Expressive Writing can Boost Mental Health!

Author: Hope Evans

Expressive writing is writing about expressing emotions, thoughts, and moods. It allows individuals to express their deepest feelings and thoughts about an emotional or mental challenge. Expressive writing can behave like a story but be turbulent and unpredictable since spelling, punctuation, and other writing conventions are unimportant. Expressive writing allows individuals to let go and explore what is affecting them. 

There is a direct link between expressive writing and wellness, considering you are writing about how you feel about an event more so than the event that is happening or has happened. Dr. James Pennebaker was the first to discover the connection between expressive writing and wellness at the Chari of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin. He developed an expressing writing prompt to assist with discovering the connections between health and expressing writing. These prompt and subsequent studies are often discussed and referred to as the Pennebaker Paradigm, which has been shown to improve individuals' distress to stressful events. 

Expressive writing can help people cope with emotions from a breakup, moving cities, traumatic events, diagnosis of a severe illness, grief, loss, and those struggling with ongoing or critical mental health challenges, such as PTSD or depression. There are plenty of famous writers who have been known to experience depression. Some of those are James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and J.K. Rowling.

Avoiding, inhibiting, or obsessively ruminating about unpleasant or psychologically upsetting experiences and emotions or suppressing your thoughts makes your body tense, your mood negative, yields no answers, impairs cognition, and can lead to mental health issues. By actively confronting these feelings and events through writing, people feel better, gain perspective about the experience, and construct a coherent narrative of what occurred, allowing them to heal. 

Expressive writing has been found to:

1. Boost mood/affect;

2. Enhance well-being;

3. Reduce symptoms of depression and stress levels;

4. Reduce intrusion and avoidance symptoms post-trauma;

5. Improve working memory; and

6. Lower blood pressure and improve lung and liver functioning.

If you would like to try expressive writing, some tips to get you started are:

1. Find a place where you will be comfortable and won’t be disturbed.

2. Choose a timeframe you will write continuously for, such as 15 minutes.

3. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or punctuation.

4. Write about something personal and important to you that you can handle now; don’t write about trauma too soon after it has happened if it feels overwhelming.

5. Include your feelings and emotions in your writing.

6. Don’t censor yourself.

7. If you like music, put on a playlist to help with the writing process.

8. In the end, re-read your writing and reflect on it to see if anything surprising or unexpected pops out at you.

While expressive writing is a free, simple, and readily available way to help care for your mental health, there are other medically proven ways to manage mental health, such as life coaching and therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy. If you need assistance to help maintain your mental health, contact us for more information on our life coaching program or other qualified professionals for support.

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Diserio Consulting is a professional service firm that works with individuals and organizations, assisting them in gleaning insight into behavior. We provide services in life coaching, criminal investigations, management support, insider threat, victim advocacy, and training.