Writing Is Good For Us (Literally)

This February, we are celebrating what we love about writing. This is the second of two planned posts celebrating the written word—even though it’s March, we still love writing 🙂

Writing is often described as a solitary activity, and one that requires a lot of work. And while we sometimes think of the ways in which we personally appreciate writing, writing has beneficial effects that go well beyond the personal and solitary.

Research has found writing benefits the brain, our interpersonal skills, our physical
and emotional health, as well as our job prospects and our community life.

Writing is good for your brain

Writing improves memory. This is true both for mundane, list-writing recall, as well as longer-lasting effects on our working memories. Lists are good—and focused writing on a topic of our interest is even better. We’ve got scientific backing for the writing habit!

Reflective writing, in particular, helps us develop critical thinking and reasoning skills, which can help us in school, at work, and whether you are writing nonfiction or a complex fictional narrative.

Writing is good for your body

A number of studies have found that journaling, specifically—reflective writing, sometimes about dark or traumatic experiences—boosts the immune system. During flu season especially, this is valuable information.

Writing has also been shown to reduce blood pressure, improve lung function, and is associated with better athletic performance (via goal-setting and reflection). Interestingly, those who engage in writing specifically focusing on gratitude were more physically active and reported fewer physical ailments than others who wrote about more neutral or negative topics. How’s that for an activity that’s typically seen as desk-bound and sedentary?

Writing is good for our emotional life & the people around us

In the past several decades, two dozen and more experiments have linked reading to better social skills and empathy. While some studies and reports have made hay out of an apparent advantage in the fiction realm, the results do show that the ability to think our way into the minds of people who are not us is the crux of the matter—and well-written nonfiction can achieve this also.

Writing about personal traumatic experiences, meanwhile, has been shown to reduce stress levels, stress-related visits to the doctor, and improve moods. So, if we are not ready to be grateful, we still can receive physical and emotional benefit.

The sneaky advantage of all of these immediate personal benefits is that as we feel better, we help those around us to feel better, too.

Writing helps us problem-solve and reach our goals

Our enhanced critical thinking, focus, and the introspection that writing fosters probably play a big role here. Not to mention that writing sometimes requires research, which can help us figure out how to address problems, real or in our writing universes.

We also achieve more concrete goals (back to list-writing, again), and overcome our losses better, when we write about them. This pertains to finding our next (better) job as well as big bucket-list items….writing a book, perchance?

The bottom line

Writing is good for us in ways both obvious and subtle, and despite the idea that it’s solitary and sedentary, can also lead to a better community and better physical health. Those are excellent benefits, in my opinion.

Resources:
Calch, Alice. “How Writing Influences the Brain.” FinerMinds. Accessed February 27, 2018.

Gentry, Baihley. “11 Reasons Writing is Good for Your Health.” Writer’s Digest. February 10, 2017.

Kaplan, Sarah. “Does reading fiction make you a better person?” Washington Post. July 22, 2016.

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