How to clear your scattered mind with one obscenely simple ritual
5:30 AM. Wake up.
I get up early because then I have time to work on my dreams. But the moment I wake up, my mind is spiralling...
My friend hasn’t replied to my message.
I haven’t been to the gym in a while. I need to prioritize fitness.
Oh there’s that Book i started. Man, I need to read that.
I need to finish this essay I’ve been working on.
I started getting back into the drums. I should do a 15-minute drill practice.
I get downstairs. I see the kitchen is a mess...
I should clean it.
Oh, I need to revisit that idea I was brainstorming with Claude.
I should write those ideas down.
Frantically, I open Apple Notes. I jot down everything fast. Because time is running out.
Notes get added to the pile of things to do, ideas to process, books to read, routines to implement, hobbies to get back into.
What's next? What do I do?
I feel like writing. Let me quickly grab my laptop and get to work.
Ah, but if I don’t go to the gym, then that’s another day skipped.
I should work out. I’ll listen to an audiobook as well. But let me quickly clean the kitchen.
I Load the dishwasher and wipe the bench.
I Need to clean ASAP or I won’t have much time.
I run to the gym on the way to work.
Fuck, I forgot to make breakfast...
A fast mind is not a compliment.
“My mind is too fast for handwriting.”
I hear this a lot. People disregarding an ancient practice because they believe a fast mind is a superpower.
In my experience, a fast mind hoards at speed.
All these notes you've speed captured, what have you done with them? Do you feel at peace? Is your mind not mentally obese from all those open loops?
You've been piling speed onto speed, and somehow you feel slower than ever. Thinking fast doesn't mean thinking clearly.
And here's what's interesting - this isn't about ADHD.
This is just what it's like to live in the modern world with a creative mind.
The Speed Trap
In the 1950s, the world which only knew handwriting began to adopt this new form. A faster writing method using a typewriter. Suddenly people could translate thought to text at a fraction of the time.
Thoughts lived on paper and could be mailed to friends at fast speeds.
A few decades later, the computer became available.
We could now type and save endless amounts of thoughts. And we had a delete button!
We could copy and paste. Quality didn't matter as much because we could edit it later. Or continue to let the pile of files build.
AI is here now, and God only knows how many abandoned chats, created documents, logs of insights, half-formed ideas, strategy docs, email templates, and process documents I've created.
Where are they?
Have they made me more productive?
Do I remember what I documented?
Do I know what I created?
Is this helping my fast mind?
No.
Every tech evolution jump makes the speed at hoarding compound.
The same issue exists, it's just given steroids and is jacked as fuck.
No idea, thought or feeling is staying in my mind and my body long enough to understand it. I'm immediately offloading anything of value.
We've been speeding up for generations. When do we stop?
The population of the world has grown. Why don't we have a growing number of philosophers, deep thinkers and thought leaders?
The people we still read, still quote, still return to. They took handwritten notes. They thought slow. The speed is the trap. You've been told it's efficiency. It's not. When you speed capture thoughts to save them for later, you're not processing them. They're getting tossed into a bin that never gets emptied.
They never get a chance to be processed. You know this. That's why they are saved for later. But the later never happens. They just pile up. Time goes on, and you forget they exist.
If you think about it, that's pretty sad. All these ideas you were excited about get sent straight to the graveyard without a funeral.
I carry a pocket journal with me everywhere.
It's cute, and every time I pull it out, people mistake me for a detective. Lol.
Its function is not to capture faster. It's to capture slower. There is friction. I'm forced to sit with the idea longer. I'm forced to process, not hand it off. It forces me to think if I actually believe in the idea and question if it's even worth exploring.
It’s like a filter because let's face it if you're generating a thousand ideas a day how many of those are actually great and how many are just noise?
Yes your mind is fast but most of the thoughts are useless. Capturing by hand and doing it consistently trains your mind to slow down reduce the noise and focus on quality ideas you can actually do something with.
Sam Williams has an article about pocket journaling as a thinking tool. You should totally check it out.
The Paradox
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Two opposing things are happening at the same time. Nobody talks about how weird that is.
Thinking and feeling are polar opposites. One, we've been told, happens in the heart, and the other in the head. They seem to constantly be in tension, tangled, confused.
The feelings want to feel, but the head says no.
The thinking wants to point to truth, but the vibes feel off.
These are swings we've all experienced before. Speed keeps them tangled. Slowness untangles them.
The hand knows when feeling needs rationalising.
The hand knows when rationalising is choking your soul.
Check out this banger from Carl Paoli
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Feelings lose their weight.
