Writing and Health: Some Practical Advice

[Daniel E.]

Writing and Health: Some Practical Advice
by James W. Pennebaker, PhD

Writing about emotional upheavals in our lives can improve physical and mental health. Although the scientific research surrounding the value of expressive writing is still in the early phases, there are some approaches to writing that have been found to be helpful. Keep in mind that there are probably a thousand ways to write that may be beneficial to you. Think of these as rough guidelines rather than Truth. Indeed, in your own writing, experiment on your own and see what works best.

Want to try a writing experiment online? It will take about 30 minutes to do the entire thing. We are constantly trying to figure out what kind of instructions and feedback work best. To try out the study go to www.utpsyc.org/Write/. Your help and feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Getting Ready to Write
Find a time and place where you won't be disturbed. Ideally, pick a time at the end of your workday or before you go to bed.

Promise yourself that you will write for a minimum of 15 minutes a day for at least 3 or 4 consecutive days.

Once you begin writing, write continuously. Don't worry about spelling or grammar. If you run out of things to write about, just repeat what you have already written.

You can write longhand or you can type on a computer. If you are unable to write, you can also talk into a tape recorder.

You can write about the same thing on all 3-4 days of writing or you can write about something different each day. It is entirely up to you.

What to Write About

• Something that you are thinking or worrying about too much
  
• Something that you are dreaming about
• Something that you feel is affecting your life in an unhealthy way
• Something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks, or years

In our research, we generally give people the following instructions for writing:
Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it. In your writing, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved or love now, or even your career. How is this experience related to who you would like to become, who you have been in the past, or who you are now?

Many people have not had a single traumatic experience but all of us have had major conflicts or stressors in our lives and you can write about them as well. You can write about the same issue every day or a series of different issues. Whatever you choose to write about, however, it is critical that you really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts.

Warning: Many people report that after writing, they sometimes feel somewhat sad or depressed. Like seeing a sad movie, this typically goes away in a couple of hours. If you find that you are getting extremely upset about a writing topic, simply stop writing or change topics.

What to do with your Writing Samples
The writing is for you and for you only. Their purpose is for you to be completely honest with yourself. When writing, secretly plan to throw away your writing when you are finished. Whether you keep it or save it is really up to you.

Some people keep their samples and edit them. That is, they gradually change their writing from day to day. Others simply keep them and return to them over and over again to see how they have changed.

Here are some other options:
Burn them. Erase them. Shred them. Flush them. Tear them into little pieces and toss them into the ocean or let the wind take them away. Eat them (not recommended).

Some References for Writing, Journaling, or Diaries
There are some outstanding books by people who have an intuitive and practical approach to writing. Each author approaches journaling or diary writing in very different ways. Check the various books out and see what works best for you.

Adams, Kathleen (1998). The Way of the Journal: A Journal Therapy Workbook for Healing. Sidron Press.
Baldwin, Christina (1992). One to One: Self-Understanding Through Journal Writing. Evans Publisher
DeSalvo, Louise A. (2000). Writing As a Way of Healing : How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Beacon Press.
Fox, John (1997). Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making. Tarcher Press.
Goldberg, Natalie and Guest, Judith (1986). Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala Press.
Jacobs, Beth (2005). Writing for Emotional Balance. New Harbinger Publishers.
Pennebaker, James W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotion. NY: Guilford Press.
Pennebaker, J.W. (2004). Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Press.
Rainer, Tristine (1979, [2004]). The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity. Tarcher.

Related articles:
Write it down, let go, feel way better
http://forum.psychlinks.ca/resource...t-writing-it-down-helps-you-to-calm-down.html
How to Start a Healing Journal
http://forum.psychlinks.ca/resources-self-help-exercises-readings/11712-journal-writing.html
http://forum.psychlinks.ca/resource...s/3546-freeware-diary-journaling-program.html

 

[Daniel E.]

Writing to Heal: Research shows writing about emotional experiences can have tangible health benefits
by Viv? Griffith, Office of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin
March 2005

For nearly 20 years, Dr. James W. Pennebaker has been giving people an assignment: write down your deepest feelings about an emotional upheaval in your life for 15 or 20 minutes a day for four consecutive days. Many of those who followed his simple instructions have found their immune systems strengthened. Others have seen their grades improved. Sometimes entire lives have changed.

Pennebaker, a professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and author of several books, including Opening Up and Writing to Heal, is a pioneer in the study of using expressive writing as a route to healing. His research has shown that short-term focused writing can have a beneficial effect on everyone from those dealing with a terminal illness to victims of violent crime to college students facing first-year transitions.

“When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health,” Pennebaker says. “They go to the doctor less. They have changes in immune function. If they are first-year college students, their grades tend to go up. People will tell us months afterward that it’s been a very beneficial experience for them.”

In his early research Pennebaker was interested in how people who have powerful secrets are more prone to a variety of health problems. If you could find a way for people to share those secrets, would their health problems improve?

