How To Reduce Stress Through Creative Writing

As you likely know, stress has negative consequences on our physical, mental, and emotional health. It negatively affects functioning in our personal and professional lives.

And stress can easily get out of control before we even realize it, and pretty soon we are not doing well.

It can be detrimental to relationships and our overall well-being. Stress is a reason that we stop deriving joy from things we once loved. It prevents us from parenting and caregiving to the best of our abilities. It makes us avoid intimacy and interaction.

Because of this, stress should be combated with multiple interventions. We often need multiple layers of self-care to ensure our wellness.

So, have you ever thought that writing or journalling would be a great way to reduce your stress?

If not, you should, and today I’ll tell you why.

One way to reduce stress is through creative writing. It can be surprisingly therapeutic to put pen to paper (either literally or metaphorically, on a computer) and see what appears.

And we may be surprised by what we see at the end of a creative writing session.

Writing is one way to help us make sense of the world around us, as well as our feelings and thought processes. It is similar to art in this way but perhaps not often thought of when we think about managing our stress.

What Is The Science Behind Reducing Stress By Creative Writing?

Research has found that creative writing can reduce stress in individuals, supporting the effectiveness of writing in wellness.

Creative writing, however, may be more helpful for individuals experiencing stress separate from a significant mental health disorder.

This suggests that creative writing does have the ability to make positive changes, but it cannot be the sole treatment for significant struggles with mental health.

Creative writing has been found to help individuals relax – and the inability to relax creates a lot of stress. Or often stress prevents us from being able to relax.

Individuals who write, according to a Harvard study, are less likely to access health services to help with their overall wellness. This study was conducted in students who arguably experience a significant amount of stress, which is extremely positive because college can be very difficult and stress-inducing.

Studies have found that writing can initially upset individuals more, but in the long run helps them to relax.

This could be because feelings and thoughts come up in writing that we may have been avoiding or repressing prior to engaging in a writing activity.

This could especially occur for those who choose to journal instead of writing stories or less personal forms of writing.

While this can be true, it is important to not give up. Feeling comfortable likely means that you are on the path to your creative writing helping to reduce stress.

Writing also helps us to organize thoughts. It helps to process information and especially traumatic events – and processing such trauma can help to reduce overall stress and anxiety as trauma creates stress, anxiety, and depression in many people.

Processing this trauma, or beginning to, can help us regulate our emotions and help us assign meaning in our lives. This is necessary and important personal work, but it is not easy and may require support from professionals.

Writing also helps us to be willing to talk to others about our experiences. This especially helps us to recovery from whatever could be causing us stress.

Humans were never meant to manage or process anything in silos. We have always needed each other for recovering from stress but often times we feel as though we have to do it all alone.

As we begin to open up and practise vulnerability, we break down stigmas and develop interventions to combat stress together.

How Else Can Writing Help With My Stress?

Writing, similar to reading a book or listening to music, can offer us a respite from our stress. It can help us to escape. In small doses, distraction can be a powerful tool. When used all the time, however, we avoid growth and addressing things that need addressed, which is, of course, counterproductive.

Writing can help us to form worlds in our heads that we did not know even existed. This creativity, like any other, can be freeing and exciting and stress can tend to melt away. This is a very freeing experience.

We should feel proud of things that we create. Telling a story, whether true or not, is a beautiful thing and we should allow ourselves to feel that pride and excitement in our accomplishments and our abilities. Feeling proud of one’s self can also help to reduce stress.

What Types Of Writing Can I Do?

Free writing is one type of writing you can focus on. This involves choosing a topic and getting started. It is often an easy way to begin creative writing. The key to free writing is not to make judgements about what comes out when you write. Whatever it is you have to say needs to be said and processed.

Another approach to free writing is to choose three random words (preferably nouns) and start then just start writing, the only rule being that all three of those words must appear within the first paragraph. After that, you just see where your writing takes you. The goal with this version of free writing is not to try to open up about any particular thoughts, emotions, or memories, but to let your mind go where it wants, with no restrictions, other than maybe setting a time limit (e.g. five minutes). (This is also a great warm-up exercise if you’re experiencing writer’s block.)

The crucial thing with free-writing is not to edit as you go – you can do that later, if necessary.

Poetry is another form of writing. Writing poetry can be very fun and creative. This is especially true for individuals who are very visual and love language. Poetry is very artistic. Remember to focus on your different senses and how you feel about them as you write poetry.

And of course there are different styles of poetry:

• You can choose the more traditional style, where each line follows a specific pattern (or metre) and includes rhymes at the end of lines. Certain types of classical poetry also have a fixed number of lines (e.g. sonnets, which usually consist of 14 lines). This can work for people who enjoy structure, although if you’re not this type of person, forcing yourself to try it can activate pathways in your brain that may be underutilized.
• Then there is the more free-form style of poetry. In this style, metre (or rhythm) is less important, there is no need for rhymes, and they can be as long as you like.
• Acrostic poems can be fun (and a type I have literally written hundreds of over the past decade or so). With this style of poem, you think of a short word or phrase, the only constraint being that it must have an even number of letters (8 – 16 works well). These letters then become the first letter of each line of your poem, which is normally a rhyming poem.
• Haiku is another fun and easy way to create ultra-short poems. It’s a traditional Japanese form of poetry, that comprises just three lines. These three lines contain five, seven, and five syllables respectively. Haiku is often about some aspect of nature, and may be somewhat abstract rather than simply describing something purely physical.

