Does Writing Help (or Hurt) Your Mental Health?
With National Novel Writing Month underway and many writers a few days (or a week?) behind, tensions can be high. Thoughts of failure and futility come through. Many times, people speak about the hardships of writing in tweets or witty memes.
However, studies show writing in general helps people. It reduces stress and augments one's physical and emotional well-being. When someone writes about an emotionally trying topic, such as a traumatic event they survived, they gain more emotional benefits than someone writing about a mundane (or general) topic. This means a great deal to survivors of great adversity, whether because of abuse, mental illness, discrimination, or traumatic events.
Writing Fiction: Anxiety Relief or Anxiety-Inducing?
We aren't necessarily speaking about journaling like the studies, though. We're talking about fiction. Still, though, fiction writing offers an escape. It can be cathartic.
As someone with depression, an anxiety disorder, and experiences with grief and trauma, I write characters meant to help others feel less alone. Their struggles with loss don't necessarily mitigate mine, but it offers a way to explore emotions in a way that is safely adjacent, removed from speaking in an autobiographical manner. When I'm fidgety, writing offers an outlet for the brain gnats, something to do with my hands that also wards off worries over being unproductive or engaging in unhealthy behavior, such as drinking twenty cups or coffee or eating everything faintly edible in the room. Writing offers a semblance of control over the environment; it's like spring cleaning for the soul.
Despite all this, writing anxiety is a thing. It often comes up in academic writing when writing centers want to explore how to help students who procrastinate or avoid seeking help because they either struggle to start writing or cannot bear to share their work with others. But it happens with fiction too, and it all comes from fear.
Fear of not being good enough to write the complex story in your head. Fear of writing badly. Fear of judgement. Fear of rejection. Fear of bad feedback that affirms your worst expectations. Fear of a success followed by a string of failures that each show that your one success was a fluke, a mistake. Fear that you're a fraud waiting to be revealed.
Writing helps my anxiety, but it also gives me anxiety. Talk about a Catch-22. I get frustrated when I feel like I'm going nowhere, like I put in hours on considering and tweaking work that ultimately doesn't have legs, doesn't engage others. I become disenchanted and want to forget most of what I write, even if I'm told by others that, no, it's good, they loved it.
Mostly, I don't like feeling as if I'm idle. As much as I try to find perspective, to tell myself that, in the grand scheme of everything, my decisions are minor, I obsess over details and loathe that, yeah, no matter what I do, some imperfection will slip by, an imperfection some will catch and others won't.
So, What Should You Do?
Unfortunately, I wish I had a pithy answer. I really don't want to be a writing coach insisting that there's One True Way™ to conquer this issue. Not only is writing subjective, but so are the many experiences we have. This is more of a "I feel you" post. Because if writing worsens your day sometimes, I feel you.
I can repeat all the easily Google-able stuff about finding perspective (which, admittedly for me, inevitably starts with, "Hey, well, the Earth will probably be sucked into the sun, so really..."), or taking a walk, or distracting yourself, or embracing mistakes, or harnessing anxiety to write more. This is all perfectly sound advice for many people, but for everyone, is writing always the solution if it's sometimes the problem, especially for those grappling with trauma or mental illnesses?
Still, as I thought over my own struggles with writing anxiety and how it impacts me, most of my searches for information talk about how writing is the answer. I should know; I research and present on this sort of thing. I'm heartened that so many people report how writing helps them. But in talking about how writing helps, there's not much about solutions for when it doesn't, or when it works 80% of the time, but sometimes becomes an all-consuming vortex of doubt and teeth-grinding.
Does writing positively impact your mental health? Are there days it doesn't? What do you do when you experience writing anxiety?