Health At Your Fingertips

Putting pen on paper can be a clinically healing experience too, say doctors

EVER THOUGHT OF WIELDING the quilt as a form of heal-ing? Well, jotting down a few lines after a long day might just be your way of de-stressing and rewinding. Conflicting emotions, clash of interests and many forms of stress that one ex-periences lead to pent-up strain. Dr James W Pennebaker, Profes-sor and Chair, Department of Psychology, University of Texas, told eye: “Writing helps people to organise and understand bitter experiences. Afterwards, they sleep better, are more focused and socially engaged, and less ruminative about the experiences. In short, writing helps to reduce stress, which is linked to a variety of biological markers related to illness and immunity.” Asthma is also caused by stress. Hence, providing an outlet to the pent-up pressure within can prevent it from aggravating. Writing finds manifestation in many forms. Be it creative writing, maintaining diaries, or mak-ing your shopping list—all these consti-tute various forms of self-expression. And all these can be therapeutic and healing as well. Maintain-ing a list of your daily chores and medicines is probably the best possible way to prevent amnesia and Alzheimer’s. As writing also involves mental reconstruction of events, it helps to sharpen one’s per-spective and ob-servationpowers. It also takes the mindinwardand to hitherto un-charted territo-ries, thereby mak-ing one more self-aware.

Says Delhi-based psychiatrist Samir Parikh: “Writing about one’s own thoughts and feelings helps ventilate emotions, and at times de-velop a better understanding of one’s self.”

Globally, most mental health professionals advocate writing down thoughts and feelings as an ad-junct to therapy. However, only a few of them have learnt the techniques and strategies that will transform this daily scribbling into a powerful therapeutic tool.

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Agrees Dr Pennebaker: “Writing is recog-nised by top medical journals as being ef-fective in improving health and general well-being. Most physicians, however, still adhere to a strict medical model that posits illness is the result of biologically identifiable pathogens.”

Pathological cases of chronic de-pression may require special medical attention, but otherwise dabbling in a little bit of writing has been proven to be mentally therapeutic. Others have often found writing a meaningful occu-pation in difficult circumstances.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are proof of how people have written to keep their sanity in adverse situations. On the other hand, writing also helps to mould and heal an impressionable young mind. Kalam: Margins Write, a Kolkata-based creative writing programme for the marginalised youth, is empowering youngsters to discover themselves as creative writ-ers and cultural thinkers.

Programme coordinator Sahar Romani says: ‘‘Kalam, through its creative writing workshops, encourages the youth to think about who they really are. Many young people find this to be a healing experience. While Kalam doesn’t seek to bring out trauma or stigma, the process has allowed many young people re-negotiate their pain through metaphors and similies, both consciously and unconsciously.”

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So, irrespective of whether you are young or old, happy or sad, have a literary bend of mind or not, at the end of a day put the pen on paper. It spells health.

Donald Trump may replace H-1B lottery with wage-based selection process

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Days after hiking the fees for new H-1B applications to $100,000, the Donald Trump administration has proposed to overhaul the visa process for high-skilled non-immigrant workers. The Trump administration has suggested a wage-based selection process for the H-1B programme, instead of the current lottery system.

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