How To Write Two Consecutive Quotes

Every distraction imposes a cost on the depth of your focus. When your brain changes contexts—say, going from painting a picture to answering a text and then back to painting again—there’s a switching cost. Your brain has to load a different set of rules and information into working memory. This “boot up” costs at least a few minutes, and for complex tasks, it can take even longer. The two of us have found it can take a couple of hours of uninterrupted writing before we’re doing our best work; sometimes it even requires several consecutive days before we’re in the zone.

Let It Out Some studies have shown that simply writing down how you feel can release the air from the stress balloon. In the 1980s, University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker had half of the students in one of his classes write for 15 minutes on four consecutive days about their deepest thoughts and feelings about traumatic experiences in their lives. The other half of the students was asked to simply write about everyday things. At the end of the year, the two groups were compared and it was found that the students who’d written about their life experiences were the healthier of the two.