Essay: Why writing about your life can help turn it around
For the past three weeks, after years of false starts, I’ve finally managed to sit down and meditate nightly. I had a heart-to-heart with my partner and came amicably to a decision we’d been batting around for months. I have been actively cultivating a sense of gratitude. And I’ve had a hugely productive run at work. I credit these improvements to several hours spent writing about my past, present and future using a curriculum called “Self-Authoring.”
Autobiography, memoir and diary-keeping are thought to be acts of pure self-involvement or, at most, rarefied literary pursuits. But a Canadian psychologist thinks that writing about one’s life in a structured way can be a potent and cost-effective path to process emotions, relieve stress, improve health and boost cognitive performance.
Self-Authoring is a series of guided writing exercises developed by Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto that is sold online for $29.90.
You write about your past, your virtues and your faults, and envision possible good and bad futures as in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. You then make specific plans to reach your goals. The output is several thousand words, and the results can be dramatic.
In Peterson’s initial study of 85 McGill University students on academic probation, the group that