Writing: it's good for morale!

I have already dealt with this theme in another article: writing has unsuspected therapeutic virtues. The words begin to spring out, the pen slips, and here is the page which darkens!

You must have already had the desire and the pleasure of writing. We write to feel better, and therefore lighter, to evacuate our ailments, for the pleasure of inventing stories… what do I know? The reasons are so many!

Writing has incredible virtues. This allows, among other things, the detox of the mind, more than important to feel in full health!

Write to relieve pain in the body

Writing can have a real influence on physical suffering. When you take the time to write about your pain or problems, you feel better and you will not see your doctor as much. Writing reduces physical pain and fatigue. This activity has a positive effect on blood pressure and heart rate.

When you write, you focus on your emotions. This exercise of writing about pain, for example, allows you to express your thoughts, your feelings about a fact rather than telling the story of the event itself. You are then encouraged to pour whatever is on your heart onto the sheet, without paying attention to the usual constraints of writing, How to start a Wikipedia page for someone such as punctuation, spelling, grammar, or the form of the story. By practicing this way, you will feel relieved and released from a weight!

Writing is in itself a liberating act in several ways.

 

Writing to fight stress and depression

We all know that writing is good for morale. By being attentive to our emotions, managing to welcome them with kindness before writing down hard, even traumatic events in order to overcome them… This is the goal of writing!

Writing alleviates the sorrows and allows one to gain lightness and optimism. The very act of writing has many benefits for mental and physical health:

* mood improves in the long term

* the stress level drops

* the depressive symptoms subside.

15 to 20 minutes regularly are enough to make a difference in you. By writing about emotional, traumatic, or stressful events in your life, you are much less exposed to illnesses and less likely to be affected by future trauma.

 By writing, you improve the functioning of your liver, which is, according to traditional Chinese medicine, the seat of emotions. Researchers speculate that self-writing promotes a form of individual and social disinhibition. Writing makes it possible to put words on the feelings felt and thus modifies the working memory.

Writing allows you to take a step back from the stress of everyday life. But, the virtues of this practice go much further. The benefits of psychological health are undeniable. Expressive Wikipedia experts improve self-awareness and self-acceptance. It also helps to fight against ruminations, invasive negative thoughts, anxiety, and avoidance strategies.

Write to improve sleep

Worries, ruminations, dark thoughts keep you awake and prevent you from sleeping peacefully. For example, studies show that keeping a diary at night for 5 minutes before going to bed helps you fall asleep faster.

This exercise is not intended to write down what you did during the day, no, but rather to write a “to-do list” for the next day. It's the unfinished tasks that occupy the most space in your mind, much more than those that you will have completed during the day.

You can also write for 15 minutes to write down on paper why you are grateful in your life. A calmer, more focused mind slows down the flow of thoughts that prevent many people from falling asleep quickly.

 

Write to facilitate learning and creativity

When we were at school, the writing was a good way to remember our lessons. This is due to the physical act of holding the pen in our hands and practicing movements. Part of the brain is thus activated and writing becomes a priority in the list of tasks that the latter must perform.

Thus, concentration grows and promotes the faculty of learning. Writing every day or regularly forces the mind to constantly come up with new ideas. In this way, a form of a creative habit takes place and thus, ideas flourish in many aspects of life.

This can materialize in greater creativity in work, in social relationships, in experiences. The mind is more open to emit ideas and receive external creative suggestions.

 

Write to achieve your goals

Defining your goals precisely by writing them down regularly is an essential first step in achieving them. In 2015, American researcher Gail Matthews demonstrated that writing down your goals would increase your chances of success by 42%.

Gail Matthews

Write down your goals in a notebook: this is the first step to achieving them. Then you can prioritize them.

Writing daily will give you rigor, self-confidence, optimism, and motivation, and therefore, creativity. Because it's a hell of a discipline!

Writing allows you to fantasize about your future, to imagine it, and therefore, to consider it more serenely. This very powerful form of visualization has the added benefit of being able to go back to your writing and refine your goals, whenever you want.

Write to feel better

Everyone is different, so not everyone will want to write the same thing to feel better. To get started, you can start by keeping a diary. Get in the habit of allowing yourself 10, 20, or 30 minutes a day to write your journal and express your thoughts and feelings.

Writing letters also has real therapeutic power. You can write to your loved ones to keep in touch or write letters that you may not send. Nothing prevents you from writing a letter to your boss, your mother-in-law, your ex-spouse… The main thing is to write and let your feelings speak!

Writing fiction can also be beneficial. If you think you don't have enough imagination, you are wrong. Go gradually. Start by writing fiction in your favorite universe, or recounting a childhood memory. Little by little, you will manage to detach yourself to create your own universe.

 

In 2013, New Zealand researchers monitored the injury recovery of 49 healthy adults. Adults in one of the two groups created wrote down their thoughts and feelings for only 20 minutes a day during the two weeks leading up to the final check-up.

At the end of the trial,  76% of the group who wrote had fully recovered, compared to 58% for the group who had not written. The study found that writing about distressing events helped participants make sense of their experiences and helped reduce the anxiety associated with them.

Other studies on patients suffering from asthma and cancer have established that writing improves the quality of life of patients and develops in them a more positive view of events.

 

To reap the benefits of therapeutic writing, one must attempt to transcribe the deepest feelings and thoughts about a traumatic experience. It could be a bad relationship experience, an accident, an upcoming or past event. It is important not to worry about style, grammar and especially to tell yourself that no one will read this text. So we feel totally liberated.

Some people will prefer to keep this writing and come back to it later. Others will simply choose to throw away the written word to free themselves from it.

Write to improve your writing skills

Many authors admit to forcing themselves to write a minimum number of words each day to boost their productivity. Many also tried to copy great authors to be inspired by their styles. Like any activity, writing is a discipline where you can only progress if you train every day. So if you decide to write your life in words, expect it to be more and more beautiful as you develop your skills as a storyteller.

Write for yourself or for others?

For writing to be truly beneficial, it must be done in a benevolent way. The goal is to free you from a weight, not to put even more pressure on you! From this point of view, it seems pretty obvious that you should write for yourself and not for others. This is especially the case if you write very personal things.

However, some people also find it liberating to be able to share their emotions with other people. In this case, nothing prevents you from sharing your writings with people, whether they are your friends or strangers whose judgment you will not have to put up with.

Precisely, every Thursday, I propose on this blog a new writing proposal, and I publish the composed texts, almost anonymously, on Saturday of the following week. You can always try, it's free. I am sure that the pleasure of writing will eventually prevail over judgment, fear, or all the prohibitions that you impose on yourself not to take the plunge.

I'm WAITING FOR YOU! So, to your feathers!

As a conclusion

The fact of writing will improve your condition in general, to improve your well-being. Indeed, when you write, especially personal things, you manage to put words into what you are feeling.

More than that, writing allows you to externalize thoughts that might bother you or cause you pain. Dark thoughts could indeed tend to generate stress.

By taking the time to put your thoughts down in writing, you should quickly start to feel better and get back on your feet.