Today I’m going to be talking about how writing improves your health. I do mean this literally. But I mean it in the sense that writing improves the health of your mind.

Writing is great exercise for your mind. And, just as a bird never flew on one wing, if we’re to make the best of our time we need to be healthy in mind as well as body. Writing has improved and does improve my mental health and well-being at least in the same proportion as physical exercise does for my body. My feeling now is that exercising my mind with writing has had an even bigger and better impact on my overall health and quality of life. It took me quite a while to get to the realization that I needed to exercise within as well as without. And, to be honest, I doubt if I’d have got there if I hadn’t managed to make a breakthrough in my attitude to physical exercise. 

I’ve never been a regular exerciser. It took me a long while to get beyond the idea that “exercise is good for you” to some kind of consistent action. It’s always felt like a necessary chore, so my motivation has been weak.  Consistency has always been a challenge for me, I repeatedly found myself in the situation where I’d dropped the last training regime for some reason or other and knew I needed to get another started again now, as I was beginning to feel flabby. I’ve tried many and various fitness regimes down through the years and joined more than a couple of gyms in my time. I’ve tried swimming. I’ve started but never finished training for 5Ks, half-marathons, and, from time to time, even marathons. And I’ve never taken part in any of them. I find myself counting the steps or strokes so I’ll know when it’s going to end. I think I’ve mentioned that I like hiking, but running or swimming aren’t inspiring or enjoyable for me. Nor is going to a gym, to be honest. And hiking is too intermittent to count.

I do understand intellectually that a sedentary lifestyle like mine requires me to exercise regularly if I don’t want to atrophy, to devolve physically. We understand so much more now, than our parents or earlier generations did, about the importance of diet and physical exercise. And we’ve many more opportunities to eat better and exercise. My thinking on this is that, barring accidents and unforeseeable developments, if I don’t live longer than my parents, I’m being lazy and unintelligent. Part of my measure for myself is to make sure I’m doing what I can to live longer than my parents in a physically fit and healthy way. So, although physical exercise isn’t a natural inclination for me, I am motivated to keep going back to some form of it to keep integrity with myself. 

So, some time back, I started yet another exercise regime. This time I was trying yoga because my back was getting so stiff and feeling so sore when I woke up in the morning that I knew I had to deal with it. Or I’d end up too sclerotic to do all the hiking and sightseeing I still plan to do. The yoga helped very quickly to mitigate the stiffness and help me to get more flexible. I’m still doing it because the impact, when I stop doing it for a few days, is so obvious that I’d feel foolish not doing it. I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

My wife also commented that when I do yoga regularly, I’m calmer, less turbulent, and I don’t thrash around as much in my sleep, much to her relief. This was simply an interesting observation for me until one night at a class the yoga teacher made a comment that a side-effect, we might notice of stretching our muscles and joints, was that it also released the emotions that’d been stored or trapped in there, sometimes for years. 

I’m sure this wasn’t news to me but I was able to hear it for the first time then. And it was a breakthrough idea for me in that moment. It illuminated and transformed the idea of physical exercise for me. I saw that exercise is physical and emotional hygiene in the same way brushing and flossing your teeth is dental hygiene. This made sense to me in a way nothing else had in relation to the why of exercising - I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a late developer, so bear with me. 

I remember asking the dentist once why I needed to brush my teeth in the morning when I’d done it at bed time the night before and not put anything into my mouth in the meantime. They must get this question a lot because, boy! did I get a lot of information very quickly and with passion. He and the dental hygienist had quite an antiphony going about the build-up of undesirable stuff, the settling of unwanted matter during the night, the necessity of cleaning it all up in the morning, and so on. 

I see something similar in relation to my body. I wake up in the morning with stiffness having built up during the night, just as I wake up with all that build-up in my mouth that needs to be cleaned out. My attitude now, to doing yoga, or going out for a walk or run, is that it’s cleaning my body in the same way that washing my teeth cleans my mouth. And I’ve found this to be true. I start the day in a much better state when I do some exercise than when I miss it for whatever reason. Knowing this and remembering this means that nowadays I can overcome much more consistently the resistance to exercise and the tendency to let it drop. 

It's completely changed my attitude to taking exercise. I may never get to the point of enjoying daily exercise, any more than I will enjoy having to floss and wash every morning. But now I feel and appreciate clearly why I do it, as well as understanding why.