It turned out that often they would, and that it wasn’t even necessary for people to tell their secrets to someone else. The act of simply writing about those secrets, even if they destroyed the writing immediately afterward, had a positive effect on health. Further studies showed that the benefits weren’t just for those who had dramatic secrets, but could also accrue to those who were dealing with divorces, job rejections or even a difficult commute to work.

“Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives,” Pennebaker explains. “You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.”

Our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us. When a traumatic event occurs or we undergo a major life transition, our minds have to work overtime to try to process the experience. Thoughts about the event may keep us awake at night, distract us at work and even make us less connected with other people.

When we translate an experience into language we essentially make the experience graspable. Individuals may see improvements in what is called “working memory,” essentially our ability to think about more than one thing at a time. They may also find they’re better able to sleep. Their social connections may improve, partly because they have a greater ability to focus on someone besides themselves.

If writing can have such a dramatic effect on our lives, does that mean that we would all be best off keeping a daily diary? Not necessarily, Pennebaker says. While his work is not inconsistent with diary keeping, it acts more as a kind of life course correction. It allows people to step back for a moment and evaluate their lives.

“I’m not convinced that having people write every day is a good idea,” Pennebaker says. “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity.

“But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”

Pennebaker’s research is benefiting people outside of those who participate in his studies. In 2004 he published “Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma and Emotional Upheaval.” The book is aimed at a general audience and offers a primer on writing and healing and numerous exercises that anyone who is capable of putting pen to paper can undertake. People across the country are giving it a try.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based company WordPlay recently offered a workshop titled “Writing to Heal” that borrows heavily from Pennebaker’s work. The participants were not necessarily people who came to writing with an intention to publish. But they each brought a life event they hoped to work through, whether it was a childhood trauma or a recent battle with cancer. Instructor Maureen Ryan Griffin said that each of the students came away feeling the writing had made a difference in their experience.

“They left with a new sense of the power of words,” she says. “They actually got access to using language as a healing tool in a way they had never used it before. Through writing they become active creators of their life stories. They are not simply people something bad or painful has happened to.”

Pennebaker has been looking at specifically how people use language in their writings and whether certain approaches to language translate into greater benefits from writing. To do so, he and his colleagues developed a text analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Using LIWC they can look at the types of words people use in their writings. They are discovering some interesting patterns.

“People who are able to construct a story, to build some kind of narrative over the course of their writing seem to benefit more than those who don’t,” Pennebaker says. “In other words, if on the first day of writing, people’s stories are not very structured or coherent, but over the three or four days they are able to come up with a more structured story, they seem to benefit the most.”

Making a story out of a messy, complicated experience may make the experience more manageable. Linguistically, Pennebaker looks for words that are associated with more complex thinking, including certain prepositions such as “except,” “without” and “exclude” and causal words such as “cause,” “effect” and “rationale.” An increase in these types of words over the writing process suggests that the experience is becoming clearer and more narrative.

Pennebaker has also found that the ability to change perspectives during the course of writing is also a potent indicator of how well the act of writing will benefit an individual. Using LIWC, he can analyze the types of pronouns an individual uses. A shift in pronouns means a shift in perspective.

“So one day they may be talking about how they feel and how they see it,” he says, “but the next day they may talk about what’s going on with others, whether it’s their family or a perpetrator or someone else. Being able to switch back and forth is a very powerful indicator of how they progress.”

It’s not clear whether people who are able to construct narratives and change perspectives can be guided to do so in their writing, or whether doing so is simply a reflection of an emergent healing process for them. In “Writing to Heal,” however, Pennebaker offers exercises to help people experiment with both skills. After their four days of writing, individuals can analyze their own writing and try writing from different perspectives.

Griffin used Pennebaker’s exercise in changing perspectives in her class and found that it was one of the most profound things her students did.

“I was really struck by how amazed everyone was after writing about an event from more than one perspective,” she says. “It made a huge difference for them and their sense of the story to do this, and they were surprised by the power that had.”

Pennebaker is quick to point out that the act of confessing or expressing trauma has been part of healing for virtually all cultures, ranging from Native American indigenous cultures to those based on both Western and Eastern religious beliefs. He also notes that writing should be used cautiously. He doesn’t recommend trying to write about a trauma too soon after it happens and says that if a topic seems like it’s too much to handle, don’t try to tackle it before you’re ready. The effects of writing can be subtle, but sometimes they can be dramatic.

As an example, Pennebaker speaks of a young woman he worked with who had lost her husband very suddenly in an accident. The woman was praised by her colleagues in graduate school for how courageously and smoothly she had handled her husband’s death. She came to Pennebaker because she felt she needed to write about her loss. By the last day of writing she said she was transformed.

Within two months the woman had quit graduate school and moved back to her hometown. The writing experience had made her realize she was on a life path she no longer wanted and that she had been putting on a false, cheerful front with her friends.

“As a researcher, I could say, ‘Well here I have a technique that made an individual drop out of school, stop pursuing an advanced degree and return home,’” Pennebaker says. “It was a dramatic change, and it sounds like a failure. But from her perspective, it wasn’t.”

In fact, the woman felt that those four days of writing had saved her life.

