Big thanks to Anna Miller for this great post! 

We often think of writers as eccentric people who make a living writing novels in a cabin on their own. Or we think of writers as people who use the act of writing to communicate important information, such as a breaking news story. We think that these people are good at writing, and because they make a living from it, then most likely writing is a process that’s only for the experts.

But what we don’t often realize is that writing is something that’s available to all of us, if only we can be confident in our abilities. You don’t have to be a great writer in order to use writing to balance your life. There is a kind of writing that only you will see. It’s the kind of writing that you use to help you during periods of intense self-reflection. It’s writing for you and for you alone.

So, with that in mind, here are five useful ways of writing that can help you reflect upon and balance your life.

Keep a Dream Journal

Keeping a dream journal is a great way to help you recover and understand your emotional state. Dreams are often outlets for the suppressed emotions we’ve experienced throughout the day to bubble up, so it makes sense to try to evaluate them, as they can give us insight as to what is troubling us or making us happy. Try keeping a dream journal during the especially emotional periods of your life. The minute you wake up, freewrite for five minutes in your journal, doing your best to retell the dream exactly as it happened. Then, let the journal sit throughout the course of the day. When you get home, take a moment to reread your dream journal. Spend some time writing a reflective paragraph on what the dream might mean to you and your day.

Write an Angry Letter (But Don’t Send It!)

Another thing you can do is use the letter format as a way to purge yourself of excessive emotions. A favorite of mine is to write an angry letter to someone who I feel has wronged me. I take a moment to write the letter quickly and angrily, then let it sit overnight. I review it and make changes the next day. Then, once I’m happy with it, and once I feel that my emotions have rebalanced, I shred it. I can use the letter to help me deal with the situation or I can use the letter to let the situation pass by. In either case, the process of writing and revising the letter helped me balanced my emotions.

Write a Story

One really interesting way to use writing to balance your life is to consider writing a story. This is useful for when a situation you were involved in didn’t go your way. Writing a story with yourself as a character lets you examine the real situation as it happened and plan out other scenarios. This is helpful for honing your social skills and letting you understand how you respond in different social situations.

Keep a Memory Journal

Another great use of writing is to write down all of the memories you can remember. Keeping a memory journal can help you organize and understand the trajectory of your life. Remember, that’s why we love to read novels so much, because they often give us a complete and meaningful understanding of a characters life. Through a memory journal, you can also create that same feeling in your own life.

Track Your Activities

Finally, for a more pragmatic way of balancing your life, you can use writing to track how you go about your daily routine. Spend a week to write down what activities you do each day and how long you do them. After that week is over, look at the time your spending on each activity and compare that to your list of goals for achieving a balanced life. Where can you shift your time? What activities are useful and what seem to unbalance your routine? Write down a plan for changing your routine.

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This guest post is contributed by Anna Miller, who writes on the topics of online degree programs.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: anna22.miller@gmail.com.