The Healing Power of Writing About Your Life Goals
Dec 16, 2021
It’s been clear since HyperWriting that therapeutic writing about trauma, fail or self-development problems helps to process them.
Laura King asked herself “whether writing that promoted self-regulatory processes that was not at all related to past trauma might produce health benefits even in the absence of experiencing or reexperiencing intense negative emotions”.
She discovered:
“…that independent of emotional expression in the essays, increasing use of insight words, causal words, and words associated with cognitive activity were associated with health improvements.”
Especially when “the concept of the best possible future selves was used as the goal measure”.
Thus, writing about your life goals might:
- involve awareness and clarity
- organize priorities
- serve to reduce goal conflicts
- feel less upset, more happy and healthier
- increase in subjective well-being over 3 weeks.
