The need to write consistently

Yes, writing consistently is good for mental health. Journal writing, specifically, has proven benefits by allowing the urgent, alarm-sounding things in the mind be downloaded and then analyzed. I myself have found it beneficial.

Creative writing also has mood-lifting benefits and has proven effective for treating trauma.

Is writing on a keyboard more, less, or equally beneficial to writing things out by hand?

Writing by hand is better for memory and retention. Studies have shown that it stimulates more neural pathways and enhances creativity.

Typing is convenient and legible.

I co-own and write for a newspaper besides my full-time job as a reference librarian. I spend the majority of my day typing into databases, researching, learning online, and other tasks that have me hunched over a desk and a keyboard. I don’t remember what I typed most of the time, but that’s because it’s a one-off and doesn’t need to crowd my brain.

I work on my weekly planning and I take interview and research info for newspaper articles and book clubs by hand because that information must be retained at least in the short term the majority of the time. And part of journalism is having an encyclopedic knowledge of people, places, events and things, but as I get older and have too much stuff in my brain, I find it much more useful to know *where* to find facts than remembering (or misremembering) the facts themselves.

Bottom line: just write. If you need a keyboard, do it. If you have a $1 notebook or a fancy $50 notebook, it’s worthless if it just sits on a desk looking pretty.

So write. Begin there, and everything else follows. I like to type. I like to write by hand. I use the scanner function on my phone to upload images of my handwritten items into the same database (Notion) that I use for my typewritten musings. I occasionally review them and I make sure that I use OCR so that I can search them to retrieve an idea or a quote or a fact that didn’t seem important at the time but now is. I also use a daily journaling app called “Journey,” available for iPhone and Android. I can type, format in Rich Text, add images, and track where I am and the weather and temperature. It has a nice “on this day” lookback feature and it has been my go-to journal since 2015.