The Science of Healing through Expressive Writing

Dec 15

You're lying awake at 3 AM, your mind spinning with thoughts about that difficult conversation from yesterday, or perhaps a hurtful experience from years ago that still haunts you. We all carry emotional burdens, both big and small. But what if I told you that a pen and paper might be more powerful than counting sheep?

I discovered expressive writing when I was a young mom. I'd just launched an online writing workshop platform on this brand new thing called the Internet. (This was back when you could pick up a Prodigy or AOL software CD at the grocery store checkout. Times have changed.) I was trying to survive a turbulent marriage and run a new business. One of my fellow writers recommended a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and it changed my life. I learned that the simple act of writing, without editing or judgment, was a potent way to process the jumble of emotions I felt.

Let's learn more about expressive writing and discover why researchers and therapists have sung its praises for decades.

What Is Expressive Writing?

Expressive writing is exactly what it sounds like – writing that expresses your deepest thoughts and feelings without worrying about grammar, spelling, or what anyone else might think. It's a deliberate practice of exploring the experiences that have shaped you, the emotions that move you, and the thoughts that keep you up at night.

Think of it as spring cleaning for your mind, but instead of sorting through old clothes and dusty books, you're creating space by examining the stories you carry within. And just like a good closet cleanout, the results can be surprisingly refreshing.

There are lots of ways to do expressive writing (or freewriting, or emotional writing — the practice goes by many names), but I prefer a simple 20-minute practice daily. And when I say 20 minutes, I mean 20 minutes. I set a timer, just as Natalie Goldberg advised. Why? Because the timer creates a sense of urgency: "I've got to get this all down before time runs out!"

My ruthless self-editing skills have been legendary throughout my professional writing career. I’m known for clean first drafts. But self-editing renders expressive writing more or less useless. It strips the rawness from it and distracts from its healing benefits. That's why the timer is important. That urgency to "get it all down" is the secret sauce. It's how I trick my brain into not censoring my writing as I go.

The Science of Expressive Writing: More Than Just Dear Diary

When I was in middle school, I had an incredible English teacher with an unfortunate name: Mrs. Hurlbutt. She was vibrant, zaftig, and if her husband's surname bothered her at all, she didn't show it. She introduced us students to something akin to expressive writing — we just didn't have a name for it yet.

Mrs. Hurlbutt had us journal for 20 minutes at home every day. Then, we would hand our journals in. Mrs. H would open them, make sure we'd made an entry, and close them, giving us an "A" if we met our daily writing goal. We could invite her to read our entries (which I did, because I've always needed approval and I liked that she told me I was a good writer), but she would otherwise respect our privacy. All we had to do was write about our experiences and the way we felt about them as a small but significant way to make sense of our world.

In 1986, Dr. James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin decided to test a wild hypothesis: Could writing about our feelings actually make us healthier? Spoiler alert: it does, and in ways that surprised even the researchers.

The research involved two groups of people. One group wrote about their deepest emotions and challenging experiences for 15 minutes a day. The other wrote about what they had for breakfast (riveting stuff, I know). After just four days of writing, the emotional writing group started showing remarkable changes. Over time, they visited their doctors less frequently. Their immune systems functioned better. They even slept more soundly.

But here's where it gets really interesting. Over the past few decades, more than 200 studies have replicated these findings, showing benefits that sound almost too good to be true:

Reduced anxiety and depression symptoms
Improved sleep and focus
Better work performance
Stronger immune system function
Greater resilience in facing challenges

One 2019 study showed that a six-week writing intervention helped people who had experienced trauma reduce depression symptoms, anxiety, and rumination. Thirty-five percent of the participants no longer met the clinical criteria for depression by the end of the study.

What fascinates me most is that these benefits aren't just for people processing major trauma. Writing about everyday stressors, work challenges, or relationship difficulties can be just as powerful. I've written my way through all of the above.

The Magic Behind the Emotional Writing Method

How can something as simple as putting pen to paper create such profound changes? Let me geek out with you for a minute about what's happening in your brain when you write.

Research suggests that trauma and emotional stress can actually change the way your brain processes information. It slows things down and makes it harder for you to access the insights you need, kind of like having too many browser tabs open at once. But when you translate your feelings into words, you're quite literally reorganizing these experiences in your brain.

I learned this firsthand during a particularly rough patch after a career setback. Every time I thought about the experience, my thoughts would spiral into a jumbled mess of anxiety and self-doubt. But when I started writing about it, something shifted. Instead of being stuck in the emotional whirlwind, I became the narrator of my own story. That simple shift from "experiencing" to "observing" changed everything.

This transformation happens because expressive writing does three powerful things:

It moves experiences from the emotional center of your brain to the analytical areas, helping you make sense of what happened
It gives you a safe distance to process events, like watching a movie instead of being in it
It helps you create a coherent narrative, turning emotional chaos into a story you can understand and, eventually, learn from

The best part? If you can put words on paper, you can get these benefits.

Your brain doesn't care about perfect grammar or elegant metaphors. It just needs you to show up, gather your swirling thoughts, and put them down in words to help it make meaning from messiness and order from chaos.