write your problems down

There are numerous benefits to having a journal and consistently writing in it. One of them, and this is the big one, is that it gives you a helpful and effective avenue to solve your problems. Your journal offers you the much-needed space to figure out whatever problem that’s bothering or obstructing you, whether it be work or business dilemmas, financial problems, people and relationships, or simply yourself and your inner conflicts and emotions. 

When you transfer all your problems, challenges, anxieties, fears and worries on a crisp sheet of paper, you start looking at them objectively. The simple act of writing provides a space for you to figure out what’s wrong and not working, and this equips you to find potent solutions. As business philosopher Jim Rohn put it, “There is something magical about writing down a problem. It is almost as though in the very act of writing what is wrong you start to discover ways of making it right.”

Writing helps you crystallize your challenges and obstacles and further deconstruct them. And as you do that, you gain better clarity with regard to what’s really bothering you, positioning you to come up with specific answers. Mental pondering or rumination doesn’t give us the same opportunity. When we think about life challenges only in our heads, our imagination constructs a false, distorted reality. We either become too optimistic or too pessimistic. However, when we describe those same challenges in writing, we assess the situation more accurately, thus becoming more realistic and factual. With a new and better picture in our minds, we start seeing things as they truly are, and with this clarity, we empower ourselves to find effective solutions. 

Seneca once wrote, “We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” This is unfortunately how we humans are wired. But writing our problems down and contemplating on them with objectivity gives us a way out and helps us avoid this trap. So today, take out your journal and start writing about a current challenge that you’re facing. Empty your thoughts and feelings from your monkey mind and capture them on paper. Once you do that, I’m sure you’ll start seeing things for what they really are and soon discover ways to overcome that problem.