If our minds are generally focused on the future, it is necessary to take a break and see what has been achieved to better understand our past. With the advent of working from home and the deprivation of leisure for two years now, it is not uncommon to find oneself lost. A nightmare for some, an opportunity for others.
Discover our latest podcast
This face-to-face with your inner self can lead to the urge to write about your own experiences, which can prove very beneficial. Having experienced things, whether they seem good or bad, happens to everyone, but writing about them is a rarer and more complicated exercise.
The benefits of writing
A study published in 2002 on the website of the American Psychological Association supported the idea of writing therapy. A thesis that has since been taken up by the author Alison Armstrong Taylor.
Taylor saysin one of her books and transcribed in an article in The Oakland Press:
The mere fact of organizing your past in a system, whether chronological or not, can help you see your life in another way.
Writing about one's experiences in itself helps to 'cathartic' them and 'give them meaning.' It also allows you to better understand the future by understanding exactly what you need.
Putting words on paper or on the computer about stressful events allows you to better manage them because they are then better defined. In addition, reading what we have accomplished also allows us to see the importance it has had on our lives and to be proud of it.
Read more:
⋙ Study reveals video games may benefit our mental health
⋙ Psychedelics: The next big thing for mental health treatment
⋙ These 5 habits can damage your brain
The journalist's tip
Journalists Cindy Le Ferle for T.O.P offers several tips to make the most of these memories, which will probably have no other future than in your notebook or hard drive.
Cindy suggests that you should start by writing as you feel the experience, with your own words without much effect. 'Do not write on several memories at the same time,' she says. 'Try to learn a lesson from each event.'
Although the story is meant to be personal, consider seeing how great authors have written their memoirs to give you some writing leads.
