Transform Your Health: Write to Heal

Do you know that writing can help you to heal?

Research tells us that expressive writing has the power to help us transform our physical, mental, and spiritual health. In fact expressive writing has been shown to:

• Decrease the heart rate
• Lower blood pressure
• Enhance breathing
• Strengthen the immune system so that it can better fight off infection
• Improve self-esteem
• Help manage stress

Writing can help us face our most difficult challenges with past or present experiences and even future challenges.  Put another way, when we write we can gain perspective on our circumstances, we provide provident information to our body, and we engage our internal healing resources.

"I was finally able to get the thoughts out of my head and put them down on paper instead of fighting with the difficult thoughts that kept recurring."

"This has been one of my highlights at Duke Integrative Medicine."

"(The workshop) gave voice to something I always knew was important, but didn't know how to approach."

"My experience was excellent, empowering, and fun."

"I'm still benefiting months later."

"I believe I sleep better, and I certainly feel much less stress about this issue that I have been dealing with for a very long time."


Sources:  Duke Integrative Medicine, John Evans, MAT, MA, EdD writing workshops, and Pennebaker, J.W. & Chung, C.K. (in press). Expressive writing and its links to mental and physical health. In H.S. Friedman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of health psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.