I’ve been thinking today about the reasons behind my choice of writing in a journal.

Out of all the things I could have chosen to battle a mobile and social media addiction, I chose to write in a journal for 30 days. Why?

To be honest, I don’t really know why I thought of this, it’s just the first thing that popped into my head.

I had the book (I originally bought it as a travel diary for when I went hiking) and I figured that it was something to do that was ‘offline’ and ‘analog’.

Now that I’ve been writing in this journal every day for the past 18 days I’ve come to realise a few things about writing stuff down.

The first thing is that it get’s things out of you. It does this in a couple of ways. It get your thoughts out of you and it makes you think about your attitude towards things in general.

Writing is very very cathartic, so when I say it gets stuff out of you it’s kind of like pulling out emotional splinters. Sure there still might be pain for a while and possibly a scar but this act of drawing out your emotions and thoughts by writing, cleans the slate a little and ever so slowly it allows you to start healing.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s really made me face a lot of things that used to get swept under the rug. The act of writing down your goal, your difficulties, where you were right and where you f4cked up is very confronting and liberating at the same time.

When I had my head stuck in my phone all the time, my mind didn’t get the opportunity to think about these things. With a book or journal there’s no updates or scroll function to wash away the words you’ve added and make you distracted on the next bit of content.

Often I would fleetingly think about the things I should improve in my life or stuff I should get rid of like:-

• I should really start eating better
• I wish I could do something about getting closer to my kids
• I should stop picking the skin around my thumbs...it’s such a bad habit
• I would love to have more time with my wife
• I should get out and see my friends more often

Mostly, when I thought about this stuff my mind would be sucked back into my mobile and social media.

Writing down thoughts makes you face them. You put these words in that book, now what are you going to do about them?