So that was my physical health. But what about my mind? Was I regularly exercising my mind in any way? If I’m going to take full advantage of all my days I need to be fit and flexible in mind as well as body. So, what was I doing as regular exercise for my mind, for the intellectual, emotional, creative sides of my life? When I looked at it from this perspective it was, for sure, a bit shocking to me. I’d never thought of it from this point of view. Never given it any attention. I’d never even got to the point of making assumptions. I’d simply never thought about it at all. 

If I’d treated my body in the same way, what kind of a mess would that be in at this point? When I did start looking, what I saw was someone who didn’t exercise their mind at all really. Someone who hadn’t challenged themselves or tried something new for years, who’d been living on the equivalent of a diet of emotional TV dinners and intellectual junk food. I wasn’t happy with this situation. Quite honestly I was appalled. I know how grotty a lack of physical exercise makes me feel and realized that not exercising my mind must be having a similar effect on it. I knew I had to do something to improve the situation.  

I think our minds get better with age if we keep using them. We have more experience, more understanding, more memories. And our minds get deeper, more colorful, more rounded. I wanted to find something I’d be able to develop as a habit and that would have the same effect in exercising my mind every morning as physical exercise does for my body. Among the candidates for me were learning to play a musical instrument, learning how to paint, working through a book list. And I did actually try out all of these and found them useful. Some I still do - my reading time and list have both improved dramatically since then. However, none of them turned into what I was looking for, at least not for me.

And then I re-discovered writing. Or, more accurately, I discovered writing in a new way. It was by no means a quick discovery for me and getting to a consistent writing practice was definitely a matter of trial and error. I’ll be filling in the details of how I got there in many of the Podcast episodes. 

One of the starting points for me was that I remembered I would sometimes write down my thoughts when I found myself overthinking or not able to stop thinking about some particular situation. This helped to clear my head for new thoughts and to see more clearly how I thought, and often felt, about something.  So, I decided to start there again and see what happened. 

Here’s what I did then. And because it worked so well for me this is what I still do pretty much every morning of my life now. I wake up early. I like it early because it’s quiet. The family and most of the world is still abed. So, I can do my personal stuff without interruptions. I set aside thirty minutes for what I call my writing practice. Whenever possible I write outside as I’ve found simply listening and looking around are often enough to get me started. I’m clear that this writing is exercise for me. This is me exercising my mind in the same way doing yoga and going for a walk is exercise for my body. 

And I start writing about whatever pops up. Sometimes it’s going over the past, sometimes it’s completely new. Most of the time it feels like a lightening or freeing-up exercise. Sometimes things come up from areas where there’s some stress. In those times I may not get to the end of my thinking or feeling or invention but I get further than I was when I started and I’m less stuck than when I started. No matter how dark or desperate the topic is, or seems, when I start, there’s always movement by the end, some light between where I begin and where I finish that morning. I always end up in a better place than where I started. 

But I wasn’t just feeling better. I could see that I was remembering things better, and was actually being more creative in my thinking. I was looking at things in ways I couldn’t have imagined before I started my writing practice. To me the changes this kind of exercise have made for me have been amazing over time. Not overnight, mind you - it’s the same as physical exercise – you have to keep at it for a while to see results. This exercise of writing has positively impacted all areas of my life – relationships, how I feel about myself, how I feel about being alive. My thinking is sharper and deeper, I notice things more, and pay more attention than I used to. My memories are richer, my emotional awareness is greater. 

If we’re going to fulfill our role as this amazing, unprecedented generation that’s living longer than almost all the generations before us, we have to stay fit in mind as well as body. Writing is great exercise for your mind. I’m not asking you to take my word for it. And I am asking you to be willing to give it a go. Try it out. See for yourself. 

One of the reasons I started the Writing Is Great! podcast is that I was so affected by the realization that I hadn’t been exercising my mind, hadn’t even thought about it, that then I couldn’t stop talking about it - with my friends, my family, and so on. And I kept talking about how writing for yourself is such a great way to exercise your mind and to improve your overall health. I think they got so tired of hearing me going on about it with them, that they suggested I should start talking with other people about it as well. I was, and still am, so convinced of the value and importance of exercising your mind that I thought it was worth trying to share it. And hence this podcast.  I hope it’ll encourage and help you to develop a writing practice of your own.