People in the second group may worry that their journals are too depressing because no one wants to read about stressful, doubtful, or heartbreaking moments in the past. Still, in reality, they engage in expressive writing without realizing it. This practice has been the focus of hundreds of studies over the past three decades, and those studies have found that writing about challenges positively impacts your health and well-being.
Pennebaker and Smith discuss the advantages of expressive writing and the scientific background of it in the new edition of their book, Opening Up by Writing It Down. When you falter, you can use this writing exercise to express your distress and start the healing process.
How can you develop your expressive writing skills?
The fundamental guidelines for creative writing state that you should write continuously for 20 minutes about your innermost feelings and thoughts regarding an emotional challenge in your life. Let yourself be free while exploring an event that impacted you; you might notice a connection between it and your childhood, your relationships with your parents and other loved ones, or even your professional life.
To get the most out of this exercise, set aside some quiet time to delve into yourself, and remember that the goal is to notice things about yourself and new connections between your emotions, not just to vent your feelings. Although the participants in the study wrote about secrets they are ashamed of and very painful events they experienced, such as childhood abuse and war experiences, you can write about anything that bothers you or is curing you. Pennebaker and Smith recommend the following types of expressive writing:
- Writing to solve problems: Write for 10 minutes about a personal problem, then read what you wrote to identify the main obstacles you face, then write for another 10 minutes about those obstacles and read what you wrote again; finally, write for 10 minutes to consolidate what you have learned.
- Before going to bed, write down your fears and concerns: This may help you fall asleep faster.
- Writing the word "anxiety" and linking it to other words: Write down the topics that come to mind when you read them, then write down the words or topics that come to mind when you read new words, and repeat this process to figure out what anxiety means to you.
Research suggests that writing for a short period may also be beneficial, even though the conventional advice is to write for 20 minutes every day for four days. Try writing for at least two sessions, Pennebaker and Smith advise, even if they are only 10 minutes apart, as this rest period allows your brain to process and integrate. While some people prefer to write about the same issue repeatedly, looking at it from fresh angles each time, others write about different subjects each session.
Researchers are still trying to determine who benefits from expressive writing the most regarding potential harm. Still, some preliminary data suggests that those who are least likely or inclined to express their feelings in daily life gain the most from it. According to additional research, writing expressively may not be beneficial when the trauma is still fresh or recent.
Right now, you are the best person to advise you on this. If writing makes you feel good, do it. However, expressive writing might only be appropriate for you if you feel ready or if you think that writing causes you to meditate or keeps you from making significant changes in your life.
Benefits of expressive writing
Writing about emotions like fear, sadness, or anger could be more enjoyable, which is probably why even people who keep journals regularly find it difficult to do. According to studies, expressive writing can cause temporary sadness and anxiety but has different long-term effects.
In the earliest studies on expressive writing, participants were given the choice of writing for four days straight about trauma or unimportant subjects. As a result, after six weeks of writing exercises, participants' immunity improved, their sense of meaning was stronger among expressive writers than those who wrote about uninteresting topics, and they made fewer doctor visits over the next six months. The benefits of expressive writing on health are still being investigated, but it appears to guard against the negative effects of stress and rumination.
Expressive writing might aid in job placement. In a different study, engineers who had recently lost their jobs wrote about their feelings and thoughts after being fired, and after seven months, more than half of them had found a new job. This is three times the number of study participants from the other groups who wrote about time management or said nothing, even though each group's participants had conducted roughly the same number of interviews. The researchers think the engineers' expressive writing helped them express and manage their anger. Therefore, they came across as more knowledgeable when discussing their former employer in interviews.
The health advantages of expressive writing, which may last up to four months, include improved working memory, student averages, and test scores. Expressive writing may help students adjust to new life changes when they enter university.
Expressive writing has some of the most exciting advantages for those suffering from mental health conditions or long-term illnesses. According to one study, people with depression may experience a reduction in their symptoms for up to a month after attempting this practice. Also, some research suggests that it may help those with PTSD. Additionally, expressive writing may help people with asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, muscle pain, fibromyalgia, and IBS. It also aids in lowering high blood pressure, boosting immunodeficiency patients, and enhancing the quality of life for cancer and heart attack patients.
The logic behind expressive writing's effectiveness
Pennebaker and Smith acknowledge that "we still don't have a good explanation for why expressive writing works or doesn't." However, preliminary research and feedback from dozens of study participants all point out that writing about one's experiences rather than suppressing them has a significant impact.
In his best-selling book, Getting Things Done, author David Allen makes the case that making to-do lists is essential for clearing our minds of tasks and making room for more significant thoughts. Doing this lets you concentrate on your creative ideas rather than trying to remember tasks.
According to Pennebaker and Smith, negative experiences also go through a similar process. If unpleasant memories linger in our minds, we will constantly think about them. This is because they will compel our attention in the hopes of processing and resolving it. They say that one of the causes of our obsessive thinking about upsetting events is that we frequently try to make sense of them. When we try to make sense of it through writing, our minds become more at ease, our experience becomes more like a story that we can listen to, and we can distance ourselves from what happened. This frees the mind to engage in healthy activities like getting a good night's sleep and interacting with other people.
We change our thoughts and feelings when we write about them and communicate them. Writing convinces us to organize our thoughts successively. With time, we recognize traits and patterns, develop fresh viewpoints, and come to novel realizations.
The researchers discovered an intriguing pattern following a textual analysis of expressive writing samples. In subsequent writing sessions, the most successful participants use progressively more cognitive words, such as "effect," "logic," "I understand," and "know," showing a clear progression from feeling and suffering to thinking and understanding. Even more intriguingly, those who start out using many cognitive words do not ultimately benefit. They appear unable to advance to the next stage because they are stuck in a state where they don't deeply engage with their emotions.
The authors acknowledge that sharing our thoughts and feelings with trusted individuals is usually the best action when we're struggling, but that's not always possible. Sometimes, we cannot share a secret because it does not belong to us alone or because we are afraid of the reaction of others. In these situations, writing is the second-best option because it allows us to express ourselves without being judged, reveal information without fear of repercussion, and deal with each situation individually. If your diary is filled with suffering and pain, this is nothing to be ashamed of.
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