There are many good reasons you should make a good session of writing part of your daily routine, even if it’s just a few hundred words. You don’t have to be a pro to reap the benefits of creating the written word.

1. Remove Stress From Your Mind and Place It On Paper

Writing can be therapeutic. It can be a way to vent all the pent-up frustrations burdening your mind into a far less volatile form. You can address your anger, fear, worry and stress. Writing can serve as a form of cathartic stress relief where you finally get to say what you can’t say out loud.

2. Sweep Your Mind

A daily writing habit gives you regular time to sweep your mind for forgotten tasks and ideas that have been fermenting in the back of your head. It allows you to take the unordered thoughts floating around your head and turn them into ordered plans and actions.

3. Keep Your Writing Skills Sharp

Like any skill, the ability to communicate clearly, concisely and aesthetically degrades without practice. As a result, many people who don’t write regularly can freeze up, lost for words, on something so simple as an email to a friend.

4. Make Some Pocket Money

If you’ve got a knack for writing and just had a great dinner at a new restaurant and written about it for your daily pages, then isn’t it better to have a shot at getting that review published instead of letting the piece do absolutely nothing?

5. Turn the Noise Off

Get away from the constant low-quality input of day-to-day life. You receive and create barrages of useless distractions that don’t help you or the people you know; sitting down to write lets you get away from it all.

6. Enhance Your Communication Skills

Use daily writing to enhance your communication skills. Writing regularly can hone the skill of self-expression, something that is useful in written communications such as email, and that can translate into improved verbal communication.

7. Know What You Want

Part of the reason so many people do not get what they want in life is because they do not know what they want from it. Writing each day gives you time to think carefully and reflect on what you want to achieve the most, and develop a clearer, achievable image and plan for that result.

8. Develop Your Analytical Skills

Writing regularly develops your analytical and rational skills. Working through your problems with a piece of paper encourages you to think things through clearly.

9. Get Away from Technology

If you opt to use a pen and paper instead of a computer, you give yourself valuable time away from technology to gather your thoughts without constant, meaningless interruptions and distractions.

10. Meet Yourself All Over Again

Letting words flow out of your brain unedited can introduce you to a part of yourself you’d been censoring from yourself to cope with everyday life.