Redirect Your Life With These Writing Exercises

Redirect Your Life With These Writing Exercises

Regular journaling has been shown to improve your mental health and increase your productivity. If you don’t keep a journal, even simple writing exercises can help you reframe your life and help you find your purpose.

Picture: pedrosimoes7/Flickr

Fast Company suggests several specific writing exercises to “edit” your story, from writing about a challenging problem for 15 minutes over four days in a row to imagining your best possible self. This “distancing from negative experiences” exercise seems particularly useful:

Research has also shown that having some distance from a difficult event allows us to step back and better understand it. There’s a writing exercise [social psychologist Timothy] Wilson calls the “step-back-and-ask-why” approach that allows us to create this distance and understanding in order to reframe negative events.

To do this exercise, close your eyes and bring yourself back to a specific moment or event that was upsetting to you. Then, in your mind, try to take a few steps back from yourself in the moment so that you can see the story unfolding as if it was happening to a distant version of yourself. Write about what that distant version of yourself is thinking and feeling. One way to do this effectively, suggests Wilson, is to write in the third person, rather than the first person, which automatically builds some separation between you and the moment you’re writing about.

Rather than recounting the event, the exercise has you step back from it and explain it.

Writing is an incredibly powerful act.

Writing Exercises Scientifically Proven to Redirect Your Life [Fast Company]


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