My brain no workie so good today. Like Ben Franklin wrote, “Late to bed, late to rise, makes for dull thoughts and for sleepy eyes.”
When I have to write an email on days like today, I go to my default and ask myself, “What interesting thing did I learn lately?” Here’s one I read in an article a few days ago:
“Patients in clinical trials are sometimes asked to keep a pain diary, and it turns out that the keeping of the diary itself can diminish the intensity of pain and improve one’s mood.”
A pain diary, btw, is just what it sounds like — a daily entry of where it hurts, of how bad it hurts, of how you feel as a result of it, etc. Back in 2018, scientists at McGill University used this as a treatment for 72 patients with chronic pain. And like the article above says, just writing about the pain reduced the pain and made life better.
This was interesting to me, for one, because it seems to go against the prevailing wisdom, about the importance of gratitude journals, focusing on the good etc.
For two, this was interesting to me because I have lately noted the strange effect I feel from writing down random thoughts that come into my head. Not necessarily painful thoughts, on the one hand, or pleasant thoughts, on the other. Just thoughts.
Somehow, writing a thought down allows it to go away instead of continuing to cling to my brain or taking up valuable neural real estate.
Often, after writing down what seemed to be an irrelevant or inconsequential thought, I find myself in a better mood, looking around the world and noticing things I had never noticed before, or having new, surprising, more fun ideas pop up.
So maybe there’s not such a conflict between pain diaries and gratitude journals.
Maybe what you write about is less important than that you just write, and get thoughts down and out of your head, so other, better thoughts can pop up, or so your brain can simply be free to enjoy the day instead of holding on to what it’s got.
That’s another argument to write daily emails. Like a pain diary, daily emails can be therapeutic, but unlike a pain diary, daily emails have other benefits too — connections formed, assets built up, money made.
If you want to start writing daily emails, I told you above one thing you can always write about — something interesting you’ve learned lately.
But maybe you want something a little more specific, a little different, a little more exciting to write about from day to day. In that case, I’ve got just the thing to help you: