problem I have with this is that my thoughts come 10 or 20 times quicker than I can write them down. And while doing this writing exercise I’ll have meta-thoughts about the writing and the exercise. The thoughts hopelessly outrun the writing, and also the train of thoughts will be wildly different from what it would be when not attempting to write it down. I guess one still learns something from the exercise, but it’s quite a frustrating experience.
It sounds like you are putting too much pressure on yourself. You don’t have to write everything down. Just writing something, anything at all, no matter what it is, is great. That’s something to be proud of.
I find it very helpful to slow down, breathe, and regain connection to my body.
And you can stop whenever you want. Journaling is something you do for yourself — it shouldn’t feel like a chore.
Your journal is your safe place where you can dump your thoughts. It will never judge you :) It can receive anything you offer to it.
My point is that I don't find it remotely feasible to write down unfiltered thoughts. They are necessarily dramatically filtered in terms of volume, because the speed of thought is magnitudes faster than the speed of writing. They are also filtered because putting things into words constitutes a transformation and distortion of the original thoughts, a crafting into words that are not quite the same as the original thoughts. Thirdly, the writing process introduces meta-thoughts about the writing, which when following "write down what pops into your head" very quickly leads to just writing about the writing.
Maybe other people are less conscious of the distortions and of their meta-thoughts. But for me it makes the exercise a rather artificial process, where it's difficult to produce anything authentic, anything close to the original thoughts.
If writing is something new for you then it is normal that it will feel unnatural and thus attract more attention to the activity itself. It's totally okay to start off writing about writing to get things going. In no time you will naturally move on to writing about other things. So don't worry and just write
Just write about your day if you need to. What you did, what you read about online (including reflecting on news if you read that), what thoughts you had over the course of the day.
When I have good writing habits I can easily write 500-3000+ words about my day, and I don't have what most people would consider an interesting life. I just work from home, work on my hobbies (mostly gamedev), read articles, go to one or two social events a week (often just a family party or casual game night or meetup, nothing crazy), go to a few conventions throughout the year, and take one weeklong trip.
One year I managed to write 120,000+ words with this approach, and it likely would have been higher if I hadn't skipped a decent number of days (maybe not a lot higher, I sometimes made up for the skipped days by reflecting back as much as I could).
I'm not currently that good about it, though. In general it's been a bad year for me for writing these things. Maybe this article will help me get back into it.
In past, I had the habit of laying in bed and not being able to fall asleep because I was pondering about "bad" things that happened that day, or pondering about things going to happen the next day where I didn't feel confident about the outcome, or my role (or similar).
I kept this a little vague, I think the kind of events that keep you away from sleeping may be different for everyone. And if you have the habit of being in bed awake for longer time, you know why that is anyway.
To get to the point: Doing a daily writing basically wiped out the problem entirely for me. Nowadays, when I can't sleep, it is because I ate too much too late.
I do my writing once per day, usually close to bed time. I write about relatively noteworthy things ("another day of being too lazy to progress on hobby thing XY" is a pretty common one), then go a bit on a tangent maybe, why that is and if it's actually that bad. I try to be mostly gentle to myself here and keep it positive. If things happen that annoy me (neighbours annoying, cashier rude, big train delay, whatever), I of course write them down too, and also go on a tangent. Can I do something about this? Are there maybe good reasons for it, which I didn't think or care of the moment it happened, etc?
Basically, do the thing you would do while laying in bed and pondering things - the difference is, when you are not in bed, and writing, you do it in a more constructive, brief way. For events the next day (difficult meeting etc.) nail down the worst case, the way it will likely go, the things you for sure do not wanna do/say.
And it weeds out the desire to unwrap all that crap once more as soon as you lay down. Which is the whole point of the exercise, basically.
Do I read these things ever again? Most often not, honestly. But I maybe change my opinion on that, and if so, they are available.
FWIW, I write these on computer, not pencil and paper. Lowers the friction for me, and is fine. Most often it's in the range of 150-400 words, roughly guessed.
