Remember when you were in high school, you keep a diary under your pillows? Rereading your old diaries probably makes you think, “I was so embarrassing back then!” It was a place where you dump all your thoughts and feelings about eventful moments, crushes, backstabbing friends, best friends, parties, etc.
However, the diary is not just a bunch of embarrassing scribbles. You may have not realized, but it has actually helped you to make sense of the world during the awkward stage of puberty.
As you reached adulthood, you may have stopped writing a diary. The world gets more and more realistic each day, many problems and work needs to be done. It’s so confusing, chaotic and stressful that there’s no room for daydreaming anymore. But on the contrary, what if this ‘daydreaming’ moment will actually help you detangle chaos around you?
Writing can improve your overall mood as you enter a state of ‘flow’, which is a state of pure focus. It allows you to focus on your thoughts only. From there, the flow of words will create a little distance for you from your thoughts. Thus, it will give you a more objective, third-person-ish perspective towards your situation. Note that writing wouldn’t necessarily bring forth the solution, but it will clear your scattered path towards the source problem.
If I’m not used to writing (in this case, expressive writing), where should I begin? What should I talk about?
It doesn’t have to be some deep stuff, like traumatic experiences. You can start… literally with anything, but to give you a picture, you can start with your breaking down your daily activities, who you met today and what you guys talked about, or simply about the weather. In fact, if you’re having a really bad day and you wish to forget about it, you can write about something else --a childhood memory, your favorite food, a dream vacation.
Point is: start gently. You don’t want to crumble down from the beginning, because it will create a bad introduction to the writing process itself. You must remember that writing is not a straightforward cure like medicine. Its improvement is almost invisible and immeasurable, but steady. So, it is important to write continuously.
Also, don’t worry about grammar and structures. You’re not writing a college essay or work reports. This is purely for yourself and nobody's there to judge (unless you decide to show a therapist or such to analyze it). If you’re not in a mood to write, you can take a break. Just don’t stop writing abruptly.
There are still many benefits of writing, as you can read here, and mental health improvement is one of them. Writing a diary or journal can help you create order and understand your situation or feelings more clearly. By setting aside a little bit of your time each day to write a journal, you can also give yourself a little break to destress and wind down.
However, if you are in a severely depressed or traumatic condition, writing may feel too direct. Your head is still too focused on that particular disturbing experience or thought. Perhaps you should start with a less direct approach, like visual art.