Mental Health | Advice | Anxiety

Two Ways Writing Can Help with Your Anxiety

Writing as a catalyst for change

First things first: the importance of writing

From an early age, we write. It is one of the first tools we are given in elementary school. We learn the letters, we draw them, step by step, towards the act of writing, closely linked to reading, two sides of the same coin.

Coin, yes. Because the ability to understand a text, as well as to produce it, is the greatest wealth of the human being, whose value is incalculable. And it will be even more incalculable today, in the information age.

But the value of writing is not measured only by information. It is and will always be important in a perspective of self-recognition, of discovering the map of our interior, of opening the hidden chest of our greatest treasures and dangers.

Writing is, very clearly, an excellent way to combat disturbances of the mind and spirit, such as, for example, anxiety.

Not from a clinical point of view — at least I don’t dare say that, although I don’t doubt that it can indeed have that impact — but from an informal point of view, as a support, a helping mechanism.

So, let’s dive in. Here are two ways writing can help you combat your anxiety.

#1 Creating distance between you and your thoughts

One of the most fundamental characteristics of anxiety is the torrent of thoughts that plague us.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a pressure situation like an academic exam.

We look at the blank sheet of paper, the questions seem to scream at us in the stifling silence of a crowded room.

We hear the ticking of the clock, even though the clock does not exist.

We imagine all this scenery will block us.

We will not solve the questions.

We will forget everything we ever knew about the topic.

This swarm of thoughts makes it impossible to focus on one, to grasp it and, by deconstructing it, make it disappear. We feel like silly cockroaches trying to grab hold of them all, as if they had a life of their own and we had slippery hands.

This is where writing comes in. It allows us, by putting a thought down on paper, to be its owner and lord. It is we who are giving it form through the pen, we who personify it on paper.

And, in this distance that originates between creator and work, between thinker and thought, we gain the necessary distance to understand it. We look at him in his smallness and rationality returns to us.

Writing proving itself as a weapon to know and master ourselves better.

#2 Writing fiction to engage our problem solving capacity

However, it can take us even further. It can lead us to draw the trail to the solution for our problems. It becomes an even more powerful weapon when it is born and grows in the paths of fiction.

Let’s think of a fiction author presenting his story, chapter by chapter, on a social network or on a blog. We, avid readers, follow the adventures of his character.

In one chapter, the author decides to lock his character in a bunker with no way out, dependent on someone’s help, although no one knows his unfortunate fate. We are left anxious to know what clever strategy the author will use to free the character we have learned to cherish.

Due to a great misfortune, the author dies before he can publish the chapter that unravels the character’s solution.

And we feel like him, trapped. We wish to know what will happen to him. Will he die alone? Will he be able to save himself?

We can’t stand the situation and we decide to think of a solution for the character. We invent a logical and rational way — we want stories to be believable — and we manage, in our minds, to save this character.

Perhaps we even dedicate ourselves to write the missing chapter.

This is precisely what writing allows us to do, if we go for fiction or something semi-fictional. Transporting our anguish and our problems into a character, from whom we have some distance, allows us to think more clearly about our own way out of the bunker in which we feel, pressured and trapped by a problem that afflicts us.

That is why writing can, also in a fictional way, help us to know our own spirit, our desires and insecurities.

In conclusion

It is quite clear that writing is powerful.

Those who do not have the ability to understand and express language will be at a disadvantage, because they will lose an efficient mechanism to be able to know and recognize themselves in words.

Not only to deal with the pain of thinking, of which the portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa spoke, when thoughts pursue us in incalculable numbers, but also to engage in the process of creation, the act of making real imaginary worlds that, connected to the real, allow us to see more than the next few meters ahead.

They allow a broad view of the map that will lead us to the destination of knowing ourselves better.

How about you?

Do you use writing as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety or a similar situation? Have you ever did some kind of writing work to calm yourself? DO you have another reason why writing can help our mental healths? Tell me all about it in the comments.

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