Is Writing Your Feelings the Easiest Way to Battle Stress?
Whether its job or illness, fight with your loved one or a financial crisis – we all feel stressed sometimes. Popping up a pill to fight your stress or getting indulged in alcohol and smoke may not be a long term solution to help fight your stress. While discussing your problems with someone dear to you can help, that’s not always possible either! Have you ever thought of penning down your feelings to relieve your stress and bring clarity in your thoughts? Well! Recent studies have suggested that writing about your positive emotions may help reduce stress and anxiety, while on the other hand, writing your negative thoughts may get that burden off your chest!
How Writing Helps You Battle Your Stress?
There are multiple mechanisms wherein penning down your thoughts can help you. Some of them are mentioned below:
Overcome emotional inhibition – One of the ways to deal with any overwhelming emotions like stress, depression or reduce stress and anxiety is to find a healthy way to express yourself. People who have overcome a traumatic injury might learn to move beyond the stressful experience once they expressed their emotions about it. Writing may help give meaning to the traumatic experience and makes you feel relieved.
Writing helps you organize your thoughts- Writing enables people to focus on other things instead of thinking about stressful situations.For example: Organizing an event brings unnecessary expenses for some people, which may cause stress. Sorting it out by writing and making a prior plan can help you organize things and your expenses.
Helps manage stress- Effective journaling can help you clear your head. It is an incredible stress management tool that lessens the impact of physical stressors on your health. It helps develop important connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and even reduce stress and anxiety the effects of mental illness! Studies have found that writing about your stressful experiences can help you manage them in a healthy way. Also, 20 minutes of writing every day have shown to improve liver function, boosts immunity, and heart function.
Writing helps track your triggers and symptoms: People might be allergic to various things, like pollen grains, gluten, milk protein etc. One of the best ways to track these allergy-causing agents is to make a list. This cannot only help you avoid those triggering agents but also help your doctor and the people around you to take extra care of you.
Helps reach your goals early – Have you noticed ticking dates on a calendar and working to complete your tasks exactly on those dates. Similarly, writing your goals and dreams not only forces you to get clear on what, exactly, it is that you want to accomplish, but also helps to motivate you to complete the tasks in order to achieve your goals.
Boost your mood– Just like writing an exam paper and completing it in our own words makes us feel good. Penning down your feelings may also help you enhance your mood. Journaling cannot only improve your mood but also provides you with a greater sense of overall emotional well-being and happiness.
Writing makes you self -aware – Writing your feelings can help detect sneaky, unhealthy patterns in your thoughts and behaviours. You may even end up laughing at your own thoughts.
Writing makes you a good writer – “Practice makes a man perfect’. It’s your thoughts you put onto a paper and sometimes to put those words into meaning you may require assistance from google or a dictionary. Also, writing on a continuous basis makes you aware of a lot of things. For example, referential writing is a piece of writing where you take information from other sources like textbooks, encyclopedias, journals, research papers, newspapers and interviews. Referential writing can enhance your knowledge, improve your working memory and helps enhance your writing skills
Expressive writing improves your quality of life: Whether, you are suffering from cancer, depression, stress arthritis or other disorders, Just like talking to a support group about your symptoms, improves your quality of life. Expressive writing also can also help the same way. Expressing your inner feelings and confronting them can make your mind clear, and help you set goals and objectives on how to overcome it.
Penning down your thoughts can help you feel light, stress-free, and also provides you with the strength to fight depression. It improves your mental health by helping you gain control of your emotions.