I’ve lost count of days I've felt anxiety creep out of my chest.
Sometimes it's too much.
I sense this underlying fear like something is going to spontaneously appear from oblivion and obliterate me.
I once heard that journaling feelings was a great way to release them and feel better. I mean, people always say how talking to someone about your feelings is therapeutic. I had deducted that writing about them would be similar.
I've typed, brain dumped, and stream of consciousnessed how I'm feeling many a time. It felt nice, but it was like I was rushing to get it over with.
Writing about feelings is confronting as fuck.
Handwriting your feelings... it feels like you’re walking naked into a shopping mall.
Typing it out made it feel nice in the moment, and it works, kinda.
But one day I decided to do it by hand instead. The resistance was strong. It was like waves were crashing against me, pushing me away from the page. The inner demons knew something was coming. They were about to be exposed to the light.
I picked up the pen and started writing, thinking and feeling slowly. Word by word, I proceeded to paint the page.
It's like I had no idea where I was going. Questions popped up as the hand drew each letter. I followed the questions, described the sensations I was feeling.
It was beautiful.
It's like the world stood still. A sense of peace washed over me. I wasn't afraid.
I experienced this deep sense of knowing that I'm safe, like nothing is going to obliterate me. Suddenly all of the things I worried about felt smaller and insignificant.
Looking over what I wrote, it felt absurd.
Is that what I was worried about?
It's like I plucked a piece of me out and placed it on the page. I shed some dead weight. I'm lighter. I'm free.
The act of forming letters imposed order and chaos. What was abstract, shapeless and shadow-like suddenly became clear and visible.
Handwriting and sitting with it forms a pattern. Next time the feeling comes, you see it, you name it, and you're less affected by it.
The hand as art.
This isn't therapy. This is art.
The creation of art starts with the hand.
It brings the imagination into reality. Art is not the output of a paintbrush or sculpting tools. It's the act of moving with intention.
When you handwrite, you are doing the same thing.
Taking the slow process and applying imagination, thought, feeling, and sensation into what you create.
You are not just journaling, you are an artist. The wandering is not a process that produces content. The wandering is the content.
The act, the slow movement, the integration of thought and feeling and imagination is the work.
This essay? Handwritten.
Craig Perry also writes his essays by hand. You can feel the hand in the prose. You should totally check out his art.
People can tell.
Readers can feel the difference between prose that was rushed and prose that was sat with.
The feelings are felt before the mind can process why.
AI makes this worse.
It's not going to flesh out the feelings of your work. That's your job. And AI is never going to beat the quality of writing that was handwritten slow and thoughtful.
Yes, production will be slower, but that is the point.
You sit with the whole piece, it becomes a part of you, not something you wear occasionally, like a hat. It becomes a part of your soul. It's embodied, you're more likely to remember it, and when people ask you questions, you can recall it and explain it clearly to people.
And when the time comes, you don't need a script when you give a public speech or talk your idea to the camera.
One thing I notice is that analogies are more likely to surface in this process.
In the rushed version, these opportunities don't surface. They arrive when your hand has time to wander.
Countless well-known authors swear by handwriting. It's not a quirk, it's a practice.
Not a replacement.
I'm not saying to toss your keyboard.
Sometimes you need to sit and do a massive brain dump or a messy download. I like to think of the synergasm (synergistic orgasm lol) between typing and handwriting like a boomerang.
Typing gets it all out.
The overwhelm, the 1,000 ideas, the ton of insights you've gathered over your lifetime, it gets thrown out like a boomerang.
Handwriting brings it in.
Then using the hand, you bring it all back, clearer, full of insight and higher quality.
You work out what it all means. You discover gold in the mess.
The keyboard is for volume, the hand is for depth.
It's not about abandoning speed, it's about integrating depth.
Even one handwritten page a day, where thinking and feeling find each other, changes how you relate to your own mind.
Art for art's sake.
Don't handwrite because you should handwrite.
Handwrite because the act itself is the point.
Handwriting because you should, frames it as an obligation.
Handwrite because the act of moving your hand, like sculpting or painting with intention, fires the imagination. Your mind and feeling work together.The art is in the doing.
When you handwrite for art's sake, not for results or approval or productivity, that's when the real stuff comes out.
Try it tomorrow morning.
A pen, a page, and your phone in another room.
When your mind is running before your feet hit the floor, don't reach for the notes app.
Reach for the page and don't try to write something good.
Don't capture ideas.
Just move your hand and let the thinking and feeling find each other at the speed of your pen.
See what happens.
The wandering is the work.
