3 Reasons Why Journaling by Hand Might Help Slow Your Mind

Show of hands: How many of you have way too many things running through your head at any given time? Between ideas and tasks I have for work, things I need to get done at home, ideas for my personal writing projects, Thoughts (yes, with a capital T) I have about ~waves hands wildly~ everything going on in the world, and anticipating how the next event listed on my calendar will go (no matter how innocuous that event is), sometimes there’s just too much zooming around my brain that I can’t think clearly.

As a writer, the first thing I’ve always turned to when this happens is writing in a journal by hand. Even when I can’t seem to write fast enough, there’s just something satisfying about hearing the scratch of a pen on paper that encourages my brain to slow down, just a bit. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it really does help.

Here are 3 reasons why journaling by hand can help slow your mind when you need it to.

I’ve actually been struggling to write this blog post. I think it partly has to do with the fact that I’m using a word processing program on the computer to do it, so as I write, I see the notifications when a new email pops up, and it interrupts my train of thought. When I type a sentence, I keep getting dotted lines under phrases encouraging me to rephrase, red lines indicating I’ve spelled something wrong, or double underlines indicating … well, I don’t know what it indicates, and I don’t want to find out right now. Or something I’m thinking triggers another thought which is actually a question, and I need to google it right now. All of these things distract me from what I should be doing—which is getting the thoughts out of my head and onto paper (or screen). But even notice that phrasing I just used: “onto paper (or screen).” I’m self-editing as I write and, in the process, I’m losing some of the thoughts that were coming to me.

Instead, if your mind is overwhelmed and your brain is going too fast, turn to your journal. There’s no spell check—and you don’t need spell check in your journal because it’s just for you. Your journal won’t suggest how to rephrase things, because that’s not what a journal is for. There’s no backspace to delete a phrase you don’t like; just scratch a line through it and keep writing. You can get out the big ideas however it makes sense to you with pen and paper. Maybe that’s a list, or maybe it’s a stream of consciousness run-on sentence that lasts a full page. Perhaps it’s a mind map of bubbles with text arranged randomly on a spread. For me, writing to slow and clear my mind isn’t the same as writing document I’ll refer back to like a to-do list is. It’s just a brain dump, so I really don’t care if my handwriting is too sloppy to read.  

A lot of times, when I need to get something done quickly (or write something quickly) I think going to the computer is the quickest way to do it. And plenty of times that’s true. But other times, it slows me down drastically. Whether it’s rethinking and retyping the same thought a thousand different ways to make sure it sounds right and that I’ve chosen the word, or getting distracted by something else I need to do online, I’m focused on the wrong things.

So when my mind is crowded and overwhelmed, this isn’t the kind of slowing down I’m looking for. I want to get as much out of my head as quickly as possible so I can think clearly again. And for me, handwriting in a journal is the best way to do that. I don’t ever intend to go back and read my journals, nor do I anticipate they will be of much interest to anyone else later on (though who knows what could happen), so I don’t worry about my handwriting. It’s nearly impossible to read. It’s a strange mix of cursive and print where half the letters look like other letters. I rarely use journals with lines, so the writing scrawls all over the page in varying sizes.

Inevitably, I start off writing as quickly as possible to get as much out as possible, and gradually, my hand starts cramping from holding the pen too tightly. But this too is counter-intuitively a good thing. Because by the time I get to this point, I’ve usually started having coherent thoughts again, almost one at a time! So, I can slow down and start to consider the ones weighing on me most with more thought and intention. I can explore what’s really bothering me about something. This is the kind of slowing down I come to my journal for.

[Read More: Keep, Burn, Curate, or Donate: What to Do With Your Old Journals.]

I kept journals all throughout high school and college, and I wrote literally whatever thought occurred to me. Some of it wasn’t kind and a lot of it was nonsense that I’d certainly be embarrassed about—both then and now. I worried about my journal falling into the wrong hands (i.e. most likely a friend I was annoyed with), but not enough to not write. Now though, the idea of doing journal writing by computer makes me far more nervous than journal writing by hand. It’s much more likely that someone or some entity could hack or surveil my computer than it is for my physical, bound journal to be found.

So, if you’re writing your true feelings about someone you know or current events or maybe the illicit dream you had last night, journaling by hand to get it out of your mind is probably the safer option. Sure, you can delete things from your computer, but there’s often a trail. If you really want—or need—to keep it a secret, write it down from left to right first, then flip your journal to the side and write over it again from bottom to top.

Of course, you might end up being a writer whose work will be acquired by a university or other organization for future research. In which case, A) congratulations, B) don’t forget to burn that which you don’t want to be read, and C) be sure to read Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know.

So maybe we’re not really using journaling to slow our minds. Maybe we’re using journaling to ease our minds. We’ll do more of that next month when we’ll focus in on journaling to process and document current events.

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