Freeing Your Mind: The Power of Externalizing Thoughts in Journalling

Don't let your thoughts fester in your mind, externalize them!

Hello friends,

I am currently sitting in my living room with a huge writers block, for this article. I promised myself a few months ago that I'd try to do a weekly post and writing this one seems to be a difficult task for me.

As I am sitting here pondering what to write about, I am reminded of something I promised myself a while back. That is, that I'm going to treat this blogging thing as a sort of "online journal" about my own introspections.

After watching some YouTubers discuss the benefits of journalling, I have also been journalling every other day for the past few weeks.

Normally, my days are uneventful or at least they eventful and repetitive, much like the Squidward gif below:

This is perhaps because I'm living life on "autopilot" without much novelty, and it makes me lose sense of myself and sometimes even time. The truth is that I need to occasionally take time for introspection. It gives me an opportunity to "get out of my head" and "put it on paper".

Normally, it's easy to give other friends advice on how they could solve some problem they have irking them in their mind. When I have the exact same problem it becomes a different story, even though it shouldn't.

Writing down thoughts, whether ignorant, accurate, funny, or sad, they can all be written in the journal. No one is looking at it (hopefully), no one is judging it. You don't need to act on it. When the journalling is finished, you can look at it like you're looking at a friend you're trying to help or listen to. It's like having an out of body experience and looking from above about who you are and what your thinking processes are.

From there on, journalling makes it much easier to find out what's been deeply bothering you because you don't have to keep scrambling and scanning your ever so faulty brain to see what's really deep inside you that's been bothering you. It makes you realize that maybe you're tunnel visioned in one thing without considering some alternative viewpoint. In essence, it could double as Mindfulness meditation and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

This article is meta in the sense that it came from today's journal. Since I let whatever thoughts flow out in my journal for 20 minutes, I wrote about a thousand words, and came up with ideas for a couple of future posts.

How do you all get over some sort of mental block even if it's not a writer's block? Do you journal? Talk to a friend? Leave your answers in the comment section below!

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My Favourite Things

🎞️ Movie

I watched the movie "Imitation Game" starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Though I have been curious about AI since I heard about Dall-E, I never considered going back to the father of computers, Alan Turing. I knew of the Turing test and of the "Enigma" problem during World War II but never sat down and read a full Wikipedia article or anything of the sort about it. This movie was a great jumping off point.

📕 Book

I have recently finished the audiobook Mythos by Stephen Fry. It was an interesting read (listen?) about the Greek Myths from the beginnings of Chaos all the way to , with the wit and humour of Fry sprinkled in

Quote

... it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.

Austin Kleon, Show Your Work, resurfaced using Readwise

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