Studies show that writing helps process emotions.

Troubling thoughts can circle round the mind, taking on a magnitude all their own, and leave us feeling exhausted, and helpless. Those thoughts, if they stay in the brain and don’t find an outlet, can lead to us feeling powerless and out of control.

It’s well known that talking helps. Finding someone, whether that person is a professional counsellor or a friend, to talk to, can break the vicious cycle of worrying thoughts.

What’s perhaps less well known is that writing helps too.

In the privacy of our own home we can spill out thoughts and feelings onto the page and write through our emotions.

We are, quite literally, writing it out of our system.

Writing for wellbeing

For the past six years, I’ve run creative writing workshops for people affected by cancer. I know from what delegates have told me, that writing helps.

It can help us cope with the shock of diagnosis and the gruelling effects of treatment. It can also help us make sense of our experiences long after the event.

Previously I ran similar sessions for groups of refugees, who said that writing helped them heal from traumatic experiences.

What research shows

As well as anecdotal evidence, studies have shown that therapeutic writing can boost the immune system, help prevent reoffending, ease symptoms in conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis and help people deal with trauma.

Dr James Pennebaker has measured the impacts of expressive writing on different groups over a number of decades and discovered it can boost immunity, improve mental health, aid sleep, regulate blood pressure and even reduce pain in chronic illness.

In one study, he asked four groups of students to write for 15 minutes for four consecutive nights. Three of the groups were asked to write about a traumatic event in their lives; the fourth wrote about something trivial. All the students were then tracked for the next six months and the research showed the three groups who wrote about traumatic events had better health outcomes.

From lifer to writer

Writer Erwin James is a powerful example of the ability of writing to change lives. A former prison inmate who served 20 years of a life sentence for murder, he says writing helped him turn his life around.

Jailed in 1984, he took part in a writing programme in prison which he said helped him learn how to communicate. ‘I had massive social inhibitions. I couldn’t speak or talk to people. I was always acting. I was always trying to be somebody else. I didn’t know who the hell I was.

‘What we did in the group went back to the wing with us and made us more thoughtful and more reflective. Writing does that.’

Erwin is now a successful author and journalist, having published several poignant memoirs about his time in prison and his rehabilitation.

How does expressive writing work?

One of the brain’s functions is to help us understand events in our lives.

When we’ve experienced trauma, there’s a danger that the brain can replay the same non-constructive thought patterns repeatedly, so we become stuck.

Writing helps us build a narrative to put those experiences into context and organise our thoughts.

It can also bring closure, which tells the brain its work is done and frees us up to move forward.

My own experience

I discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing first hand when I had my own cancer diagnosis back in 2010.

Off work with nothing to do except show up for hospital appointments, I started a blog. A place where I could express my emotions and work through feelings of confusion, bewilderment and shock.

The blog became an outlet that helped me through my treatment and allowed me to connect with the world at a time when I might otherwise have felt isolated.

It also made me realise there was an audience for my writing, which led to me doing an MA in Creative Writing and becoming a novelist.

Journalling: where to start

Keeping a journal can be a powerful way of tracking our emotions and gaining distance from them.

Clinical psychologist Beth Jacobs says: ‘Journals are like a checkpoint between your emotions and the world.’

Here’s a few simple exercises to get you started.

Exercise one

1. However you’re feeling right now, write about a good experience.
2. Describe how you felt, run through the senses, what could you see, hear, smell, touch etc at the time. List who was there. Try and relive the experience.
3. Now think about a difficult situation which is causing you to feel low, confused, or even overwhelmed. Describe your feelings in a similar way.
4. Return to and re-read your positive experience.

Doing this helps reinforce positive memories and reframe negative ones. It also reminds us that we have a range of responses available to any given situation.

Exercise two

1. Pick an issue that is causing you difficult emotions
2. Choose three people, a friend, someone you see as being hugely confident and someone who makes you feel uncomfortable
3. Tackle the issue from each of these three people’s point of view, as if it was happening to them.

This sort of activity helps us distance ourselves from our feelings and acknowledge there is more than one way of reacting to and approaching a problem.

Exercise three

1. Pick an emotion – eg happiness, sadness, anger, fear, joy etc.
2. If that emotion was a colour, what would it be?
3. If it was an object, what would it be?
4. What sort of landscape would it be?
5. If it was music, what would it sound like?
6. If it was weather, what would it be?

Naming emotions and describing them in different ways can help us recognise, then process them.

For more journalling exercises, I can recommend Beth Jacobs excellent workbook Writing for Emotional Balance: A Guided Journal to Help You Manage Overwhelming Emotions.

I will be running taster sessions on Writing for Wellbeing at Newark Secret Garden studios from December. Find out more here.