Day 34: People Used to Journal For a Reason
by Edward Smith
08 Aug 2020
Download Your Brain and Learn to Sleep Better
In this article I'm going to talk about my personal experiences with blog writing. If you are not familiar with what a blog is, or have never heard of me, congratulations! You are actually reading a blog right now. Even better, I can use this blog right now to describe what I'm doing here, and why you stumbled upon this article. Sounds like we'll both gain something here. Let's begin.
What is Blogging?
Blogs can take many forms. They can be done in the style of a journal or an article. They can even be written in the format of a notice calling others to take action. With blogs, it's basically up to the writer to define what the blog is, and who they want the blog to target. The blog writer defines whether the blog is for personal use or for public consumption.
The Sixty Six Day Challenger Blog
On 06 July 2020, I began writing in a blog called the Sixty Six Day Challenger. That's the blog you're reading right now. My goal began around the idea of changing a major habit. To do that, I would need sixty six days of focused intention to succeed. I decided to create this blog so that I would be forced to revisit this plan every single day and remain accountable to my plan.
What Blogging Has Done for Me
As of this writing, today marks my thirty fourth day mark. That means I've been writing a new article every day for the last thirty three days. That's a lot of content. During that time I've learned a few things, and I think the experience has taught me why why people do blogs.
Blogging Frees Your Brain to Do Other Stuff
For the first thirty three days writing articles was super easy. I had all of this stuff stuck in my head, that demanded to be let out. These things would literally just pop into my brain at inappropriate times.
I would be in bed trying to sleep, and I would find myself thinking about these things instead of sleeping. Since I had no where to put anything, I would find myself reliving things over and over again, and the things would get louder and louder the longer I ignored them. I was getting exhausted.
Blogging helped me to do something about it. I suddenly had a place to put things. I could download my thoughts, and revisit them whenever I wanted to review them. That was great, because I no longer had to be mentally responsible for everything and I didn't have to keep performing a mental upkeep each day. I could delegate it to my blog and do something else with my mind instead.
Even better, writing things down forced me to be more careful with how I organized my thoughts. At some point I had to walk away, and each article had to stand on it's own. If it wasn't good, I had to fix it. This meant the writing process forced me to think about things in a deeper and more careful way. I was under my own scrutiny, so I needed to ensure that what I was putting out there matched up with what I was actually trying to say.
To do that, I had to be heavily involved in the article's formation and editing process. With each blog post, I had to reread what I wrote and remove the errors that popped up. That process could take several rounds of intentional effort and tweaking.
That's what makes writing valuable. When left on it's own, my head can't see the grass from the weeds. In my head, things just bounce around and remain disorganized and cluttered. There is never a finalization process. With writing you can stop the spinning and lock things down.
Conclusion
Today marks day thirty four of my Blog's journey. Today, as I sat down to write an article, something was different. I hit a mental roadblock. My brain had essentially run dry of content and the noises were quiet.
I didn't know what to write about, so I decided to reflect upon this, and write about the moment itself. Up to this point, my blog has given me a refuge to consistently expend myself mentally. A topic would be screaming in my head, and the blog would serve as a platform to voice that topic.
Today was different. In writing terms, I think it's what frustrated writers refer to as a "writer's block". Super painful if you have a deadline to meet, but for me the situation provided an insight. My blog had diligently served as a dumping ground for trapped ideas. Today my head was clear and peaceful. I had dumped everything that I needed to dump. Kind of a nice development.
If you find you spend a lot of time wrestling with your mind, Blogs can really help you out. The price to begin is free, but the cost to not start one can be tremendous. Your brain needs a place to go release itself. It doesn't like to be trapped all of the time.
Start a blog and start writing things down today. You may find the initial process to be a struggle, but as you keep doing it, you'll find it becomes easier, and your brain will become less noisy. It beats waking up in the middle of the night to a spinning mind. Start a blog. Use it to get some sleep. Your brain will thank you in the morning.
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