Writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge

> Very similar to meditation. The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored.

Similarly, no matter how much instruction I've gotten in meditation over the years, I still go back to Tilopa's advice all the time [1]. Just rest.

[1] https://unfetteredmind.org/tilopas-advice/

There was an app or site I remember using that, every time you typed a sentence, it disappeared so that you only focused on the sentence in front of you. After you're done, you could export the entire document. I wonder if we could add some LLM features to that too.

Before I graduated from college, my aunt gave me the book, The Artist's Way, which prescribes this basic task as you've described as the foundational exercise for creativity. The suggestion given was 3 pages a day no matter what.

Hi, I eat my own dogfood so to speak and built an app for stream of consciousness writing: https://enso.sonnet.io

I've been using it for 4 years, every day, every morning. We also have a small, but community of users using it regularly.

Finally, weirdly enough I wrote about morning notes, processing emotions through writing here: https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...

Try taking an edible, sit down in a quiet room in front of your text editor of choice, and write down ideas.

The next day, look at the stuff you wrote and pick out the good stuff.

Which stock A4 should I use?

> Very similar to meditation. The best meditation advice I got was to just sit down, focus on doing nothing and be OK with being bored. Not some breathing techniques, how to focus your mind, posture etc. That comes later, very naturally, after you get curious about improvements.

Chilling != meditation. Like I get that chilling is helpful for you but words have meaning and that is not meditation.

They say you don't truly understand something until you're forced to explain it to someone else. Writing your ideas down is essentially “rubber duck debugging” applied to your thoughts: you can get clarity without needing a human third party.

I don't like it because I feel my vague ideas "disappear" when becoming concrete. It feels like trying to project a multidimensional creature into 2D; you inevitably lose some of it. In contrast, in my brain I can rotate or pinch the idea anyway I like and even turn it into further ideas.

>I like writing because it forces you to turn vague feelings into concrete ideas.

Yep. I've started painting my dreams and it is surprisingly difficult to turn vague memories into concrete scenes. It's almost physically exhausting.

To add, it helps to have some record of inner thoughts to look back and reflect with greater fidelity than memory.

Done enough, one can start to make connections at a greater rate than if one was to try to keep it all in one's head. I've had several experiences in therapy where I had the spontaneous thought, "I've written about this before!" I was able to go back and thread through all previous reflections in a way that was much more than the sim of their parts. It really accelerates self discovery and growth.

I remember I was at a party few years back, some guy did way more acid than what he could handle and had a breakdown. I remember there was another guy there who was “tripsitting” but just something about him seemed kind of off, like he was trying to control the whole situation

So here was this one guy having a mental breakdown, really suffering, and there’s this other guy who keeps aggressively “checking in” on him every other minute, nobody stepped in to stop him because he was “tripsitting”.

(I know normally tripsitters can do this, but the way the guy was doing it was just awful, like he was invading the guy’s space and pestering the shit out of him, it freaked him out even more)

You’re definitely fortunate to have had a good friend nearby, some people are too fucking crazy to ever get high around

I've been using marijuana for too long for it to have that effect on me unfortunately, but actual psychedelics are great at expanding the mind. If you can find someone that you trust to be a 'sitter' (at least for the first couple of times), it can be a life changing experience with positive long-term effects. Micro dosing psilocybin has been starting to show positive results in trials in recent years.

I tried weed once a few years ago and took a bit too much as well. When the euphoria hit, I realized I had never felt that good in my entire life and I became scared of the idea that I would lose control. My thoughts also sped up and I would get into these metacognitive/self-analytical loops. I'd start thinking about something and before I could finish I'd have another thought analyzing what I had just thought, and so on. And I experienced the loss of filter. At the time, I was with a friend in his basement and we were surrounded by his mom's amateur paintings. I've never been an art person but I remember looking at one of her paintings and talking nonstop about all the different visual details that kept popping out at me.

I didn't have as complete as loss of inhibition as you described however. The friend I was with wasn't someone I completely trusted - many of my thoughts I decided not to share. Still, I think the experience was valuable and I'm glad I tried it. Although, in retrospect any self-insight I gained I don't think I truly took to heart, as it didn't lead to any meaningful behavioral change. It's only been two days, but I wonder what kind of long term changes you will see. Has the loss of filter persisted in any way or did it wear off when you came down?

Either way, your story, outside of being well written and incredibly personable, gives me hope for my own healing. I'd love to connect and hear more about where your experience takes you, especially if you end up trying cannabis assisted therapy. I'm planning on trying psychedelic assisted therapy at some point so it would be cool to have someone to discuss with. My email is in my profile if you're interested.

Writing is one of my favorite things to do high. Nothing that interesting just whatever pops in my mind. Pen to paper so I don’t get distracted by shiny internet things

I, too, have had the experience that cannabis 'removes repression'. In my case, it caused me to consider a pretty-good plan to try to improve my life that I was previously unwilling to entertain because of shame or embarrassment or painful memories.

