5 Reasons to Write Every Day

Over the past decade my life has changed completely. I went from a guy who didn't know what he wanted out of life, who got stressed by everything, who was preoccupied with what people thought of him, who drifted from one odd job to the next, who didn't know how to make money, whose emotional world was a mess, and who above all had no understanding of what I wanted to do with my life or how to get there.

One day I read an article about how to change your life in 90 minutes. It was about a morning routine, and one of the things it talked about was writing.

I'd never thought about it before, but if you join the five-in-the-morning club, what else are you going to do besides meditate or write? So I started writing.

The first thing I started writing about was how much money I wanted to make by the end of the year, and how I'd make it. I wrote down the amount, and I wrote that it would be with as few workdays a month as possible, and from something I love.

Within a few months I'd landed that work, and by the end of the year I was pretty close to that number.

Writing changes your life. It's no coincidence that so many of the most important people in human history kept a journal.

They say the reason Marcus Aurelius, the ruler of the Roman Empire, never descended into tyranny was that he wrote in the morning and in the evening.

In the morning, who he wanted to be that day.

In the evening, whether he'd lived up to the goals he set for himself.

Writing creates awareness, narrative, clear goals, self-discovery, precision, understanding, and emotional release.

Try it for one month and see how your life changes.

I love to write. Every week I write the newsletter that goes out every weekend, and I have a notebook I write in on a daily basis. I use it all day long to sharpen my goals, pour out my feelings, and make plans.

I use it in ways that help me improve my self-worth and self-confidence.

Here are a few of the different ways writing positively affects how we function:

1. Writing makes you happier and healthier

Studies show that writing about your life goals makes you happier and healthier. Most research in the past focused on writing about a person's past traumas in order to recover from them faster. What's interesting about this study is that they compared the effects of writing about traumatic events to the effects of writing about the participants' "best possible future self." The researchers found that both had similar positive effects.

2. Writing makes you more resilient

When we go through a hard experience, or a challenging period, writing can help you cope better. A study that followed recently laid-off engineers showed that those who consistently engaged in expressive writing about the layoff — the fears, the difficulty — managed to find new work faster.

"The engineers who wrote down their thoughts and feelings about losing their jobs reported feeling less anger and hostility toward their former employer. They also reported drinking less. Eight months later, fewer than 19% of the engineers in the control groups were reemployed full-time, compared to more than 52% of the engineers in the expressive writing group," explains Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist from the Wharton School.

3. Writing boosts your gratitude

According to research, people who take the time to reflect on the good things in their lives once a day or a week — even just by writing them down — become more positive and motivated about their current situation and their future. I've written before about how writing down gratitude should be part of your mental fitness routine.

This could be the subject of a whole article — which maybe I'll write another day — but practicing gratitude can improve your psychological health, improve your empathy, boost your self-esteem, help you sleep better, and more.

By nature, we tend to dwell on the things that go wrong or that didn't turn out the way we hoped and wanted, so it's a great exercise for us to think instead about the things we're grateful for by writing them down. And by the way, if you also take some of your time to thank the people who supported you, so they know you're grateful for their help, you'll also create an improvement in the relationships in your life — which affect our physical and mental health no less.

4. Writing helps you communicate more clearly

This might sound obvious, but it's been proven that regular writing helps people convey complex ideas more clearly. There are benefits to this both in terms of emotional intelligence — expressing how you feel — and in what's considered the hard sciences, like math.

You know how sometimes you want to explain something but feel like it sounded better in your head? Writing is a great way to flex that communication muscle, and by doing so, get better at translating what can feel like jumbled thoughts into words other people can understand. Whenever I struggle to express something and I have a chance to sit and write it down, I pull out my notebook and try to put it into a few sentences. It usually helps clarify my thoughts, first of all for myself, and as a result for others.

5. Reflection and growth

Writing is a great tool for personal growth that I use a lot as part of my way of achieving conscious productivity. At the end of each day I can write about how my day went, what I did, what I didn't get to and why, whether I focused on what matters to me or whether the day slipped through my fingers. What did I accomplish today? What do I want to achieve or do differently tomorrow? How did I behave today? How did I speak to others? What did I do well? I'll sit and write down every success, and by doing so I'll also raise my self-worth.

If all of these haven't convinced you to start writing, I don't know what will.

If you'd like to start, in my online course, How Do You Make Change? I spend a little over an hour teaching different writing techniques for all the purposes written here and more — how to begin — and I also teach various meditation techniques and how to build a beneficial daily routine that will improve your health and your life. If you sign up, tell me. I'd love to hear why, and what you changed, what improved, and how you channel writing to improve every part of your life.