Find out How Writing Can Help Relieve Stress And Anxiety
Recent research in health psychology suggests that expressing our emotions can help us control stress and anxiety. Sorting out both positive and negative emotions leads to an improvement in mental health, allowing people to reach more easily a state of emotional balance. How does writing help with regulating these states? Read on to discover how to incorporate stress writing and anxiety writing in your routine to fight off unpleasant emotions.
How to Fight Off Stress and Anxiety
Needless to say, stress and anxiety can affect all areas of your life, from mental well-being to relationships and even physical health. According to various research studies, writing has the ability to regulate and control stress and anxiety in the following ways:
- It removes the need to visit a doctor and promotes self-therapy.
- It reduces the symptoms of ill health.
- It fights off sluggishness and apathy.
- It promotes emotional declutter and destress by letting people unburden themselves of heavy emotional load.
Expressing Your Emotions
For years it was agreed upon researchers that writing about positive experiences for just a couple of minutes every day can have a positive effect on people’s mood, improving their mental health and contributing to a more optimistic outlook on life, with fewer health complaints. These findings led researchers to believe that writing about negative emotions can also have an impact on mental health. Further studies revealed that, indeed, this is an activity that can control stress and anxiety in a way that nobody thought of before.
The Therapeutic Power of Writing
The way expressing emotions can help people is by allowing them to explore and clarify their negative thought patterns and feelings. By putting down on paper what you feel, you are forced to identify the context that those feelings arose from, their underlying causes, and the relations between them.
Since stress and anxiety make people feel like they’ve lost control and are being victims of a force larger than them, writing reorganizes your thoughts so you can clearly see that the feelings of stress and anxiety have not emerged at random, but are a response to an event from your life and thus can be fought against.
Re-learn to Write
It’s difficult to get into a state of mind where writing is seen as a weapon of self-development, not an obligation. That means that most people must re-learn to write from a personal and honest standpoint in order to benefit from the findings of these studies. For example, if you’re still in college and writing is the thing that causes you stress and anxiety, you’ll be hard-pressed to believe in its therapeutic power.
For many students, seeing a pen and paper brings back memories of late-night sessions of crafting a paper or essay for a college course. If that’s the case for you, try to separate writing from stress and anxiety factors. Find essay writing help for Australians and let a professional online essay writer take care of your stressful assignment. This way you can fall in love with writing again and discover how it can help you improve mental health.
Daily Twenty-Minute Sessions
To unleash the therapeutic power of stress writing or anxiety writing, studies suggest that it’s important to write about both positive and negative experiences, whether they relate to personal life, professional concerns, or relationships. It’s important, however, to remain honest and to write down thoughts uncensored, clarifying each fear and disillusionment or, on the contrary, dream and hope.
To this purpose, daily twenty-minute sessions can prove highly effective. You can start by jotting down one positive experience, which can include anything from laughing at a good movie or being emotionally moved by a book to having a crush or finishing a passion project.
A study that involved dozens of participants revealed that people who wrote about positive experiences for twenty minutes each day for several days showed a significant decrease in anxiety and stress levels. Four weeks after the completion of the tasks, participants still reported low levels of stress and anxiety along with fewer health complaints.
Why Emotional Writing is Important
Even though it can control stress and anxiety levels regardless of the severity of distress, emotional expression is not possible for everyone. A college student or someone who has to craft an admission essay for college will have a different relationship with writing, seeing it as the cause of stress rather than relief from stress. In such cases, it’s best to find essay help online and then learn to see writing as an intimate experience.
Although many people express a total disinterest in expressing their emotions on paper, one of the top advantages of stress writing or anxiety writing is that it’s a very simple yet effective tool of self-therapy that anyone can implement anywhere. It requires no special training and removes the need for spending money and time to visit a therapist. In fact, it’s a free technique with no risks and plenty of rewards in the short-term and the long-term.
Stress and anxiety are prevalent among people of all ages or backgrounds, but sometimes regaining control over negative emotions and eliminating damaging thought patterns is as easy as taking a piece of paper and putting down what you feel and think. With so many studies suggesting that writing can help us fight off stress and anxiety, using this tool in our day-to-day routine can significantly improve our life satisfaction.
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