I find the whole thing so fascinating. Things we take for granted, and yet when we stop and actually think about them, they make so much sense.
I got properly absorbed in understanding why writing is so extraordinarily good for our emotional brain and our memory. It’s one of those subjects that once you know it, you can’t unknow it — and it changes everything about how you approach your own wellbeing.
So why handwriting? Why not just reading? Why not talking it through with someone?
Here’s the thing. When you read, you’re using your visual cortex — brilliant for inspiration, for absorbing new ideas. When you speak, you’re using Broca’s area, the motor cortex — great for expression. But when you pick up a pen and write? You’re engaging your sensorimotor cortex and your parietal lobe, the area responsible for deep emotional processing. That’s the part that creates what I think of as the physical-emotional bridge.
Handwriting is, in the most literal sense, self-awareness made physical. The slow, deliberate act of putting pen to paper means your thoughts have to form properly, they have to slow down enough for you to feel them. You can’t skim over yourself the way you skim a screen.
Reading absorbs you. Speaking releases you. But handwriting? Handwriting rewires you.
That is why journalling — actual pen on paper journalling — is at the heart of everything I do. It isn’t nostalgia, it isn’t old-fashioned. It is neuroscience. And it is one of the most powerful wellbeing tools you will ever pick up. Quite literally.