Reflections
It's Not Just a Piece of Paper; It's the Writer's Mind
What is it that drives people to write? Perhaps a visceral, instinctive amusement that comes from a sense of accomplishment. Or maybe because writing is undeniably an inalienable aspect of our daily life. When we try to suppress down our emotions, we stress ourselves. One way to spout out how we feel inside is writing, turning events into words. Writing has an immense effect that can churn one's social life as it hugely affects one's behaviour. A psychological effect is therefore obvious.
According to studies (Pennebaker and Beall 1986, 1994, 1997), people who regularly wrote, expressing their deepest feelings reported fewer visits to the health centres than before as well as fall in the number of times they fell ill. Writing stimulates the immune response of human body towards infections, such as H.I.V and also improves liver, lung and bone functions. It therefore induces a feeling of well being in oneself. Depression is likely to go away as a person becomes socially interactive.
All the emotions bottled up inside, the anxiousness or the joys which one feels can gush out through writing. It is definitely therapeutic. When you finish the piece of writing which you have worked so hard on, losing your sleep over it because the deadline is screaming out in your nightmare, all you feel is relief. Ultimately conveying what you had to say through your writing releases the pent up frustrations that have been slowly invading your head to drive you crazy.
Dilemmas can be solved by writing. Many people tend to panic and race through a stream of hysteria while combating their problems. Those who like writing are more prone to handle such dilemmas in a systematic way, because they actually think through it, before running against a wall out of sheer dismay. Researches show that writing regularly develops your analytical and rational skills that help you devise a plan to overcome your personal troubles. You will at least pause to think about the situation before absolutely losing your mind.
We often tend to get indecisive about what we want. This is an obstacle for people who don't acquire what they want from life; it is simply because they don't know what they want. However it is interesting to know that writing everyday allows you some time to think on your own, to give yourself a resolved image of what you want to achieve and eventually plan for it. Writing also deepens the field of imagination of a person and to think out of the box, going beyond any boundaries that restrict logical or creative thinking. It allows one to tangibly construct one's imagination. Is life itself anything more than the product of our own imagination?
Daily life is noisy. Those who write like to spend time alone, get inspired in the midst of solitude. However being in this solitude does not mean being alone. It simply means delightfully enjoying the silence as the mind comes in coordination with the eyes and the fingertips, without any distractions. Writing has a remarkable power of moving away from the chaos of life, it is like meditation leading to salvation. Like music, or photography, reading, scuba diving, writing has its own way to please you. The more you write, the sharper your skills get and you tend to get better at it. This largely enhances your communicating skills because when you read what you have written, you know it isn't ambiguous, but clearly expresses what you want to.
Writing something which has never been heard or been read before is supposed to be a matter of contentment for the writer. Therefore writing has its own graceful way to bestow happiness. It is amazing how someone crafts that cloud of thoughts inside their mind into something coherent and tangible. If you write it down, the thought just abruptly doesn't disappear right in the next moment when you try to remember it again.
When we write something, what comes alive is our imagination. It's an art and the fact that one can express anything in any language in a written form is incredible. It is all about creating. It is about telling others how we visualise the things that happen to us making life something that we interpret it to be. It is how we clearly express what we see and what we know. It is simply beautiful.
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