It's no secret that our overall well-being improves drastically when we follow a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and get six to eight hours of sleep every night, but could creative writing have similar positive effects on our quality of life? New research over the past five years has consistently found that incorporating creative and expressive writing into your daily life offers tremendous benefits - physically, emotionally, and financially! Here's ten ways picking up a pen and jotting down your thoughts for fifteen minutes a day can help you...
1. Relieve stress - Whether you're venting about the boss from hell or imagining fantasy worlds ruled by wizards or vampires, creative writing can be a cheap alternative for therapy! Expressing your thoughts on the page gives you healthy opportunities to release pent-up emotions and take a break from the daily grind of life.
2. Build confidence and self-esteem - Poems, stories, and songs are healthy outlets for you to voice and validate your thoughts and ideas. For people who feel overlooked or singled out by others, writing on a routine basis is also an excellent way to identify and change negative thought patterns.
3. Feel younger - In 2008, a study by Dr. John Mirowsky at the University of Texas at Austin found that people who regularly do activities which require creative thinking can shave up to six years off their mental age!
4. Identify dreams and achieve goals - Writing offers you a chance to learn more about yourself, how you see the world around you, and what you want from life. A Dominican University study reported that people who write down their goals and aspirations are 61% more likely to pursue them.
5. Boost brain power - Exploring your imagination wakes up parts of the brain that typically lie dormant when you're watching TV or making a grocery list. Over time, regular creative writing exercises actually expand your mental capacity, enhancing your ability to "think outside the box" when faced with unexpected or puzzling situations.
6. Improve your career - Stimulating your mind with creative activities like writing improves both your creative and analytical abilities and helps you quickly generate more ideas and solutions, which can make you invaluable to your employer. You may even come up with an innovation which prompts you to start a company of your own!
7. Earn supplemental income - Submitting your poems and short stories to magazines, literary journals, or even greeting card companies could pay off, literally! These days, blogging about anything and everything, from being a mom to your commentary on the world, has become another fun way to share your thoughts and bring in some extra money from advertisers posting links on your site.
8. Communicate better in your relationships - Transferring a character, scene or idea from your head onto paper requires a certain amount of organizing your thoughts so you can convey a clear and concise picture to your audience. That same practice can carry over to how you express your thoughts and feelings to friends, family, coworkers, or clients.
9. Keep a record of yourself - When you find yourself wondering, "What was going through my mind ten years ago," you can look directly to your writing for insight into your thoughts and imagination at that time. It's a great tool for measuring how much you've matured and changed during various stages of your life.
10. Enjoy life and feel happier - Multiple studies, like the one reported by Dr. Geoff Lowe in 2006, have noted positive physical and psychological improvements in participants who practice creative and expressive writing, including improvements in immune system functioning, mood, psychological well-being, and memory. Lowe's study also found that people suffering from certain ailments, like asthma and arthritis, reported less severity of their symptoms when they were writing!
Allegra Newman lives in Los Angeles and is the co-creator of 365 Things to Write About, a hands-on creative writing journal for people of all ages to explore their imaginations.
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