Writing is good for your mental health

My friend Roger struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving as a military chaplain. He has turned to writing to help process his experiences and emotions and has found it to be very helpful. Roger said, “Writing [my novel] felt like I was undergoing the most massive mental detox imaginable,” (author’s Facebook page in February 2023).

You don’t have to write a novel to benefit from writing. You can write a private journal, letters, texts, or emails to friends, or something more public like a blog or articles for a magazine like Japan Harvest.

My first article for Japan Harvest, “Crying in the Snow,”¹ started life as an email in my early language school days, a heart cry to close friends about something that had driven me to tears. I’m not good at journaling. Instead, I have spent many hours over the years processing my thoughts via texting to close friends and writing on my personal blog.

But perhaps you don’t know where to start when you face a white page? You can use a tool called a writing prompt. This can be anything that helps to inspire and guide your writing content: a question, a statement, or even a picture or song. A good writing prompt can draw out things that you never imagined were in your mind. One helpful way to approach a task like this is to set a timer for five minutes and write (or draw) as continuously as you can during that time, not stopping to make any corrections. Remember, it’s private. There is no obligation to show this very rough piece of writing to anyone.

Try one of these topics:

• Write about an item you have that isn’t expensive but means a lot to you.
• Write about something nice a stranger did for you.
• Think of a song, a movie, or an event that has encouraged you recently. Why do you think it spoke to you? What do you think God is trying to tell you with that encouragement?
• Write about something funny you saw or experienced recently. Why did it make you laugh? Describe the colours you saw and sounds you heard at the time. Describe your reaction and thoughts.
• Think about your favourite vacation place or somewhere you’d love to go for a holiday, or look at a photo of that place. What would you do there? If it’s a memory, tell some stories of good times that you had there and the people you shared those memories with.

If this is hard, try practising. Do it for five minutes once a day for a week. Or try for 10 minutes each Friday. Find an accountability partner who wants to try it too. If writing or typing is hard, try speech to text so you can speak your thoughts. Remember, this isn’t polished writing. This is for your own self-care—it’s totally up to you who sees what you’ve written.

After you have done this, you might find a gem there that you want to explore further, to write more about, or perhaps to develop into a bigger piece of writing that could be published in one form or another.

Above all, if you are struggling with your health, remember that studies have shown that writing can improve both our mental and physical health and help us work through challenges in our lives. So try writing about your life and see how it helps you.

1. Wendy Marshall, Japan Harvest https://japanharvest.org/backissue/60-3-winter-2009/, (Winter 2009, 22).