When I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed, achieving a calm state of mind can be really hard.
I often find something as simple as writing it all down really helps me to work things out and enables my mind to be still once again.
However, upon receiving the advice “write is all down” a few years ago, I found it made me feel significantly worse rather than better.
I can see now that it wasn’t anything to do with my circumstances that made writing it all down a negative experience rather than a positive one, it actually all came down to what I wrote and how I wrote it.
I used to write to let out all my anger and frustration.
I wrote down everything wrong in my life, all the negativities and bad stuff.
The problem was by doing this, the negativity simply multiplied; it would become a spiral and I could just go on and on and that only made me feel worse.
So unsurprisingly, I stopped writing, and my experience off put me putting my thoughts to paper for a long time.
I re-started writing when times were tough at the beginning of this year and I finally discovered how the advice of “writing things down” could be so helpful and beneficial.
The difference between how I used to write and how I write now is that the things I write now always come from a place of wisdom, hope, and positivity.
That isn’t to say I write down everything good in my life (although that does help), it just means I no longer give any time to focusing on what is going wrong in my life, and instead keep my focus on working out how I’m feeling and what I can do about it in this moment to help myself.
So just always remember that when you write things down, the content of your writing will affect how you feel.
If you’re struggling to know how to make the advice “writing it all down” to be a positive experience rather than a negative one, writing down your answer to the question, “What can I do in this moment to help myself?” is always a good place to start

(Originally posted on @mindfullyevie Instagram and Facebook)