Keeping a journal isn’t just about recording the events of your day. It’s as much or more about telling your subconscious that those events are worth remembering. And putting pen on paper makes a difference.

Research indicates that writing something down on paper imparts the importance of its contents to our minds in a way that simply telling yourself or even typing it does not. One hypothesis holds that our subconscious sees the extra effort required to do so and interprets it as a signal of its value, given a heuristic of associating effort with reward. It’s a brain quirk we can exploit for our own well-being.

What could you write down with a pen (or pencil or marker) that you don’t write down now? What’s worth writing down even after typing it out elsewhere? What could you start writing from scratch?