Other writing resources:
Writing is a fantastic stress reliever.
One example is writing about stressful events, traumatic experiences, or expressing one’s feelings through writing. The type of writing that involves these situations is expressive writing. Expressive writing is best for people coping with trauma or unexpected life developments like disease diagnosis, layoffs, or critical accidents, which throw them off balance. It helps deal with the situation thus reducing one’s stress levels. However, expressive writing does not work for everybody. Writing reduces stress as it helps individuals process their thoughts and emotions. It helps people think critically and review a situation in a different light. Another writing example is reflective writing. Reflective writing enables people to think of a situation and evaluate it extensively. The extensive nature of reflective writing helps people discover new things about themselves and various situations. It thus becomes easier to deal with loss and other stressful situations. Writing is also therapeutic and helps individuals deal with the things they cannot disclose to other people. People who write about the things that trouble them look at those things in a different light. In most cases, such individuals find themselves working towards solving the situations that bothered them in the past. They delve into their feelings and try to figure out why they do certain things or behave in a particular way. In doing so, they tend to act differently in the future or deal with problematic situations in a better way.
Want to try writing for stress relief?
First, think about how to set yourself up for success:
- Use whichever format works best for you, whether it’s a classic journal, a cheap notebook, an online journaling program, or a blog.
- If it makes you more interested in writing, decorate or personalize your journal/notebook/blog.
- Set a goal to write for a certain amount of time each day.
- Decide ahead of time when and/or where you will write each day.
- Write down what makes you want to write in the first place – this could be your first entry in your journal.
Next, follow the five steps to WRITE:
- W – What do you want to write about? Name it.
- R – Review or reflect on it – close your eyes, take deep breaths, and focus.
- I – Investigate your thoughts and feelings. Just start writing and keep writing.
- T – Time yourself – write for 5 to 15 minutes straight.
- E – Exit “smart” by re-reading what you’ve written and reflecting on it with one or two sentences (Adams, n.d.)
Finally, keep the following in mind while you are journaling:
- It’s okay to write only a few words, and it’s okay to write several pages – just write at your own pace.
- Don’t worry so much about what to write about, just focus on taking the time to write and giving it your full attention.
- Don’t worry about how well you write – the important thing is to write down what makes sense to you and what comes naturally to you.
- Write as if no one else will read it – this will help you avoid “putting on a show” rather than writing authentically (Howes, 2011).
Writing Prompts
The following ideas and writing prompts are great ways to continue your journaling practice or to get yourself “unstuck” if you’re not sure what to write about next. For instance, you could try the five writing exercises from this blog:
- Writing a letter to yourself
- Writing letters to others
- Writing a poem
- Free writing (just writing everything that comes to mind)
- Mind mapping (drawing mind maps with your main problem in the middle and branches representing different aspects of your problem)
If those ideas don’t get your juices flowing, try these prompts:
- Journaling with Photographs – choose a personal photo and use your journal to answer questions like “What do you feel when you look at these photos?” or “What do you want to say to the people, places, or things in these photos?”
- Timed Journal Entries – decide on a topic and set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes to write continuously.
- Sentence Stems – these prompts are the beginnings of a sentence that encourage meaningful writing, such as “The thing I am most worried about is…”, “I have trouble sleeping when…”, and “My happiest memory is…”
- List of 100 – these ideas encourage the writer to create lists of 100 based on prompts like “100 Things That Make Me Sad,” “100 Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning,” and “100 Things I Love” (Farooqui, 2016).
Psychologist Margarita Tartakovsky provides a handy list of 30 prompts (2014). Some of these include:
- My favorite way to spend the day is…
- If I could talk to my teenage self, the one thing I would say is…
- Make a list of 30 things that make you smile.
- The words I’d like to live by are…
- I really wish others knew this about me…
- What always brings tears to your eyes?
- Using 10 words, describe yourself.
- Write a list of questions to which you urgently need answers
