5 Ways Journaling by Hand Can Stop Rumination

Most people occasionally get stuck in ruminating thoughts, but people with ADHD seem to be particularly prone to it. Rumination makes you a prisoner of looping thoughts in your head; it can feel impossible to shift your focus to anything other than the topic of rumination.

So how do you break free?

This is a place where talking out your thoughts with someone else can do more harm than good. Both venting and verbally articulating the rumination are generally counterproductive. They keep you stuck in the thought loops.

A better way to break free of thought loops is by journaling them.

Read: The Difference Between Journaling and Writing

This is a place where putting pen to paper has distinct advantages over digital journaling or talking to an AI like ChatGPT.

Read: 5 Reasons Why You Should Journal By Hand

Something happens between your brain and the pen that changes the nature of the ruminating thoughts.

Here are 5 ways journaling by hand — with pen to paper — can help you get out of rumination and looping thoughts.

(1) Interrupt the Pattern

Sometimes the best way to get out of looping thoughts and rumination is to interrupt the pattern with a new activity or a change of context.

The act of taking out your journal and pens is a ritual of creating space. It signals your brain that a new activity is starting. The ritual creates a pause that can give you perspective and help break the cycle of rumination even before you put pen to paper.

(2) Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body

It’s often said that you can’t solve the mind with the mind.

When you’re stuck in your head, the only way out is through your body. Physical activity is also a good way to escape the thought loop, but you may not always have time or energy to interrupt your thoughts with a workout.

Writing by hand is an embodied, somatic process that involves more regions of the brain. It’s a physical action as well as a cognitive process.

(3) Concretize Your Thoughts

Writing on a page puts your thoughts in concrete, tangible form where you can see them. In a learning context, handwriting forces you to process and reframe information as you write it down. The same principle applies when you’re encoding your own thoughts.

(4) Putting Your Thoughts in a Safe Place

When you journal by hand, you put your thoughts in a notebook where you know you can access them and return to them with ease.

The knowledge that you’ve expressed the thoughts and captured them somewhere allows your nervous system to put the issue at rest. That effect is missing when you speak your thoughts aloud, or type them.

When you speak them aloud, they disappear into the ether. And when you type them, they get lost in the black hole of your digital assets and archives.

(5) Process What’s Beneath the Thought Loops

The slower pace of handwriting allows for more processing during the act itself, helping you connect with the thoughts — and the underlying emotions — as you write them.

This can help you go deeper to get at the emotions beneath the rumination and thought loops. In contrast, typing or speaking can keep you at surface level or in the same loop.