How Writing Can Help You Heal

Quick Win

Expressing your innermost thoughts with pen and paper or a computer keyboard can help you cope with traumatic situations, a strategy known as expressive writing.

Try This Today

• Write when you’re ready. Don’t force yourself to put pen to paper immediately after a traumatic event. Let some time pass to distance yourself from the shock before you begin writing.
• Liberate your emotions. For this exercise, spelling and grammar are not important. What matters most is documenting your thoughts and letting your feelings flow. “Find a place where you won’t be disturbed, sit down and just start writing about some issue that is weighing on you,” says social scientist James Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who pioneered the study of expressive writing.
• Don’t censor yourself. Nobody else will see this writing — it’s only for you. Write about your thoughts and feelings exactly as you experience them. Perhaps you’re more angry than sad that your spouse ​died​, for example. You might be reluctant to share this thought with others, but you can reveal your feelings on the privacy of the page.
• Monitor your progress. Expressive writing works better for some people than for others, Pennebaker says. Sometimes people will feel better after one day — in that case, there’s no need to keep writing. If someone writes for three straight days and there’s no benefit, they might want to consider therapy, he suggests.

Why

Traumatic events — the sudden death of a parent, an unexpected cancer diagnosis, the loss of a job — can rock our lives. One way to cope is by writing candidly about the emotions and thoughts that emerge from these events. A structured six-week writing program led to boosted resilience and reduced depressive symptoms, perceived stress and rumination on a distressing past event, according to a study of 39 adults, average age 55, published in 2018 in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. Additionally, 35 percent of participants who likely had clinical depression when they began the intervention no longer met its diagnosis criteria at the end of the study.