26.02.2025
SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN: BY WRITING 8 MINUTES BY HAND, YOU CALM DOWN AND MAKE A SMART DECISION
Pouring your feelings on the white sheet is not just a poetic phrase. Psychological research has proven that writing really helps to control emotions and lower anxiety.
When a person has a problem, failed in something or faces an important choice, he is worried. And it changes the brain. One of the most characteristic consequences is strong pessimism-everything looks worse than it really is. This prevents a real assessment of the situation and leads to incorrect solutions.
The most common is the negativity associated with errors, but it can be reduced by a few minutes of writing, says Hans Schroeder, a doctor of clinical psychology at the University of Michigan.
He presents the results of his research, which involved 40 students. They all had problems at the moment and showed high levels of anxiety. Schroeder divided them into two groups. People in one were asked to write a text to express their feelings. Students in the other group had to write an essay on an abstract topic.
After 8 minutes of writing, the participants held a game for a quick response. Those who pour their soul on paper showed much better results. They had mastered their anxiety and negativism. As a result, they made much less mistakes than the group that wrote an abstract essay.
Dr. Schroeder also proves with other experiments that writing releases the brain from concerns that disrupt productivity. "Anxiety absorbs cognitive resources. As we write our worries on a piece of paper, they already take up less space in the brain," the psychologist said.
Writing is the cheapest and most affordable treatment that you can help yourself when you are disturbed, commented James Penbaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. By expressing your emotions, you seem to throw them away and make sense of them. This helps to suppress the feeling of threat and reduce pessimism. When a person is obsessed with anxiety, one cannot pay attention to other information. If he is able to reduce the time he deals with this anxiety and breaks away from him, he will be able to think more clearly and make better decisions, explains James Penbaker how writing purifies the so-called Working memory.
One of the interesting effects found in the studies is that anxiety is removed faster when a person writes by hand rather than on the computer or phone screen. Even if you pour the same feelings, it matters the purely technical way you do it.
Probably the reason is in the special brain connection. Writing triggers the area called a reticular activation system that blocks the processing of side information. When writing the letters with a pen or pencil on paper, the brain focuses because the hand performs more movements. And writing a computer is monotonous - every time you just have to press a key, says Virginia Bеrginger, a psychologist at the University of Washington.
