I try not to evangelise because I think it's too easy to blow your evangelism budget and cause people to discount you altogether, and also because lives are complicated and advice needs to be contextualised, and what works for me may not work for you.

That being said...

You should start a daily writing practice.

You would benefit from it far more than you think you would, and it is much more viable than you think it is.

My recommended starting practice (which is not the evangelical bit - this may or may not work for you) is:

Start a blog called "notebook" or similar. Use a pseudonym if you're shy.

Pick a favourite book. Ideally a longish one you've read before. Fiction is fine.

Every day, pick a random page in the book, copy out a passage from that page, copy it out onto your blog, and write something short on your blog inspired by it. Even just a single sentence is fine. If you're inspired to write more, do, but the success criterion is one sentence.

On days where you want to write something else, do that instead. If you want to change books, do that if you feel like.

The point is not to stick religiously to any single writing practice. The point of the practice is to ensure that you can always write something, every day.

Having the daily writing practice is the important part - even the baseline will be life improving, and repeatedly returning to the practice will give you a platform to experiment within.

The important part of this suggested practice is to lower the baseline difficulty of the writing practice so that you absolutely definitely 100% can succeed on a daily basis without pushing yourself. Then do that every day. Success is writing, everything else is a bonus.

Also, you will occasionally miss a day anyway. Life will happen, you'll forget, you'll have a bad mental or physical health day, whatever. That's fine. Don't beat yourself up over it.

If you're missing a *lot* of days something has gone wrong and you should figure out what that is (still don't beat yourself up about it! It's a practical problem, not a moral failing. Solve it, don't stress about it), but the occasional day is no big deal.

Also if you absolutely can't bring yourself to do this in public, even under a pseudonym, then doing it in private in a Google doc is fine, but I think you will find that sharing your writing results in better writing and a more life-improving experience.

From a friend: "Can you give more info on why it's life improving. Other than improving writing skills?"

Improving writing skills is actually a huge deal, because it teaches you to explain yourself clearly, and being able to explain yourself clearly improves everything you do.

In particular it improves your own mental health. The ability to clearly think through and explain your own experience improves your ability to introspect about that experience.

It also teaches you skills of thinking more deeply, because it draws out your thoughts into a coherent form. You start to form connections you wouldn't otherwise have seen, and you start to build a body of work of your thoughts you've had.

The reason the book practice is particularly good is that it gives you an opportunity to experience something in a richer level of detail than you otherwise would have.

When reading an entire book you tend to skim over it because you feel you have to complete it. When you get to spend time on a single passage you discover a lot you would otherwise have missed. That reflective / observational skill is very useful to improve.

Another mental health aspect to it is that you probably have a lot of anxiety around writing, and by making it something you reliably succeed that you drain away a lot of that anxiety.

Oh, I forgot the obvious reason: It's fun, and it's enjoyable and rewarding to do intellectually stimulating fun things.

BTW another reason to do this is that the things you write will be useful and interesting for other people to read. Reading other people's daily writing is a good way to get an insight into different perspectives on the world.

I mean sometimes it'll be useful to other people because you wrote a great piece that people will find intrinsically useful and want to read and share. If you keep up your daily writing long enough that's basically guaranteed. But that's not the bar for usefulness.

Also if you're curious and aren't one of the regulars on my Twitter feed, this is the thread indexing my own daily writing practice: https://twitter.com/i/status/1229061018019651587