I'm still intending to avoid cannabis though.

I don’t have many favorite comments on hacker news, especially not if this kind, but this one goes on that list. Thanks for sharing.

It's unbelievable how that campaign and even the hint of something like it here with internet mobs can obliterate the creative capacity of huge numbers of people. I write and make to understand things, and by example, I recently wrote about 12,000 words to get a yield of about 3,000 words of my best work. The stuff in that other 9,000 words will probably never see a screen again, but it had to come out to mine it for the single ideas and turns of phrase that become like library functions for dense, concise writing.

If you can't produce the raw material, you can't make anything new or good.

It sounds like you are putting too much pressure on yourself. You don’t have to write everything down. Just writing something, anything at all, no matter what it is, is great. That’s something to be proud of.

I find it very helpful to slow down, breathe, and regain connection to my body.

And you can stop whenever you want. Journaling is something you do for yourself — it shouldn’t feel like a chore.

Your journal is your safe place where you can dump your thoughts. It will never judge you :) It can receive anything you offer to it.

If writing is something new for you then it is normal that it will feel unnatural and thus attract more attention to the activity itself. It's totally okay to start off writing about writing to get things going. In no time you will naturally move on to writing about other things. So don't worry and just write

I few similarly, but writing both makes me edit in real time and then again as I move stuff around.

I don’t think it’s useful for literally capturing every idea, but it captures as many as you can get down.

It’s kind of like how when you’re reading a book aloud you get a few seconds ahead in your head.

> Just write about your day if you need to.

In past, I had the habit of laying in bed and not being able to fall asleep because I was pondering about "bad" things that happened that day, or pondering about things going to happen the next day where I didn't feel confident about the outcome, or my role (or similar).

I kept this a little vague, I think the kind of events that keep you away from sleeping may be different for everyone. And if you have the habit of being in bed awake for longer time, you know why that is anyway.

To get to the point: Doing a daily writing basically wiped out the problem entirely for me. Nowadays, when I can't sleep, it is because I ate too much too late.

I do my writing once per day, usually close to bed time. I write about relatively noteworthy things ("another day of being too lazy to progress on hobby thing XY" is a pretty common one), then go a bit on a tangent maybe, why that is and if it's actually that bad. I try to be mostly gentle to myself here and keep it positive. If things happen that annoy me (neighbours annoying, cashier rude, big train delay, whatever), I of course write them down too, and also go on a tangent. Can I do something about this? Are there maybe good reasons for it, which I didn't think or care of the moment it happened, etc?

Basically, do the thing you would do while laying in bed and pondering things - the difference is, when you are not in bed, and writing, you do it in a more constructive, brief way. For events the next day (difficult meeting etc.) nail down the worst case, the way it will likely go, the things you for sure do not wanna do/say.

And it weeds out the desire to unwrap all that crap once more as soon as you lay down. Which is the whole point of the exercise, basically.

Do I read these things ever again? Most often not, honestly. But I maybe change my opinion on that, and if so, they are available.

FWIW, I write these on computer, not pencil and paper. Lowers the friction for me, and is fine. Most often it's in the range of 150-400 words, roughly guessed.

The feedback-evaluation of you also must be evaluated.

A few things: around once a month I log what I've been reading, listening to, watching, playing, and hanging out with.

For the daily journaling I try to focus on a quality of feelings and events, which we could call significance. It is pretty difficult to measure the significance that a thought or event will have in the future, but this process itself is helpful for journaling in the moment, and its most helpful for my future reader self.

That means that when I sit down to journal I no longer focus on the "material" conditions, when I do that it feels like I'm grasping at straws to capture some inner snapshot that by nature is not contained in any of those material factors.

Rather I try to focus on fragments of my inner narrative while being on the lookout for my own biases and mental patterns. It's almost like trying to guess which events for the day will resurface in your dreams, which stick to your subconscious rather than what you think is relevant in the moment that you sit down to write.

Is it important to go back and read them?

The few times I've felt motivated to write down my thoughts were during periods of high personal stress and once they were on paper I put the notebook on a shelf. It sat for a while, and one day when I thought about it I tore up the pages and threw them away. They weren't anything I needed anymore, and I certainly didn't want anyone else to come across them.

Now I'm anxious about cancer and I didn't even get to the secret about lowering the stakes :-/

There are lots of journals out there that provide a daily prompt. Day One (from Automattic) is pretty nice and you get basic functionality for free.

Fill-in in what sense? Like a physical journal but digital?

I think it's nice to see my own library grow. It will also be interesting to revisit it one day. It's like a time capsule. Plus it's thousands of pages of input to create an ai-version of myself one day ;)