Earlier this year I wrote a piece about the world of self-publishing and the new opportunities available to the average writer in ebooks, but even if you aren’t interested in writing as a career, there are a lot of reasons to put that pen to paper. Creative and expressive writing can be beneficial to both your mental and physical health.
Writing by hand, for instance, can help your brain function more efficiently, allowing you to absorb and remember more information than if you were typing those same words. Writing on a keyboard has valuable benefits as well.
The most universally acknowledged benefit of writing is that it can be incredibly cathartic and can aid in healing emotional traumas. People who write about their negative experiences are often more capable of dealing with those events in a healthy way. There have also been studies showing that writing thoughts and feelings on a blog can benefit those with emotional difficulties and a lack of peer support, despite the inevitable negativity that a blogger is bound to come across occasionally.
An Applied Psychology study found that writing can also help you sleep. Writing about your thoughts, feelings, and traumas can help you heal, but writing down what you are thankful for, or what makes you happy, can help you sleep better at night. The study showed that participants who wrote short lists of things they were grateful for before bed sleep longer, and more soundly, throughout the entire night.
In what might be the most surprising benefit of writing, a study from New Zealand found that when subjects wrote about traumatic experiences two weeks before skin biopsies, their wounds from surgery healed twice as fast as the participants who did not write about emotionally charged topics. It’s possible that this finding reflects what other studies have proven; expressive writing reduces levels of stress hormones, especially in those suffering from PTSD and other emotional instabilities or traumas. Lower stress levels allow the body to heal more quickly.
Writing can heal you, both mentally and physically. So go write. Write anything, just write something.