*I will preface this post by saying that practising writing for well-bring can sometimes bring up emotions and memories that we might not feel equipped to deal with so please only engage with these activities if you feel you are able to cope with these potential feelings or under the supervision of someone you can trust and who understand your illness. I am not a professional, merely someone who has lived with mental illness and survived various traumas wanting to share my findings, speak my truth as well as give a space for your voices too*
I recently attended a psycho-education course covering the benefits of writing in regards to our mental health. I feel like writing, journalling, etc are quite a classic suggestion when it comes to coping mechanisms, and supplementing mental health recovery in general. I’m always quite quick to be the skeptic when it comes to mindfulness and activities such as this but I feel like it’s all down to the mindset you are in when you engage in these sorts of exercises.
why is writing beneficial?
When services suggest writing as a coping mechanism I have found that it is less often that they will add the caveat that you do indeed need to be in the right frame of mind before putting pen to paper for it to be beneficial in lifting your mood. Often writing can open doors to memories you might not be equipped to deal with in that moment so making sure you are in the right environment and headspace can make you more likely to have a positive experience.
Writing has the ability to calm the mind and emotions in turn and can boost your mood. It can also help build up a collection of positive memories for use during more difficult times as well as help you to process things such as trauma. In addition to that, it can just help to have a visual representation of things inside your mind during that moment and aid finding solutions as well as communicate your struggles with other people. Having something written down also allows your brain to let go more easily; if it’s written down then your brain doesn’t have such a need to keep hold of it. Obviously, when it comes to trauma, this is rather more complex although writing it down can help make sense of things or act as a way to vent your anxieties. Please take caution when using writing as a way to process traumatic memories as this can be extremely painful and can lead to a mental health crisis. Please refer to our page of mental health helplines should you need support.
There are many types of writing that can be helpful during recovery but in order to make this information more palatable I will cover one style at a time. In this post we are going to be focusing on gratitude writing.
Gratitude Writing
Gratitude writing is about focusing on the more positive aspects of your day. Often we can find ourselves focusing on the negatives and allowing them more power. I’m not going to sit here and write about the power of positive thinking because I think in the midst of depression and the likes it is so incredibly difficult to see past the fog and I don’t want to invalidate just how difficult it is to see past that.
The type of gratitude writing I will be covering in this post is called EGS (the lady hosting the course said it like “eggs” and that is probably the only reason I remembered it let’s be honest).
EGS stands for:
Enjoyed
Grateful
Satisfied
The idea is that every day, you write a list of things you’ve enjoyed, things you are grateful for and things you are satisfied with over the past 24 hours. Pretty self explanatory really but when trying to follow something real time I sometimes struggle. Anyway, EGS…
For example, I enjoyed going for a walk today…I am grateful for my families support…I am satisfied with the cookies I baked earlier…
Some days will be inevitably easier to list than others but the point is to take out a small amount of time to reflect back on the more positive or “ok” parts of the past day. Each point can be both separate or related — its totally up to you.
There are no rules as to what you write it can be something as simple as enjoying a muffin to getting married. It’s completely and totally your own.
Try this exercise before you settle down at night as part of your bedtime routine 🙂
[…] on from the last post about gratitude writing, we are back with another instalment of this mini series with another writing technique designed to […]