Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

In this incredibly confusing period, many of us are left with ample time alone with our thoughts. It is difficult to think clearly and to focus our minds on achieving personal or professional goals especially considering the myriad of distractions around us — from the constant pings of message notifications on our phones, to the needs of the loved ones around us.

Our minds are constantly racing. What we need is a way to organise that noise in such a way that our thoughts can become clearer — and one way to do that is to write them down.

Writing down your thoughts, your goals, even your experiences has a huge potential for making a positive influence in your life. Writing down daily goals for instance, has become a ritual for countless successful people the world over. It helps to keep you on a schedule and makes you accountable to yourself when at the end of the day you have to evaluate whether or not the day was well spent and if you had achieved everything you set out to.

Completing your day’s goals provides you with a sense of pride and accomplishment and can help you increase your productivity in the future as you set goals that become more ambitious than those that have past.

Above just increasing your productivity on a daily basis, writing down what is going on inside your head for more pressing issues can help you process your emotions and help you in making important decisions.

The thoughts in our heads when we are going through stressful times in our lives are often erratic and chaotic ,much like the flashes from cameras at a celebrity red carpet, it is difficult to make sense of it all. When you write down what is making you feel stressed or anxious, it helps you to clarify your thoughts and turns your abstract ideas in tangible words that you can see.

The process of writing these thoughts down acts as a self-soothing mechanism and makes you become more self-aware. Once you have written down your thoughts, it presents you with more logical thought path than if you were to rather keep it all bottled inside.

You may even thank yourself far into the future as writing down and dating the things that are happening in your life will give you something to look back on one day so you can see how far you’ve come.

Much like Facebook memories provides us a look back on our lives in a more social atmosphere, your writings are far more personal and intimate. They can give you a much more visceral insight into the kind of person you once were, the emotions you were once experiencing and the challenges you have overcoming on your journey of becoming who you are.

It difficult to imagine how writing down what's going on in your head will provide any value, I felt the same way before I started doing it. But, take 20 minutes before you go to bed one night and jot down how your day went and make special notice to how your emotions were affected in that day.

You will feel as if a small weight is lifted off your shoulders. Whos knows? It may even become a prominent feature in your life to incorporate some time every week to just sit down, clear your mind and take stock of what is happening in your life.