"A person is unfamiliar in a foreign land and misses his loved ones on holidays." This is the feeling of missing his hometown when Wang Wei, a poet in Tang Dynasty, became famous in Chang 'an. In ancient China, many literati liked to express their feelings with the help of poems, or they were unhappy because of their lack of talent, or they missed their loved ones or looked forward to the future. In modern society, there are still many people who persistently express their emotions by writing diaries, Weibo and blogs. So, what is the relationship between poetry creation and writing and people's emotional health?
Professor James Pennybeck, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, proved for the first time with experimental research that writing can effectively improve people's mood and health. He found that writing troubles is not only beneficial to mental health, but also can enhance the function of immune system and make people less sick. Later, researchers also used writing as an adjuvant therapy for cancer, AIDS, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, and they all found good results. So far, writing has been widely used in clinical psychotherapy, medicine and education.
Why is writing so magical? Scientists gave the following explanation.
Writing helps to express and vent emotions. Some people always like to keep their emotions and thoughts in their hearts after experiencing unhappy things. Depressed emotions are like blocked floods, which form a strong pressure over time. If this pressure is not reasonably relieved for a long time, it will eventually endanger people's physical and mental health like a flood bursting its banks. The story of "Dayu harnessing water" tells us that we should use the method of "dredging" rather than "blocking" to deal with floods. Similarly, emotions should be treated with "expression" instead of "repression". Writing is a good way to express your feelings.
Writing helps to change cognition. People's emotions are often not caused by the event itself, but by their views on the event, so as long as they change their views on the event, they can change their emotions. Writing out your emotions and thoughts about something will give people more opportunities to re-understand it, thus forming a new view and attitude towards it.
Writing helps to sort out emotions and thoughts. Emotions and thoughts stored in the human brain are often vague, while language is relatively specific. Writing is a process of linguistizing or symbolizing emotions and thoughts. In the words of Professor Pennybeck, it is the process of transforming fuzzy modal information into concrete data information. The research of emotional cognitive neuroscience also proves that this transformation can effectively regulate emotions and make people less angry, sad or afraid.