Medical and Psychological Effects of Writing
photo/ Michael Jarmoluk via pixabay.com
Writing as a therapy has been used for years. Experts know that writing has a healing effect on our psyche and emotions. Psychology professionals all agree that journals, logs, questionnaires, and other forms of writing help patients cope with stress and traumas.
Breakthrough research has suggested that writing can also offer benefits to our physical bodies. In fact, some life-threatening diseases can be treated or prevented with writing. Not everyone strongly agrees that this is entirely true. But one has to admit that many body diseases are triggered by situations of stress, which can be alleviated with writing.
Either you are writing as a job or for pleasure, you will find that this actually has some benefits to your health. In this article we will focus on those psychological benefits you can get from writing and where to go if you need help dealing with stress.
Psychological Effects of Writing.
Making a habit out of writing can help you in many ways.
- Expressive writing can make you happy. This means to express your emotions in order to vent. It is not about ranting and spilling hatred or anything like it. Even blogging has the same therapeutic effect.
- Writing about stressful events can be depressing at the moment. Studies have suggested, however, that benefits of doing so regularly will kick in with time. Writing about such events is opposed to trying to block them out.
- Expressing emotions through writing can help emotional wounds heal faster. According to a study from New Zealand, this can also help heal physical wounds faster.
- Writing about one’s blessings makes us more grateful. This allows for a positive view of life. However, pushing it too hard might have minimum benefits. The trick here is to write regularly but not every day, for instance. This will help a person stay motivated and positive about current situation and the future.
- Research is needed to write educational content. Plus, learning is done better when it is written about. Being a curator of great content encourages a deeper thinking and is a great cognitive therapy. It is suggested here to read articles, watch educational videos, listen to podcasts, etc., in order to enrich one’s load of knowledge and more easily find topics to write about in the future.
- Organizing ideas into a whole is a great therapy. Usually, we have a lot of mental tabs open at the same time. This has the overwhelming effect of not allowing us to focus. Writing down ideas allows us to obtain this needed focus as these ideas acquire form and help free some mental space.
- Getting positive feedback for a great writing is a great stimulus and leads to further motivation to keep writing. With time, writers also learn to develop a thick skin in the face of criticism. This is how stars are born and molded.
- Writing can also help patients deal with their physical disease. A patient with cancer, for instance, can change their attitude towards the disease after expressing their ideas through writing.
Get online help writing
We have discussed how writing down one’s emotions can help heal emotional and physical wounds faster. There are also long-term benefits to writing as a habit. But you cannot spend your entire time writing about your emotions. In fact, we have seen that this could actually be counterproductive.
- 750words.com is a website that has the objective of turning writing into a habit. The premise is to write a 750-word piece every day about anything that comes to your mind. The content you produced can be without edition or censor. This frees the writer from the stress of having to edit and read again their content before publishing or sending to a client. After you submit your writing, the site has tools that translate your writing into emotions in order for you to have a good picture of your emotional status.
- Essayhelp.online is a growing service that hires writers in order for them to write essays. Writing essays for others is a good way of helping others through an organized service. If you would like to get hired, you can drop an email to [email protected].
- Writing.com offers a place for you to write your ideas and store them in one place. It provides with online portfolios, the chance to share your writing with other people (and getting positive feedback which is very therapeutic), a lot of writing tools, interacting with like-minded people, and more.
- Penzu.com is a simple application that allows you to keep a daily online journal. You can use this great tool to write about your feelings and experiences on a daily basis. The app is available to download on the App Store and on Google Play.
- Boomwriter.com is a website designed for students to practice their literacy skills. It is an interactive and fun way to assess one’s skills at writing. Students get the chance to participate in any of three projects: StoryWriter, WordWriter, and ProjectWriter. A great way to improve one’s writing and interact with other people.
We are, by nature, emotional people. Our inborn nature makes us have the need to express our feelings. Sometimes, we need these ideas for ourselves alone. We write for the sake of venting out on paper our deepest thoughts. Other times, we appreciate feedback from others in order to have honest opinions of our work. This, with the purpose of motivation. Either way, writing has benefits that add up for us not only mentally, but, as we have seen, physiologically as well.
Guest Author: Jennifer Lockman
Thank you guys for posting.
Much appreciated!