Moving towards dusk. You really don't feel
you have anything to say and were going to skip notes for today. - Amorella
2006 hours. We saw Fritz this morning. We now have updated wills and
trusts for our grandchildren. We also have our stated health concerns and our
wishes for how we want to be treated towards the end of our days. For instance,
no bloody tubes stuck in us to help us survive not as we were, thank you very
much. Pull the plugs and let us out of here, for this we thank you -- legal
papers of that sort. We stopped and had a good chat with sister Cathy and
brother-in-law Tod. We also had lunch at a Greek/Italian casual restaurant in
Uptown Westerville. Quite interesting and different. We came home and watched
MSNBC and NBC and ABC News. That's it. I'm ready to go to bed early. Carol is
watching a couple of her DVRed favorite shows so I'm going up to listen to some
music on Pandora. I don't know what presently -- probably 1960's folk before
sleep. It was a good day.
It is refreshing when you get right to the
point. - Amorella
2019 hours. I feel there must be something else as you did not add
"post".
How about that BBC article on how writing
may good for your health? - Amorella
2022
hours. It was interesting but I don't agree with it. I have been writing for
most of my life. It is good for my mental health but physical health, how?
You are still alive. - Amorella
2014 hours. I am still alive because I am not dead, not because I write
or did not write. This article does not really support much evidence it is more
of a hypothesis. Here is the article you are speaking about.
** **
BBC Future
"The puzzling way that writing heals the
body"
•
By Claudia Hammond
•
2
June 2017
In
1986 the psychology professor James Pennebaker discovered something extraordinary,
something which would inspire a generation of researchers to conduct several
hundred studies. He asked students to spend 15 minutes writing about the
biggest trauma of their lives or, if they hadn’t experienced a trauma, their
most difficult time.
They
were told to let go and to include their deepest thoughts, even if they had
never shared these thoughts before. Four days running they did the same thing.
It wasn’t easy. Pennebaker told me that roughly one in 20 students would end up
crying, but when asked whether they wanted to continue they always did.
Meanwhile a control group spent the same number of sessions writing a
description of something neutral such a tree or their dorm room.
Then
he waited for six months while monitoring how often the students visited the
health centre. The day he saw the results, he left the lab, walked to his
friend who was waiting for him in a car and told him he’d found something big.
Remarkably, the students who had written about their secret feelings had made
significantly fewer trips to the doctor
in the subsequent months.
Ever
since, the field psychoneuroimmunology has been exploring the link between
what’s now known as expressive writing, and the functioning of the immune
system. The studies that followed examined the effect of expressive writing on
everything from asthma and arthritis to breast cancer and migraines. In a small
study conducted in Kansas, for example, it was found that women with breast
cancer experienced fewer troublesome symptoms and went for fewer cancer-related appointments
in the months after doing expressive writing.
The
aim of the study wasn’t to look at long-term cancer prognosis, and the authors
are not suggesting the cancer would be affected. But in the short-term other
aspects of the women’s health did seem better than for those in the control
group who wrote about the facts surrounding their cancer rather than their
feelings about it.
But
it doesn’t always work. A meta-analysis by Joanne Fratarolli from the
University of California Riverside does demonstrate an effect overall, but a small one.
Nevertheless, for an intervention that is free and beneficial, that’s a benefit
worth having. Some studies have had disappointing results, but there is one
area where the findings are more consistent and that is in the healing of wounds.
In
these studies brave volunteers typically do some expressive writing, then some
days later they are given a local anaesthetic and then a punch biopsy at the
top of their inner arm. The wound is typically 4mm across and heals within a
couple of weeks. This healing is monitored and again and again, and it happens
faster if people have spent time beforehand writing down their secret thoughts.
What
does the act of committing words to paper do? Initially it was assumed this
simply happened through catharsis, that people felt better because they’d let
out their pent-up feelings. But then Pennebaker began looking in detail at the
language people used
in their writing.
He
found that the types of words people used changed over the course of the four
sessions. Those whose wounds healed the fastest began by using the word “I” a
lot, but in later sessions moved on to saying “he” or “she” more often,
suggesting they were looking at the event from other perspectives. They also
used words like “because”, implying they were making sense of the events and
putting them into a narrative. So Pennebaker believes that the simple act of
labelling your feelings and putting them into a story is somehow affecting the
immune system.
But
there is a curious finding which suggests something else might be going on.
Simply imagining a traumatic event and writing a story about it also makes
wounds heal faster, so perhaps it’s less to do with resolving past issues and
more to do with finding a way of regulating your own emotions that makes a
difference.
After
the first day of writing most people say that churning up the past has made
them feel worse. Does the stress cause people to release stress hormones such
as cortisol, which are beneficial in the short-term and could enhance the
immune system? Or is it the improvement in mood after several days of writing
that brings the benefits for immunity? So far, no one knows.
Whatever
the mechanism, despite several decades of research showing it works, it’s
rarely used clinically. You could imagine a situation where people booked in
for surgery are given expressive writing instructions in the preceding weeks,
but very few studies have used clinical populations with real, surgical wounds,
rather than giving healthy students artificially-induced wounds. Also, it works
better for some people than others, all depending on how well they engage with
the process. What’s more, the effect is short-lived, so you’d have to get the
timing just right. Writing about your feelings doesn’t boost your immune system
for life. If the same people are wounded again a few months after an initial
study, they don’t heal any faster than anyone else.
But
now new research from New Zealand suggests it’s not essential to do the writing
before you are wounded. It can work just as well if you do the writing
afterwards. This opens up the possibility of using expressive writing not just
when surgery is planned, but for real-life injuries which of course we can’t
predict. Kavita Vedhara from the University of Nottingham and her team in New
Zealand took 120 healthy volunteers, and made them write about either a
distressing event or how they spent the previous day. They did this either
before or after a punch biopsy on their
upper arm. The people from the expressive writing group were six
times more likely to have a wound that had healed within 10 days than the
people in the control group.
We’d
need to have more studies conducted with real life patients, but maybe one day
when we’ve had an operation, we might be told to go home with instructions on
expressive writing. As Kavita Vedhara told me in the BBC’s Health Check,
the effect is “short-lived, but powerful”.
Disclaimer
All
content within this column is provided for general information only, and should
not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any
other health care professional. The BBC is not responsible or liable for any
diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site. The BBC is not
liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it
endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the
sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your
health.
Selected and edited from - http://www.bbc dot com/future/story
/ 20170601-can-writing-about-pain-make-you-heal-faster
** **
2210
hours. Writing has helped my mental health. I have learned about my own
behaviors and my weaknesses in reason as
well as about my possible unconsciousness and my uses of imagination. I am more
stable as a person from writing and reflecting on what I and Amorella (mostly
imagination I feel) have written. I now feel G-D exists but I have no proof. (I
would not be surprised either way.) - rho
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