The
Sharing for this bit (emphasis mine):
Throughout the day, we have all these things cycling through our head. Some of them seem to continue to cycle. There’s something about the act of writing, physically writing something on paper, that tends to offload it a little bit, or help us hit the pause button on it. The outcome seems to be [that] you decrease cognitive arousal, and you decrease rumination and worry.
Of course, anybody who regularly journals or keeps a paper task list already knows this to be the case (I’ve recently moved my to-do system almost entirely to paper, and I’ll be sharing more about that experience soon), but it’s always great see to such things backed up by cognitive science.
(Hat tip to my friend Jessica Williams for sending me this link.)