“The Puzzling Way That Writing Heals the Body”

Can “expressive writing” contribute to one’s mental, even physical health?

I flagged this BBC article back in June and finally got around to reading it. Fascinating stuff:

In 1986 the psychology professor James Pennebaker discovered something extraordinary, something which would inspire a generation of researchers to conduct several hundred studies. He asked students to spend 15 minutes writing about the biggest trauma of their lives or, if they hadn’t experienced a trauma, their most difficult time.

They were told to let go and to include their deepest thoughts, even if they had never shared these thoughts before. Four days running they did the same thing. It wasn’t easy. Pennebaker told me that roughly one in 20 students would end up crying, but when asked whether they wanted to continue they always did. Meanwhile a control group spent the same number of sessions writing a description of something neutral such a tree or their dorm room.

Then he waited for six months while monitoring how often the students visited the health centre. The day he saw the results, he left the lab, walked to his friend who was waiting for him in a car and told him he’d found something big. Remarkably, the students who had written about their secret feelings had made significantly fewer trips to the doctor in the subsequent months.

Ever since, the field psychoneuroimmunology has been exploring the link between what’s now known as expressive writing, and the functioning of the immune system. The studies that followed examined the effect of expressive writing on everything from asthma and arthritis to breast cancer and migraines. In a small study conducted in Kansas, for example, it was found that women with breast cancer experienced fewer troublesome symptoms and went for fewer cancer-related appointments in the months after doing expressive writing.

I’ve always thought writing can help an individual cope with emotional and psychological issues — stress, anxiety, grief. In reflecting on it, I guess that belief is precisely that, based solely on my personal experience having been a writer of some sort since I was a teenager and began to write songs. Writing has always been an outlet for me, a place I can go to work through my thoughts and give expression to my feelings, both in journals as well as scripts and short stories. But I don’t recall reading any articles on the subject. And now this.

The remarkable thing is that expressive writing can actually benefit an individual’s physical well-being, even recuperating from an injury or, as the article details, surgery.

What does the act of committing words to paper do? Initially it was assumed this simply happened through catharsis, that people felt better because they’d let out their pent-up feelings. But then Pennebaker began looking in detail at the language people used in their writing.

He found that the types of words people used changed over the course of the four sessions. Those whose wounds healed the fastest began by using the word “I” a lot, but in later sessions moved on to saying “he” or “she” more often, suggesting they were looking at the event from other perspectives. They also used words like “because”, implying they were making sense of the events and putting them into a narrative. So Pennebaker believes that the simple act of labeling your feelings and putting them into a story is somehow affecting the immune system.

But there is a curious finding which suggests something else might be going on. Simply imagining a traumatic event and writing a story about it also makes wounds heal faster, so perhaps it’s less to do with resolving past issues and more to do with finding a way of regulating your own emotions that makes a difference.

This might be the key, how the writer evolves the way they refer to an experience or emotional state over time so that it becomes a story. It’s no longer just expressing feelings, but rather making sense of them, putting them into a narrative framework.

In our lifetimes, we see, hear, or reads tens of thousands of stories. The basics of narrative structure such as Beginning, Middle, and End, the Protagonist, Conflict, Resolution exist within our conscious self as well as our unconscious and subconscious states. We know story on a gut level. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest we, as humans, have a kind of instinct to frame experiences as stories.

When we take an experience and craft it into a coherent narrative, we provide a context for the event and our associated memories and feelings. And in that context, we can understand it in a meaningful way beyond the direct experience itself.

Author Robert Anderson wrote: “I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew, to find out what I didn’t know I felt.”

I’ll bet that is at least part of why writing has a therapeutic benefit to it. Not only to express ourselves, but to create a story and through that enter into a world of self-discovery.

How about you? Does writing help you emotionally, perhaps even physically? How important is STORY in your daily life?

For the rest of the article, go here.