Recovery: Writing to Cope with Stress

By Matt McDowell, CSCS 

Personal Trainer & Group Instructor at Harvard Recreation

        Today, I am looking deeper into the ways of overcoming stress. We have all been dealing with changes to our routine due to COVID-19, from adjusting to day-to-day life of being ultra-hygienic and adopting governmental mandates for things like masks, to altering travel or life-event plans that had been made months in advance, or even wondering when you will be able to work at your job again. We are living in tense times. Although in my previous blog I discussed how exercise can help alleviate anxiety, it may not change how you feel about the stressor. By working out you can reduce the stress hormone, but how you cope with a distressing situation can affect your anxiety. In this blog I am giving you a tool to handle stress.

        In psychology, the divide is between emotional approach coping and the common conflict strategy of avoidance coping. The healthy, beneficial way to reduce stress is the “approach” method. Simply put, in order to handle stress, one must process and express emotions of the stressful matter, instead of avoiding those emotions. Talking through your problems has been around for as long as people have been around, but not everyone can externalize their feelings with others easily. It is not as simple as having a trusted confidante, some people just tend to keep these matters to themselves. Another way, which I want to focus on today, is written disclosure.

        What is written disclosure? 

        Written disclosure is an emotional approach method for dealing with stress. The way it works is you choose an event that has stressfully impacted your life. Set some time aside, more than 15 minutes, and write about the event. 

        Describe your thoughts and feelings at the beginning of the event. Did it affect you more than you thought it would? Or less? What were your concerns? How, exactly, were you worried? If you are still worried, can you do anything about those worries?

        By putting this all down you can help your mind process and evaluate your options. The goal here is to identify barriers and highlight pathways to overcome them. Even the act of appraising an uncontrollable situation has been shown to aid in the coping mechanism. The theory is that by repeated exposure to the stressful stimuli while constructively processing and appraising it, one can attenuate the intensity of the emotional experience. You can write more about your thoughts and feelings on the stressful event over time, perhaps reflecting on past feelings and comparing them to today’s situation. For some people, the same concerns and worries are echoed in subsequent entries and repeating them can validate that these are real. For some people, sorting the feelings into categories can be helpful, perhaps by the emotions they evoke or another response you recognize within yourself. For some people, it may just be the act of writing the abstract or random thoughts that are occurring which is useful. The situation also may be changing, and you can explain your concerns or worries as that occurs, or how you are reacting differently to the stress of the situation over time.

        Written disclosure has the benefit of overcoming some of the social constraints that come with other methods of disclosing. You may feel hesitant to say everything you feel about a subject to someone else, which is where writing it down has its biggest advantage. After it is written you can decide if you want to share that work with someone else or not. Just get it out! It can help.

Sources: 

Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 132(6), 823. Frisina, P. G., Borod, J. C., & Lepore, S. J. (2004). A meta-analysis of the effects of written emotional disclosure on the health outcomes of clinical populations. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 192(9), 629-634