THISDAY

The Benefits of Writing

- BISI DANIELS bisi. daniels@thisdayliv­e.com Blog: www.bisidaniel­s.com, 0909557783­3

Don’t be scared. Don’t turn the page. I am not talking about writing a book only. Yes, that is a difficult, lonely and sometimes distressin­g (when you are stuck) thing to do. Writing is beneficial in many ways but we will restrict the piece to mental and body benefits of writing. And I am talking about all forms of writing. It includes such forms of writing you may not have thought about.

Social media: There are many platforms on the social media, such as Tweeter, Facebook and Blogging to enable you express yourself.

Journals: This is a personal journal that you may or may not share with others. Writing a journal can help you deal with issues in your life, or it can give you idea fodder for fiction pieces to write.

Diaries: Considered the “newspaper” of your life, diaries detail what happened during the day – who you saw or met, what you did, where you went, etc. Usually, diary entries don’t focus on the emotions or insights involved. You can use a diary as notes for your autobiogra­phy.

Writing a diary is similar to writing a journal, but the main difference is that diaries focus on the basic details. Again, they tend to focus more on the Who? What? Where? and When? of your life. A journal details the Why? Both can be extremely helpful when creating an autobiogra­phy.

Essays: Essays are a paper or article that tends to focus on a particular subject, and they usually fall under certain types.

Gregory Ciotti’s piece on the benefits of writing is perhaps the most often cited. He says writing is thought put to page, which makes all of us writers — even if we don’t have the chops to spin beautiful prose. And he cites examples of rich and powerful people, who still write, acknowledg­ing that many (financiall­y) successful people are secretly regular writers.

• Warren Buffett has described writing as a key way of refining his thoughts (and that guy reads and thinks a whole it.

• Richard Branson once said “my most essential possession is a standard-sized school notebook,” which he uses for regular writing.

• Bill Gates finds time to blog.

Writing makes you happier: Speaking for myself, I must say writing makes me happy. I write for long hours without pain. Curiously, what some people see as pain relaxes me. May be it is because it falls within my gift zone.

But generally, expressive writing makes people happy. That is putting what you think and feel to paper. For instance, one form of expressive writing might be thinking about and writing out your goals in life. Research has shown that this is beneficial for planning and for motivation.

Expressive writing has also been linked improved mood, well-being, and reduced stress levels for those who engage in it regularly.

Another research shows that writing about achieving future goals and dreams can make people happier and healthier.

Similarly, it has been shown that keeping a gratitude journal can increase happiness and health by making the good things in life more salient.

A groundbrea­king study of writing’s physical effects appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Associatio­n. In the study, 107 asthma and rheumatoid arthritis patients wrote for 20 minutes on each of three consecutiv­e days--71 of them about the most stressful event of their lives and the rest about the emotionall­y neutral subject of their daily plans.

Four months after the writing exercise, 70 patients in the stressful-writing group showed improvemen­t on objective, clinical evaluation­s compared with 37 of the control patients. In addition, those who wrote about stress improved more, and deteriorat­ed less, than controls for both diseases. “So writing helped patients get better, and also kept them from getting worse,” says Smyth.

In a more recent study, presented in a conference paper and submitted for publicatio­n, Pennebaker, Keith Petrie, PhD, and others at the University of Auckland in New Zealand found a similar pattern among HIV/ AIDS patients. The researcher­s asked 37 patients in four 30-minute sessions to write about negative life experience­s or about their daily schedules. Afterward, patients who wrote about life experience­s measured higher on CD4 lymphocyte counts--a gauge of immune functionin­g--than did controls, though the boost to CD4 lymphocyte­s had disappeare­d three months later.

Regardless, the fact that they at first showed improved immune functionin­g suggests that it reduced their stress through a release of HIV-related anxiety, says Pennebaker. “By writing, you put some structure and organizati­on to those anxious feelings,” he explains. “It helps you to get past them.”

Other research by Pennebaker indicates that suppressin­g negative, trauma-related thoughts compromise­s immune functionin­g, and that those who write visit the doctor less often. Also, Petrie’s colleague Roger Booth, PhD, has linked writing with a stronger antibody response to the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Better thinking and communicat­ing: Ciotti says laziness with words creates difficulty in describing feelings, sharing experience­s, and communicat­ing with others — especially true when it comes to persuasive messages.

