Writing Heals the Mind and Body

Patients willing to write can change their outcomes

There is no denying that writing can heal. A 1999 University of Texas study reported that willingly writing about important personal experiences for as little as 15 minutes over the course of three days brings about improvements in mental and physical health. This was found to be true across age, gender, culture, social class, and personality type. Patients who used more positive than negative words and grew more reflective as they wrote benefited the most.

Emotional Healing 

Rita Clancy has witnessed firsthand how writing can help Holocaust survivors remember and deal with what they experienced. “It’s a way of processing things that are really troubling and festering inside,” says Clancy, the director of adult services at Jewish Family & Children’s Services in East Bay San Francisco, where she has conducted writing workshops.

For some, memoir writing puts an end to years of silence. When one member of Clancy’s writing group, Edith Heine, lived in Germany after the war, she was discouraged from talking about the Holocaust. She started writing about her experiences when she came to the United States.”No one had to listen, only the paper. It was really very healing and liberating,” Heine told the Jewish News of Northern California.

Though the act of writing about trauma has not been shown to exacerbate a disorder, studies of combat survivors suffering from PTSD who wrote about their experiences have conflicting outcomes. Time magazine cites one study that found that writing about disturbing combat experiences may improve marital satisfaction among soldiers returning home from war zones. Yet, a similar study did not find that the practice reduced PTSD symptoms in the former combatants. Putting emotions down in words did, however, improve mood and reduce levels of stress hormones  in these patients.

Physical Healing

Further research conducted at the University of Auckland in New Zealand indicates that expressing emotions about a traumatic experience in a coherent way may be important to physical health too. The 2015 study showed that the calming effect of writing can cut physical wound healing time nearly in half.

Forty-nine senior citizens, aged 64 to 97, participated in the The New Zealand study. Half were asked to write candidly for 20 minutes a day, for three days, about the most traumatic event they had experienced. The other participants wrote strictly about their plans for the next day, for the same amount of time. Though all the participants were healthy, they were considered at risk of poor healing because of their age.

Two weeks after the first day of writing, researchers took small skin biopsies on each participant, that left a wound on their arm. A week later, the wounds were photographed every three to five days, until they were completely healed. Eleven days after the biopsy, 76% of the group that had written about trauma had fully healed while only 42% of the other group had.

Time magazine also reported this type of emotionally expressive writing reduced viral load in HIV-positive patients and increased their levels of virus-fighting immune cells. The practice also improved the effectiveness of the hepatitis B vaccination by increasing antibody levels generated by the vaccine and speeding wound healing in young men.

Pen+ Paper = Brain Workout

Cursive writing stimulates the brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres. This does not happen when someone prints or types. The practical outcomes of cursive writing appear on paper, making our thinking visible and eventually more clear than when our thoughts stay jumbled, ricocheting senselessly in out heads. The more we write, the more meaning we discover.

Freelance writer Melissa Tydell says, “Exploring our emotions via writing keeps all our questions and possible answers accessible.” She goes on to explain how this gives writers “space to channel, process, and release negative emotions ” and make progress over time as they “review and rework and eventually move beyond whatever (they’re) working to process.”

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