Reading this article and the comments here make me want to journal again. After reading a book on taking smart notes and finally successfully implementing the zettelkasten technique into my daily life, I feel like I've drifted away from the traditional journal method. Where I now utilize a system of index cards to capture dreams, thought out ideas, task list and concepts, I previously held notebooks that I would attempt to write daily on all various types of things. Reading back on these is an amazing to relive and stir up new feelings.
I found that when I wrote and read things back later, I would have trouble remembering them fully. When I was using a "journal" daily, I started to capture a few key details with every entry to help with recall:
1) Current date and exact time (ex. 10/9/23 @ 9:33am)
2) Music / auditory ambiance (ex. X song was playing in background)
3) Where I was while writing (ex. on couch in living room at X house)
4) A trigger memory (ex. travelled back from X destination yesterday)
When I read the entries that include this metadata, it helps me re-live these times and further spark memories around them.
I'm curious if anyone else has key details like this they include with their journaling that help them. I have a mission to start journaling again and would be fitting to add anything else others might be doing.
A few things: around once a month I log what I've been reading, listening to, watching, playing, and hanging out with.
For the daily journaling I try to focus on a quality of feelings and events, which we could call significance. It is pretty difficult to measure the significance that a thought or event will have in the future, but this process itself is helpful for journaling in the moment, and its most helpful for my future reader self.
That means that when I sit down to journal I no longer focus on the "material" conditions, when I do that it feels like I'm grasping at straws to capture some inner snapshot that by nature is not contained in any of those material factors.
Rather I try to focus on fragments of my inner narrative while being on the lookout for my own biases and mental patterns. It's almost like trying to guess which events for the day will resurface in your dreams, which stick to your subconscious rather than what you think is relevant in the moment that you sit down to write.
I appreciate your input and I like the monthly check-in items. Those are certainly relevant and would be useful looking back.
I'm often trying to influence my dreams and make things stick to my subconscious so they will surface up during them. I find your approach interesting.
I've been journaling for something like 25 years now. The hardest yet most rewarding part for me is going back and reading my entries. Sometimes I have to force myself because I'm often revolted by what I've written during various periods however it has really helped me understand my moods.
The few times I've felt motivated to write down my thoughts were during periods of high personal stress and once they were on paper I put the notebook on a shelf. It sat for a while, and one day when I thought about it I tore up the pages and threw them away. They weren't anything I needed anymore, and I certainly didn't want anyone else to come across them.
I read it and can’t find what the secret about lowering the stakes is. It seems like it takes the impending death of a loved one to put into perspective the resistance of writing as an emperor with no clothes. That if you’re meant to write you will when it realize it.
Is my reading comprehension poor today or was there advice I missed on how to lower the stakes outside of a serious situation like she faces?
I find this to be true for me personally. I try to set aside 5 minutes every day just to write what ever I’m thinking about. I find it forces me to confront my anxieties directly. Sometimes even just writing about them reduces them.
I think this style of writing is intentionally not meant to be perfected so I never go back and edit what I’ve written.
Earlier this year I built https://chronofile.co to help me with this specific practice.
I've written down (typed) my thoughts for almost 20 years now. They're mostly just some sort of ideas that pop in my head; usually inspired by something I've read. Lot of them are just app / business ideas. Usually a few ideas a day.
I imagine a survey-like questionnaire: 1. Today as i woke up ... 2. In the course of the day i ... 3. One thing that particularly occupied me today was ...
I started doing this like 3 years ago. Actually have like 30+ 100page sketchbooks filled so far. Keep meaning to catalogue it all, but I keep adding to it instead.
I think it's nice to see my own library grow. It will also be interesting to revisit it one day. It's like a time capsule. Plus it's thousands of pages of input to create an ai-version of myself one day ;)
Very similar to meditation. The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored. Not some breathing techniques, how to focus your mind, posture etc. That comes later, very naturally, after you get curious about improvements.
Same goes for writing down thoughts. Just take a blank A4 paper from the printer and write away. Not sure what to write? Write about that, the fact that you're not sure what to write. Throw the paper away if you don't like the thoughts you see, or at least do it with that mindset. It's not about writing something novel, just as meditating is not about reaching some enlightenment