Heroes Not Zombies

I’m always interested in research which demonstrates ways in which we can support natural healing – after all, there isn’t any other kind of healing, is there?

Here’s an interesting study using writing practice

49 healthy adults aged 64 to 97 years wrote about either upsetting events or daily activities for 20 minutes, three days in a row. After a time lag of two weeks, to make sure any initial negative feelings stirred up by recalling upsetting events had passed, all the subjects had a biopsy on the arm, and photographs over the next 21 days tracked its healing. On the 11th day, 76 percent of the group that did expressive writing had fully healed as compared with 42 percent of the control group.

This particular exercise – writing about an important or upsetting event for 20 minutes each day for three days in a row – has been around for quite some time. James Pennebaker pioneered it, and has studied the effects of writing on health extensively. He says

People who are able to construct a story, to build some kind of narrative over the course of their writing seem to benefit more than those who don’t,” Pennebaker says. “In other words, if on the first day of writing, people’s stories are not very structured or coherent, but over the three or four days they are able to come up with a more structured story, they seem to benefit the most

What’s particularly interesting here is how the creation of story goes along with changing perspectives and understanding better what’s been happening.

Pennebaker’s research developed a computer-based, text analysis program to analyze word counts in different categories, such as emotion words (e.g. happy, sad, angry, joyful), cognitive words (e.g. realize, understand, think), self-reference words (e.g. I, we) and an additional 70 categories. Much to the surprise of the researchers, the change in emotion words didn’t correspond to improved health. The more powerful predictor of improved health was the use of cognitive words–that is, individuals who showed an overall increase in the use of causal words (e.g. because, reason) and insight words (e.g. realize, know, understand) showed improved health.

So it’s not just about telling a story, changing perspective or increasing understanding, it’s about improving immune function and both physical and mental health.