Tips for Writing to Heal

• Find a time and place where you won't be disturbed
• Write continuously for at least 20 minutes
• Don't worry about spelling or grammar
• Write only for yourself
• Write about something extremely personal and important for you
• Deal only with events and situations you can handle now

 

[Daniel E.]

Trauma and the Benefits of Writing About It
by Art Markman PhD, Ulterior Motives blog
October 20, 2009

Why it helps to write about negative events.

Psychological trauma is bad for your health. The stress of abuse, violence, or the unexpected death of a loved one can cause all sorts of health problems. People suffering after these events may stop working effectively in school or at their jobs. They may lash out at friends, family, and coworkers. They may experience significant illnesses as stress depresses their immune systems.

Why does psychological trauma have these long-lasting effects?

One reason for the stress of psychological trauma is that our representations of these traumatic events are fragmented. Psychologically traumatic events are ones that have no good explanation. The sudden death of a loved one may seem senseless. Abuse you suffer is a betrayal of a sacred trust. You have painful facts with no story to bind them together.

Because these memories and events are painful, our natural tendency is to avoid thinking about them. We suppress thoughts about these negative events and hope they will go away. But, they don't.

The mind is most settled when there is coherence to our thoughts. We seek to resolve conflicting thoughts by remembering them and processing them. So, a dangerous cycle can develop with traumatic events. Because they are fragmented, there are constant reminders of them. But, because they are painful, we do not process them deeply. And so, we suffer the stress of remembering a painful situation without resolving the incoherence.

Research by my colleague Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues suggests that one of the best therapies for this kind of psychological trauma is also one of the simplest: writing. He describes this procedure in a 1997 paper in Psychological Science. People are asked to spend three consecutive days writing about one or more traumatic events. They are encouraged to really explore the thoughts and emotions surrounding the event, and to tie it to relationships with significant others. In studies of this technique, people doing this writing are compared to others who write about unemotional topics like time management.

As you might expect, writing about these emotional events was very difficult for people. They did not enjoy the experience, and they found it painful. However, the long-term effects of this writing were fascinating. If you followed the people in these studies over time, they reported fewer illnesses, they went to the doctor less often, and they suffered fewer symptoms of depression in the future. They were less likely to miss work and school, and their performance at work went up. These effects lasted for months and years after writing.

What is particularly interesting about this procedure is that it is just an effect of writing about these events. The people doing the writing do not have to believe that anyone will ever read what they wrote. So, the benefit of writing is not in disclosing this personal information to someone else. The benefit is in creating a story that links together the emotional memories. Making these traumatic events more coherent makes memories of these events less likely to be repeatedly called to mind, and so they can be laid to rest.

Art Markman, PhD is the co-author of Tools for Innovation (2009) and other books on cognitive psychology. He is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

[Daniel E.]

Journaling to identify stressors & relaxers

Keep Your Stress in Check - iVillage

Stress Journal

 

[Daniel E.]

Creating a Memoir Benefits You and Your Family

A memoir benefits you, your family and your community. Here are five distinct benefits.

www.extraordinarylives.com

Memoir Benefits?​

Here Are Five to Consider​

Do you think it's a self-centered act to write or produce a memoir? We hear that from some people, but we don't buy it. There are tremendous gifts that arise from a memoir, benefits for you personally, for your family and for our world! Consider these five:

It's an enjoyable, life-affirming process for you.​

When crafting a memoir, you re-live & reevaluate events, relationships and turning points. With perspective that can only be gained by "living forward, reflecting backwards," you reexamine your life and see just how far you have come, despite many challenges. Many find great joy in the memories and may also discover healing and peace.

Plus, it's a rewarding process to create something so tangible, so personal. You accomplish something that few in life have accomplished.

You give a gift to your family -- a meaningful, permanent legacy.​

Through your stories and memories, you offer your family a greater sense of its roots and characteristics that flow through and connect generations. Even more important, your stories paint a portrait of you and how you came to be the person you are today, giving your family a much greater understanding and appreciation of the whats and whys and hows of you.

You keep other people's stories alive, too.​

You are likely one of the last people alive with memories of your grandparents and perhaps even your parents. If you don't tell their stories, they are lost, period. We hear so often from people, "I wish I knew more about my grandfather or grandmother..." The interest is there, so it's up to you to fulfill it.

What you have considered a "normal life" is actually amazing to your family.​

You live in an interesting time, when lifestyle, technology, travel, careers, homemaking, child rearing and education are changing at lightning speed. You can give your family, especially the younger ones, a window onto how much things have changed, and to a degree, how some things haven't changed at all. Your children and grandchildren will be amazed at how foreign parts of your life seem to them.

You have valuable perspective that the world needs to hear.​

You are an eyewitness to history as it unfolds. Your life is taking place during critical, groundbreaking events and the list is amazing: the Great Depression, World War II, the race to space, the Civil Rights movement, unrest in the Middle East, and on it goes. Your memories, experiences and perspective will only be added to our collective knowledge if you choose to share and preserve them.

Whether you are exploring a memoir for yourself, your parent, grandparent, or other loved one, these five benefits hold true for all. You may find that your loved one needs to hear these benefits to help them see howthey and their family will benefit.