Writing Your Way to Better Health — JANE RUBIN, PHD Clinical Psychologist

Psychologist James Pennebaker is a well-known advocate for expressive writing. Pennebaker contends that people who wrote about their feelings and emotions, regarding stressful incidents in their lives, experienced decreased heart rate and lower systolic blood pressure. Pennebaker’s research apparently shows that the benefits experienced by the individuals participating in the expressive writing portion of his study do not extend to those who are just writing randomly. That is, it is the act of writing about one’s emotions that create the health benefits, not the act of writing itself. It appears that both cognitive and social changes occur when the writer commits an intense emotional experience to paper.Read the entire article here: Writing your way to better health