Writing for wellbeing

In the early 1980s, Professor James Pennebaker based in the University of Austin, Texas, began to run a simple experiment with students at the university. He asked them to write about their deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience of their lives for twenty minutes on three or four consecutive days.

What he found over the course of the following months was surprising. While the students often found such writing difficult and upsetting initially and reported that they tended to dream and think about their writing a lot, in the long term it had a profound effect on their physical and mental wellbeing. Students who had participated in the experiment had fewer colds and flus in the months following the experiment and visited the college doctor less than those in a control group who had simply written about their college life.

In the years since that first experiment other researchers have found that writing about positive experiences in our lives can also have just as much of a good effect on mental and physical wellbeing. Studies have shown reduced levels of depression and improved psychological wellbeing. In fact a recent experiment showed that the wounds of those who wrote about their worries prior to an elective dermatological surgery healed faster than those of a control group.

So, why is writing good for you? By writing about our experiences we manage to integrate the pain and loss into our life story in a way that makes sense to us. The people who gained most from Pennebaker’s experiment were the people who by the third or fourth day of writing had already voiced their anger and sadness and upset and had then moved on to looking at what they had learned from the experience. They had gained insight and used words like ‘I now see that…’

The way a person interprets the events in his or her life and links them together is what forms the plot of the story of their life. These stories become the road maps of our lives, sending us in a specific direction. Think about the stories you tell other people in which you feature as the main character and ask yourself the following questions about these stories:

• In what ways are you portrayed either by yourself or by other people?
• Are you a hero? Someone who ‘saved the day’?
• Is there a victim in the story and, if so, are you it?
• Are the stories told about you usually funny?
• Are you in charge? A leader?
• Who is to blame in the story? Who is the fall guy?
• Do you fail or succeed?
• Are you lost in the story, not knowing what to do next?

Our story often holds us back. Writing allows us express past hurts and loss so we can move forward. Writing helps gain insight into why we behaved the way we did and to develop the best version of that story.

For the past ten years I have facilitated many writing for wellbeing groups in different settings. I have worked in cancer support centres, family centres and arts centres. As a psychologist and writer I am fascinated by the profound effects that writing and rewriting our story can have on our lives. It is after all through the story of our own life that we define who we are, for good or bad.

So what is writing for wellbeing like? It’s an enjoyable and often exhilarating experience using metaphor and imagery. So, for example, the standard question ‘how do you feel today?’ becomes

‘If you were an animal what kind of animal would you be today?’

‘If you were weather what kind of weather would you be today?’

In a writing group we use objects like stones and shells to throw light on thoughts, feelings and experiences.

A key aspect of such writing is learning to shake up our own version of events. We tend to get stuck in our own version of things, seeing everything from our side. So we get stuck in anger and blame. Changing perspective and writing from other viewpoints helps us to become a lot more flexible in the way we think about our life and to see that there isn’t only one version of our story. This is really central to such writing, the ability to widen the lense of our experience, to loosen up our fixed ideas as to who we are and even more, who we can become.

Writing for wellbeing does not depend on good writing skills. In fact it is very often the people who had very negative experiences with writing at school who really blossom when encouraged to write in this way using poetry, metaphor and fairy tales as ways to fire the imagination.

The wonderful thing about writing is that it’s free, it can be done anytime, anywhere. For the price of a pen and notebook you can begin. As a tool to enhance mental and physical wellbeing you couldn’t ask for more!