Write your own recovery: How documenting medical issues could help you get better

Writing about your emotional traumas speed up healing by three times
Just 20 minutes of writing per day helps skin heal, study finds

By
Roger Dobson

PUBLISHED:

16:02 EST, 20 July 2013

|

UPDATED:

16:02 EST, 20 July 2013

Writing about your problems could boost your immune system and speedÂ up wound healing, new research suggests.

Skin healed three times faster in people who wrote about their traumatic life experiences, compared with those who simply documented daily activities, in a study by the University of Auckland.

The 50 participants, both men and women, were asked to write for 20 minutes daily, for three consecutive days.

Healing words: The US study found that participants who wrote about emotional or traumatic experiences healed faster than those who did not

Half the group wrote about upsetting experiences and expressed their deepest emotions, while the rest wrote about their planned activities for the next day, without mentioning emotions.

Two weeks later, all participants had a 4mm skin biopsy taken from their arm and their healing rates were monitored and compared.

After 11 days, 76 per cent of the expressive groupâ€™s wounds had healed, compared with justÂ 42 per cent of the others.

â€˜Our study helps demonstrate the mind-body relationshipÂ and how we could use psychological interventions to improve physiological outcomes,â€™ says Dr Elizabeth Broadbent, who led the study.

Blog yourself better: Just 20 minutes per day of writing about trauma sped up the healing process by three times, the study found

â€˜Future work needs to investigate whether expressive writing could improve healing in people with chronic wounds or in patients recovering from surgery.â€™

A second study asked 50 injured athletes to write for 20 minutes once a week for three weeks. One group wrote about the impact of the injury and their emotions, while the others wrote about non-emotional, non-injury related topics.

The results at Glasgow Caledonian University showed that those writing expressively had a significant improvement in injury mobility.

One theory is that expressive writing eases stress, which in turn improves the immune system. Stress hormones can impair sleep, causing a drop in immune system cells. Deep sleep is also critical for boosting wound healing.