How Writing Can Help Your Mental Health

EXPRESSIVE WRITING

Emotional disclosure through expressive writing is one treatment which involves asking the person who has suffered hardship or trauma to express how they feel about the event through writing. It may seem simple but this technique has been found to improve emotional health and coping as well as physical health and immune system functioning (Smyth, 1998).

This also demonstrates how closely linked mental and physical health are. Arthritic patients who wrote about the emotionally negative aspects of their illness saw an improvement in their condition (Kelley et al, 1997). By taking care of our mental health we are also taking care of our physical health. I shouldn’t have to use physical benefits to persuade you that your mental health is important but in a world that favours the body over the mind when it comes to health, it appears I have no choice.

Your mind needs and deserves to be cared for just as much as your body.

When you have depression you don’t want to anything, never mind write or confront your thoughts and feelings. Addressing our suffering is painful in itself. But it is a simple and inexpensive form of emotional self-help which really does work.

WRITING WHEN SPEAKING IS A STRUGGLE

Patients who have little social contact with others or who find opportunities for expressing emotions to others are limited benefit from this process the most.

What does this tell us?

That talking about our thoughts and feelings is important. It is important so that we can properly digest them ourselves. When we talk through the problem we gain insight into our own distress, allowing our thoughts to become more organised. And if you do not have someone to talk to, or if you find it too difficult to talk about, writing acts as an alternative way to do this!

People often say that repeated exposure to something reduces its meaning and perhaps with writing we can use this to our advantage!

 “I tell myself to myself and throw the burden on my book and feel relieved."
—Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840

WRITING THROUGH (AND BECAUSE OF) THE STIGMA

This also tells us that we need to talk about mental health and mental illness in general. If we do not feel comfortable talking about our own thoughts, feelings and mental health then the problem continues to manifest. Take simple thoughts like ‘I’m useless/lonely/scared’. If you talked to somebody about this the first time you thought this then they could help you figure out why you feel this way and then you unpack your thoughts.

But if you put this negative internal dialogue on a loop or if you cover up how you feel instead of addressing it, the smallest of thoughts and feelings can grow and consume you from the inside. No matter how small the thought may seem, over time it can impact your mental health significantly. But most of the time we don’t talk about it because we don’t want someone to think we are weird or weak or because we don’t want to make them uncomfortable, even though we all have these thoughts at some point. Most of the time we don’t talk about how we feel because of mental health stigma. 

Mental health stigma isn’t just about the stigma surrounding mental illnesses, it’s the stigma surrounding mental health. Thoughts and feelings like uselessness, loneliness, purposelessness, fear, low self-esteem and anything else that compromises your happiness and mental health.

In a world with such stigma surrounding mental health, writing can become a solace and a survival technique.

THE MENTAL PURGE

I’m sure you’ve head the phrase ‘my mind is racing’. Most people have felt overcome by their own thoughts. It’s terrifying to feel attacked and betrayed by your own mind but writing can often offer some relief, transferring the thoughts from your mind to paper or a screen can help clear your mind, helping you to feel less overwhelmed.  

A mental purge can also help to ground you. When you can’t find the words to write or if addressing your thoughts is too painful writing about anything at all can still help. You may start about talking about the weather but your train of thought will eventually lead you to write about what you really need to address.

It doesn’t need to be extravagant or well written and it doesn’t even have to be shown to anyone else, when I first started to use writing as a way to sort through my thoughts I began by writing short notes on my phone. It didn’t matter if I was at home, in school or on the bus, I always had an outlet.

You may feel consumed with anxiety surrounding one particular thing and when you write it down you may start to realise that you are feeding it more fear than it needs. 

Writing down something that you are worried about may help you see how small it is because often the thing itself isn’t the problem, it’s how we think about the thing. You’re not worried about meeting someone new, you’re worried about what they will think about you. But processing this through writing can help you discover that what others think of you isn’t actually that important and it’s definitely not worth compromising your mental health.

"In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance."
—Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-1923

I know a lot of people cringe at the thought of writing about or talking about their feelings and that mind set is so dangerous because it casts a cloud of shame around something which is so important and useful when it comes to mental health. Even the biggest of problems starts off small and it’s the ignoring of that small problem which causes it to grow.

Obviously, this doesn’t work for everyone and obviously writing alone will not cure a mental illness – mental health isn’t that simple and we cannot expect the solution to be simple either.

But many people, including myself, have found writing to be extremely therapeutic whether that be from using it as a way to clear your mind, ground yourself, organise thoughts, work through traumatic and distressing experiences, or simply as a distraction.

"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”
—Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

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