There are, of course, other types of poetry, but this list will give you plenty of scope to play around with.

Fiction is another obvious type of writing you can do.

They say that everybody has (at least) one novel in them, but trust me, it’s a lot of work.

But you don’t have to write a 100,000+ word story – you can start small with short stories or novellas (which are often 5,000 – 20,000 words), or even smaller with what’s known as flash fiction.

Flash fiction is essentially an ultra-short story – anywhere from 100 words to maybe a thousand or two. My personal preference, for no particular reason, is 500 words, but you should try different lengths to see what works best for you.

While flash fiction may be short, it still needs to keep to standard storytelling rules – e.g. it still needs a beginning, middle, and end, even though this may all be highly compressed.

While not creative, non-fiction is another type of writing you can do. This can take the form of an article or report, or an essay. The key is to write quickly, so it shouldn’t be something you need to do a ton of research for.

Alternatively, it can be more of a brain dump about how you feel.

Finally, letter writing can be very therapeutic even though, once again, it’s not strictly creative.

If you have stress being caused by your relationships, it can be helpful to reduce stress by writing a letter, regardless of where you send it or not.

You could write a letter if you are angry, sad, happy, or indifferent. You can say everything you need to say and be very objective because nobody will be responding or talking back.

It goes without saying, however, that if you do choose to send your letters, people will have the opportunity to respond to whatever you have to say.

I actually combined these last two approaches when I was clinically depressed.

I was actually on vacation at the time, with my first wife, and I spent the first two or three days of the holiday typing what ended up being a 12,000+ word book. It wasn’t meant to be a published book when I started though – I just needed to get a whole ton of stuff off my chest, mainly to help me surface everything I was feeling about my situation, including the entire history of how I’d got there, and to decide what to do about it.

And it worked – really well.

You can download a short document that contains example of most of the above here.

How Do I Start Writing If I Never Have Before?

If you are wanting to get started writing but are unsure of where to start, you should find a quiet space, free from distractions.

Starting with free writing or letter writing will be the easiest for many people. Identify the method that feels best for you: writing or typing.

Get in a comfortable position and perhaps put on light background music (preferably instrumental as it’s less distracting for most people) as this can be helpful to focusing on the task at hand.

Then just go.

It is really that simple.

Write about what is on your mind. Things you are excited about or things that you are anxious about. Write about love or loss. Write whatever needs to be written. Or just write for the fun of writing – it could literally be complete gibberish (I’m thinking Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll) if you want, as long as it helps you relieve your stress.

It may be helpful to you to carry your laptop, pad, or tablet on you wherever you go so that you can write whenever you feel compelled to. This ensures that you are able to reduce your stress through writing whenever it occurs.

I Cannot Seem To Start. What Are Some Writing Prompts That Could Help Me Get Started?

Here are just a few ideas to get your cogs turning:

• Identify a recent dream you had. What do you think about it?
• What does it feel like to love and be loved in return?
• Are there things that make you sad that you don’t allow yourself to think about?
• Write about an interaction you witnessed that made you either comfortable or uncomfortable.
• What do you think about your job?
• If you could do anything, what would you do?
• What excites you? What makes you fearful?
• What does it feel like to wake up in the morning?

Personal Experience

I used to dislike writing intensely when I was at school, and I wasn’t very good at it either. (I’m sure the two are related.)

In my job, for many years, I wrote a lot of technical documents (I worked in information technology), and in my hobby, I wrote newsletters on a monthly basis for years – but none of that was creative.

In the 1990s I also wrote a book on a topic that bridged mathematics and magic (of the conjuring variety), but again – not creative.

My passion for creative writing only began in my 40s, when I met the lady who was later to be my second wife online (via a mutual interest in business, not via a dating site).

I started writing love poems to her – one a day for years, even after we were married. I’d never written poems before (other than a small number at school when I had no choice), but I enjoyed the activity. Not only was it a way to show my future wife how much I loved her, but it stimulated my brain in ways that other types of writing didn’t.

Since then, I have written thousands of poems, hundreds of haiku, a full-length novel, over 30 short stories / flash fiction, and even a few erotica novellas.

While these books are for sale (for the most part), it wasn’t the driving force for me. I found out that I had really developed an interest in it.

And I can testify that creative writing is a really great way to forget your day-to-day issues. You can create and be immersed in your own world, your own characters, even your own languages if you want to go that far – because you truly are limited only by your imagination.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend you give creative writing a try – you may find, like I did, that you have a passion for it, and that it also helps relieve stress.

Even if you only write for a few minutes a day, that’s OK – it shouldn’t be a chore, but something you look forward to.

And don’t forget – nobody else need ever see what you write, unless, of course, you want them to. This by itself can be a great stress reliever, because you can write whatever you want, about whomever you want, safe in the knowledge that it will remain as private as you wish it to be.

And if you do choose to publish your creations, then great – just make sure your work is fully proofread and edited beforehand.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Creative Writing Courses
2. Writing Prompts