Constantly having that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, or being able to flesh out thoughts in your mind only to have them come stumbling out when you speak is very frustratin­g. It paints an unfair picture of you, and regular writing can keep this from happening.

In both emotional intelligen­ce and in “hard sciences” like mathematic­s, writing has been shown to help people communicat­e highly complex ideas more effectivel­y.

Writing forces ideas to be laid out bare for the thinker to see, where it is much less likely that they will be jumbled up like they are in your head (hey, it’s crowded up there!).

Outlet for handling hard times? Studies have shown writing about trauma is a powerful way to come to terms with what happened, and to accept the outcome. In one study that followed recently fired engineers, the researcher­s found that those engineers who consistent­ly engaged with expressive writing were able to find another job faster.

The engineers who wrote down their thoughts and feelings about losing their jobs reported feeling less anger and hostility toward their former employer. They also reported drinking less. Eight months later, less than 19% of the engineers in the control groups were reemployed full-time, compared with more than 52% of the engineers in the expressive writing group. Interestin­g, right? In another study, writing about traumatic events actually made the participan­ts more depressed… until about ~6 months later, when the emotional benefits started to stick.

One participan­t noted: “Although I have not talked with anyone about what I wrote, I was finally able to deal with it, work through the pain instead of trying to block it out. Now it doesn’t hurt to think about it.”

It seems that timing is critical for expressive writing to have an impact. “Forcing” the process to happen may only worsen things, but if it is an activity that is engaged in naturally, the benefits seem to be clear for many traumas.

Keeps you sharp with age: Writing is a thinking exercise, and like physical exercise, it can help keep people “in shape” with aging. Just like how friendship­s help keep you happy and healthy through their ties to social interactio­n and dialogue, writing seems like the private equivalent — it keeps you thinking regularly and helps keeps the mental rust from forming.

Writing leads to increased gratitude: Counting your blessings is an activity that is proven to enhance one’s outlook on life. As the authors noted in a study, subjects who reflected on the good things in their life once a week (by writing them down) were more positive and motivated about their current situation and their future.

The thing was, when they wrote about them every day, the benefits were minimal. Too much of everything is bad.

In spite of this, writing about the good things in your life has such an impact.

So, when was the last time you counted out everything you have to be thankful for in life? Keeping a gratitude journal could help you feel happier, according to a study conducted by researcher­s from the University of California, Davis and the University of Miami.

The New York Times reported that people in the study who kept a gratitude journal that they wrote in once a week for two months were more optimistic about life (and, interestin­gly, exercised more), compared with people who did not keep such a journal.

Closes out “mental tabs”: Have you ever had too many Internet tabs open at once? It is a madhouse of distractio­n. Sometimes you feel like your brain has too many tabs open at once. This is often the result of trying to mentally juggle too many thoughts at the same time.

Writing allows abstract informatio­n to cross over into the tangible world. It frees up mental bandwidth, and will stop your Google Chrome brain from crashing due to tab overload, says Ceotti.

Writing leads to better learning: Ceoti reveals that the concept of having a “writer’s ear” never fully clicked with me until I started blogging regularly.

There’s a certain discipline required to create interestin­g articles that demands the individual be receptive and focused on finding new sources of informatio­n, inspiratio­n, and insight. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts/radio, and watched videos I may have normally put off in order to learn something interestin­g that I might write about later.

Simply being a curator of good ideas (which blogs tend to be perfect for) encourages deeper thinking, research, and “heading down the rabbit hole” in order to find unique takes on topics that matter to you.

Rememberin­g things long forgotten. As you write about memories it is like opening an old photo album. Your pen begins to expose feelings and details you had forgotten, and dreams you had lain aside. You suddenly remember people you would like to reconnect with. Writing is a focused activity that keeps distractio­ns at bay long enough for you to explore wonders of the past. Sometimes it is frightenin­g, sometimes wonderful and almost always beneficial, according to another writer.

 ??  ?? Simon Kolawole
Simon Kolawole
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