What if the cheapest brain upgrade on earth is a notebook and fifteen minutes?

Note: Today’s newsletter is a guest post from Yrmis Barroeta, one of the most brilliant sales experts I know. Yrmis, who has grown her personal email newsletter 1-1-1 Signals to over 175,000 subscribers (not a typo!), can also help you build yours. 

She’s helping me, and her first piece of advice, “Get on Substack!” is paying off with hundreds of subscribers so far. Be sure to subscribe to her Substack for valuable updates on AI, sales & marketing, and health. 

In this newsletter, Yrmis shares why she is committed to writing her book this year.

I'm going to tell you something that sounds too small to matter. And then I'm going to tell you the part that made my jaw drop.

First the small thing: write for 15 minutes about whatever is actually bothering you. Four days in a row. That's it. No app. No subscription. No accountability buddy. No leather journal that costs $48.

Now the jaw drop: In one study, college students spent 15 minutes a day for four days, writing about the hard stuff. Those who participated visited the campus health center less often than those who didn't for the next six months. Not six days. Six months!

Immune markers moved. Pain relievers stayed in the cabinet. From four sessions of writing nobody was ever going to read.

I sat with that for a while. Four days of minimal effort, half a year of measurable effect. There is no supplement on earth with that ROI.

If the fastest way to think clearly is to write badly, I'm in.

The man behind this research is James W. Pennebaker, a professor at UT Texas Austin. He has been running variations of the same study for three decades. Other researchers keep trying to break his findings, yet the results hold.

And now, brain imaging has caught up, so we can see why writing is so healing. 

When you write about a challenging experience, your prefrontal cortex (the reasoning, decision-making, grown-up part of your brain) lights up. At the same time, your amygdala (the part that screams DANGER and floods you with cortisol) goes quiet. Putting a feeling into words on paper physically loosens its grip. Neurons rewire.

The spillover is cognitive, too. A 2019 study found that people who wrote about a stressful experience before a demanding task did better on it. Their brains weren't burning compute power on the unresolved stuff anymore. 

Same thing with anxious students who wrote about their fears before big exams. They wrote, they relaxed, they scored higher.

Most of us spend gobs of money trying to think more clearly. Apps. Coaches. Cold plunges. Mushroom coffee. Meanwhile, the cheat code has been sitting on every desk our whole lives. And it’s free.

Pen and paper.

~Yrmis Barroeta

TIP OF THE WEEK: 

Freewrite

Four days. Fifteen minutes a day. Write one private page about something you haven't quite let yourself look at because it is hard. Don't edit. Don't re-read. Don't show it to anyone. See what happens to the rest of your week and even your year.

I'm doing it alongside you. I said it was private, so I can't ask you to compare notes, but feel free to comment on my Substack!