Make time to tell your story
Telling stories can help you understand emotions and reduce anxiety.
Storytelling is part of human nature. “So long as there have been people, there have been stories,” Isabella Mead from The Story Museum in Oxford, England, tells The Week Junior. However, stories and storytelling aren’t just about entertainment and enjoyment. Writing and telling stories boosts mental health in all sorts of ways, and can help you understand yourself.
What is a story?
A story is a description of an event or something that happened to someone and it can be written down or told out loud. Stories are told to entertain or inform people, and they can be true (non-fiction) or made-up (fiction).
How can telling stories help improve mental health? Research shows that telling stories can improve mental health by giving the storyteller a way to share emotions and feelings rather than bottling them up. It can help with understanding difficult feelings and over time it can make you more aware of why you feel or behave a certain way.
As you concentrate on creating your story, your mind will naturally move away from everyday worries. You’ll feel calm and in control because you are in charge of the story. Storytelling can help you see the world differently, too – for example, by looking through the eyes of a character you’ve created. It will also boost your imagination, allowing you to explore new ideas and places that don’t exist in the real world. “Stories can lift us out of our current world and take us anywhere we want to go, doing anything we want to do,” says Mead.
Your story starts here
You could write a made-up story, or write something more personal. You could even combine both of those things. The most important thing is to have a go and, if you get stuck, Mead suggests doing something else for a while. “Something physical can help, such as going for a walk, doing a sport, dancing or singing. The brain works in strange ways and sometimes it’s when we are not thinking about writing a story that the ideas come to us,” she says.