I'm sending this after the fourth of July holidays in the States...

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Chapter 1 of the Linking Your Thinking book is going to be the hardest chapter.

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I don't like non-fiction books that just point to study about study and stat after stat. Barf! But I know research is needed. So how do I break through this and still write the book I want to write? It might sound obvious, but it felt like a great insight when it struck me...

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Tie the research to a personal story!

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It's a challenge that is finally making the research come alive.

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It also made me think about freewriting, journaling, morning pages, and interstitial journaling…all of which are a part of what I’ve been doing but none of which completely scratches the itch of what has become a powerful practice for me.

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The tentative name I’m giving it is Liminal Journaling.

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These moments might be between efforts, after conversations or interruptions, before important work, or when you notice mental fog setting in. Liminal journaling arose as a way to deal with the conditions of cognitive overload I felt while working with AI to research cognitive overload. (Yes, it's very meta.)

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Liminal journaling helps navigate between different cognitive conditions.

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It’s an effective way to offload the working memory system in my brain that incessantly clings to thoughts I don’t want to lose, and which keep parts of the brain in a persistent firing pattern that exhausts the pre-frontal cortex, which then inversely activates the amygdala, which cascades into a bunch of consequences that leave me exhausted and unable to make the most of my mind.

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Being with family, socializing with friends, and going for long walks in nature didn’t ease my cognitive overload; because none of those things addressed the root cause: too much information, too quickly—overloading my brain's working memory system that was built for just a handful of thoughts.​

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It was only when I started freewriting, which evolved into a more reflective type of journaling, that I no longer felt like Atlas trying to hold up the weight of the sky on his shoulders.

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The “heavy” things I couldn't lift became lighter again.

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I could wholeheartedly re-engage with the work that meant the most to me, the work I had been wanting to continue but felt paralyzed under the weight of it all.

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Freewriting was the breakthrough.

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And in the following days and weeks, it’s become a full-on practice I keep returning to whenever I feel the tension-type headache, the mental fatigue, or the heaviness of my current, demanding efforts. That's when I know it’s time to return to my weekly note to start writing the next liminal entry to offload my cognitive burdens.

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Want to know exactly how I freewrite?

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​Watch this!​

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If you really enjoyed this freewriting video, that's just 1 out of 22 days in our upcoming mini-cohort—Writing Original Works.

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We are running it from August 1st - 22nd. (It's the perfect summer course.)

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Enrollment opens July 18th for a few days only. Don't miss it.

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​Join the waitlist to get early access to joining Writing Original Works.​

By the way, on Friday, I'll share how accidentally foraging magic mushrooms over the holidays led to me tentatively calling this journaling practice "liminal journaling." It involved lightning, Spirited Away, and quaking aspen.

• Many of you voted for the time-blocking video so I'll make that happen.
• But I also want to do the sequel to freewriting, which is free—
• Apple TV is on a sci-fi roll.
  • ​Murderbot is fun.
  • I'm very excited for Season 3 of Foundation.
  • And now this, the original cyberpunk novel is getting its screen adaptation. Is Neuromancer the next great sci-fi experience?

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