Writing: a healthy outlet against anxiety

Write your anxieties away

Expressive writing is writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings without concern for spelling, grammar, or sentence construction. Recent studies have shown that this free-flowing and unfocused form of self-expression can actually help the brain focus. According to Srini Pillay, MD, "Although not everybody benefits from expressive writing, recent studies have shown that expressive writing helps anxious individuals perform better on tests. We’re not sure exactly why this is, but one leading theory is that writing about test anxiety “offloads” worrisome thoughts, thereby freeing up mental resources to concentrate on the test.

While this theory is appealing, more data was needed to substantiate it. That’s what psychology graduate student Hans S. Schroder and his colleagues set out to explore. Their study involved people who had been preoccupied by worry for a long time. The team looked for brain wave changes as a result of expressive writing to see how the writing was helping, if at all." (Source: Harvard Health Publishing)

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