A Handwritten Letter: Unexpected Benefits of a Lost Art

It takes a handwritten letter three days to go from California to New York, while NASA can have a two-way conversation with the Mars Rover 139 million miles across space in 30 minutes. Think about the last time you hand-wrote a letter. It may have been a thank you note from a wedding gift. Or maybe a birthday card. Maybe it was way back when you were a kid writing to a pen pal. Do you remember how it felt to write the letter? To sit down and think through every word, sentence, and paragraph? Erasing, rewriting, scribbling over words?

If technology has made communication so much more efficient—with everything from one-emoji texts to entire novels traveling at literally the speed of light—you’d expect that handwritten letters would go extinct. 

And yet, people are still doing it. In fact, there are whole organizations dedicated to it. A group called the Letter Writers Alliance is 15,000 members strong. Why? Are these letter writers just luddites who hate technological progress? Not really. They simply understand the psychological, emotional, and creative value of handwritten letters. Sometimes, they don’t even send the letters — just writing them is enough. Think about someone you’re disgruntled with, how you would tell him off if you could. Sitting down and writing (physically writing) a letter to this person – and never sending it – could easily be the best therapy you’ve had all week.

The Science Behind Handwriting Letters

These letter writers aren’t crazy. They simply recognized something on their own that scientific studies have only recently noticed—that writing by hand alters the way your brain processes information for the better. A study conducted at UCLA found that writing by hand triggers parts of the brain that would remain dormant when writing the same information via keyboard. 

 The researchers think that, because handwriting takes longer, it teaches the brain to slow down and think more deeply—both of which are known to help foster creativity. When the brain slows down, your mind naturally starts to explore new thoughts and ideas, triggering the creativity centers of your brain.

A paper published in the Association for Psychological Science revealed something similar—researchers discovered that the brain remembers handwritten words better than typed ones. In fact, they found that taking notes on laptops can even be detrimental to college students’ memory of the material.

Shallow vs. Deep Thinking

Other studies have also shown a link between analog media such as printed books and handwritten letters to a longer attention span. Author Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains captures this idea well. According to his research, digital media has physically altered our brain to shorten our attention span because technology allows for so many distractions. You send a text to meet up with your friend for dinner, then you check your email. Midway through that email, you get a response from your friend asking where you want to eat. You search Google and Yelp to see what’s good nearby, but then you see an ad for that vacuum you were looking at the other day on Amazon.

According to Carr, technology teaches us to think shallowly—to think very little on a topic before jumping to the next one—and it’s hurting us in more ways than we think, starting with our memory, attention span, and information overload. We’re moving too fast from one thought to the next and it’s over-stressing us mentally and emotionally (just Google FOMO, aka the “Fear of Missing Out” syndrome). 

 Handwriting Keeps Us Thoughtful

This is exactly what the folks at the Letter Writers Alliance are trying to overcome. Writing by hand (or even just reading something on physical paper) helps preserve our brain’s deep thinking ability, memory, and attention span. It teaches us to focus and think on just one thing, one topic, as opposed to jumping around from one hyperlink to another. Handwriting teaches us to communicate more thoughtfully in terms of paragraphs and pages instead of through one-line text messages and emojis.

The next time you’re sitting around with time to kill, put away the phone and try writing a letter. Quickly you’ll find your brain re-setting itself. You’re learning to slow down, breathe, and immerse yourself in the now.