Words have the power to inspire and motivate, but did you know that writing can heal? Writing has always seemed a bit magical to me, like baking a cake without knowing what the ingredients are until afterwards. When I learned that writing could also help me deal with life, I wanted to know more. The definition of therapy is loosely “something that makes you feel better”. The concept of writing as therapy has gained momentum since the late 1980s, when studies first began to show the power of writing to support healing.

If you’re feeling stressed or anxious about a recent or upcoming event, grab a pen, take five minutes and write down your feelings, worries and concerns. According to James W Pennebaker, Professor and Chair of Psychology at University of Texas and author of the 1997 book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, doing so can help your mood and physical health. Writing, like many forms of talk-based therapies, helps you explore emotions, is a tool for self reflection, offers clarity and perspective and has been shown to improve physical as well as mental health.

Similar to the way art therapists assess your state of mind based on the nature of images you select, therapeutic writing is a tool psychotherapists and counsellors use to help determine the truth of what’s really going on inside you. Research continues to show what authors throughout history have known - that writing is a technique to help you discover your inner self. As award-winning author Joan Didion, says “I write to find out what I think”.

When you think, worry or ruminate, it is easy to get caught in a muddle of possibilities or potentials as your mind twists and turns from one thing to the next. This mental busyness is sometimes referred to as ‘monkey mind’ and is a prime contributor to anxiety and stress. When you take your thoughts, worries or mulling over to the page you create healthy distance between who you are and what’s on your mind. With your thoughts on the page you can clearly see that you are not your worries. This kind of distance - between you and a perceived problem - is known to be therapeutic. Distance inspires objectivity, helping you reframe your concerns.

In January 2011, researchers from the University of Chicago published a report in Science showing that students who take 10 minutes to write about their thoughts and feelings perform better on standardised tests than those who don’t. Part of their premise involves the idea that “worrying competes for computing power in the brain’s ‘working’ or short term memory”. They go on to discuss how when working memory is focussed on worrying, information recall is impaired.

Simply put, rather than worry about a problem, write about it! Writer and artist Julia Cameron, of The Artist’s Way fame, says, “Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change”.

Journal writing

While particular forms of writing are known to be especially healing, the simple act of journal writing can create positive change. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R Covey says, “Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness and context”. Teacher Erin Gruwell tells the story of how she used journal writing to help turn around the lives of 150 challenging students and those around them in her 1997 book, The Freedom Writer’s Diary. On her website she writes, “Journals provided a safe place (for students) to become passionate writers communicating their own histories, their own insights. As they began to write down their thoughts and feelings, motivation blossomed. Suddenly, they had a forum for self-expression, and a place where they felt valued and validated.” If journal writing can have such a radical affect on the lives of children from difficult backgrounds, imagine how it could help you enhance your life. In her 2008 book, Writing Through The Darkness: Easing Your Depression With Paper and Pen Elizabeth Schaefer suggests beginning your journey of writing to heal with journal writing.

Therapeutic writing

Research highlights the particular healing power of what’s known as “expressive”’ or “therapeutic” writing. This defines the most healing type of writing as that which is directed or focussed, especially towards an event which triggers strong emotions. Writing is most healing when you intend to write about a problem, issue or concern, discussing both the detail of the event as well as your feelings towards it.

The concept of therapeutic writing is over 20 years old. In 1992, James W. Pennebaker presented a paper on ‘Writing About Emotional Experiences As A Therapeutic Process’ at the American Psychologists Association. In this paper, he describes how “The construction of a coherent story, together with the expression of negative emotions work together in therapeutic writing”. This highlights two unique forms of writing – a narrative style, that is, telling the story of sequential events, and an emotional style – describing feelings which emerged in response to said events. Using the two together – writing about both a challenging event and the emotions it triggered - creates writing that heals. Pennebaker continues with “The increasing use of insight, causal, and associated cognitive words over several days of writing is linked to health improvement”, showing that writing about the same event for consecutive days or weeks can help create progressive healing. The level of loss or stress a particular event caused you will likely inform how long you write about it.

Part of Professor Pennebaker’s work also involves analysing the words individuals use to describe their situations. If you’re interested to see what this research says about you - and you use twitter - you may find this analytical link insightful http://www.analyzewords.com/

A few months ago I was made redundant from a long term columnist position, a decision that caught me by surprise. I wrote about this event – and the variety of feelings it triggered - in the days and weeks that followed. Each time I did, different emotions emerged, helping me gain new context on how this event – and my emotional response to it - fit into the larger context of my life. In the days immediately following the shock of being made redundant, this quote, from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating With The Dead: A Writer on Writing, resonated strongly, “Possibly then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light”.