Putting Pen to Paper Helps Manage Stress

Sept. 28, 2005 — -- Some of the scars left by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will still be around long after ravaged homes are rebuilt and lives are put back together again. These are the scars that are deep inside the victims – the stress and the trauma that, for some, will linger on for years.

How do you deal with the loss of so much, so quickly? One answer, according to psychologists, is to write about it.

"They should keep a journal, and be very explicit about their thoughts," says psychologist Louise Sundararajan of the Rochester Psychiatric Center in New York.

Sundararajan says scientists have known of the therapeutic benefits of expressive writing for decades, but her latest research shows that it's not just what you write that matters — it's partly how you say it.

"Spill out your guts," she says, and you could be on the road to recovery.

Volumes of research show it works, she adds, because writing forces the brain to process its thoughts.

You can have fears and worries lurking in the back of your brain that you never really deal with. But if you write about those thoughts and fears and worries, you have to think about them – mentally process them – as you write.

"Writing is processing," she says.

Processing is a popular word among psychologists, because some of our problems are caused by the fact that we don't always process our feelings and thoughts. Sometimes we just let them lie there, festering like an open sore.

Writing is a successful therapy, she says, because it addresses both components of mental processing.

"One component is when you write, you spell things out. You say how much you hate it, or love it, and you use all the feeling words you can think of," Sundararajan says.

"But there's another kind of processing, and the two have to go hand in hand. You restructure the whole thing. You take a step back, you look at it, you reflect on the whole thing. That's very important. That's a psychological distance you have to keep.

"You need to do both."