6 Ways to Improve Your Mental Health Using Creative Writing

©️Chiefnerds | Improve Mental Health

Are you taking enough care of your mental health? Think about the last time you did something truly beneficial for your mind and mental wellbeing. If it’s been a while, you might want to take more active care of yourself and make sure you’re preserving your inner peace. This is because your mental health should be equally as important as your physical health.

And, if you’re willing to take more care of your mental health, creative writing might just be the right way to go. Creative writing is a brilliant way for you to work on your mental health and improve it. If you’re not sure how- just keep reading.

Here are 6 ways to improve your mental health using creative writing.

Remove Self-Doubt

When it comes to saving our mental health, we need to start working on our relationship with ourselves. Most of us experience the following things more often than we should:

1. Self-doubt
2. Low self-esteem
3. Self-censorship

This type of behavior makes us feel like we’re less worthy than the people around us and cause us to feel anxious or even depressed.

But, creative writing gives us a chance to be who we are and express ourselves freely. By practicing creative writing, we’re actually:

1. Allowing ourselves to be free
2. Exploring our wildest ideas
3. Building back our self-esteem

There’s no one to judge you or set any rules you need to follow. This gives you the liberty to write freely and be completely disburdened while doing so.

Process Your Emotions

Creative writing is about turning our emotions, ideas, and thoughts into a piece of written content. This content isn’t supposed to win a Nobel prize for literature. It’s just supposed to make us feel better.

Here’s why.

It’s very important that we process our emotions and actively deal with how we feel. If we suppress it, we’ll end up feeling:

1. Tense
2. Under a lot of pressure
3. Stressed out

With creative writing, you’re able to write about all the things that you feel, think, or want to do. You’re using these ideas and motives from your everyday life and writing about them in your creative session. That means you’re:

1. Processing things
2. Dealing with issues
3. Exploring how you feel

This process will help you get to the bottom of things and disburden your mind from things that have been occupying it.

Find a Purpose

Creative writing is a beautiful process that you’ll fall in love with as soon as it becomes a habit. And, one of the best effects it’ll have on you is that it will give a new purpose to every single day.

With creative writing as a habit, you will:

1. Have something to look forward to
2. Give yourself a reason to be happy
3. Enjoy your free time actively and constructively

When you embrace a healthy habit such as creative writing, you’re making every single day better than the one before and giving yourself an extra reason to be happy.

Learn About Yourself

You can learn a lot about who you are by reading the things you wrote during your creative writing sessions. And, more often than not, you’ll find things you didn’t even know were there.

This is because, when you’re writing, you shouldn’t think about an audience or the purpose of your writing. You’re just doing it to make yourself feel better.

This is why you’ll write down:

1. Your deepest thoughts
2. Your fears and worries
3. Your observations

You’ll be keeping a record of how you feel and what you’re thinking. Over time, you’ll be able to look back through those records and see how far you’ve come.

And learning about ourselves is one of the best ways to preserve our mental health and stay focused on it.

Show Self-Love

Loving yourself is a precondition for happiness. If you’re not happy with who you are or what you do, you won’t be able to live a balanced and peaceful life.

And, self-love doesn’t come overnight for most people. This is a reason more for you to actively work on acquiring it.

Luckily, you can do it through creative writing. All you need to do is show some self-love every day in any form possible:

1. Write encouraging messages
2. List the things you love about yourself
3. Write inspirational quotes
4. Write letters to yourself
5. Write reminders of the beautiful things you’ve did

Showing self-love is a challenge, but it’s among the ultimate recipes for happiness and stable mental health.

Write Your Problems Away

Another great writing technique you should try is writing your problems away.

When you’re experiencing something unpleasant such as coping with a tragedy or trying to forgive someone, you need all the help you can get.

And, creative writing allows you to:

1. Write about those problems
2. Process them
3. Say goodbye to them

You’ll be leaving these problems on paper and making it easier for yourself to move on instead of holding on to them.