Can writing make you happy? Monday’s New York Times carried an obituary of Michael White, an Australian social worker and family therapist who helped to develop the practice of narrative therapy, in which victims of childhood trauma are encouraged to create stories and metaphors to gain control over their experience and reshape it in a more positive light. The goal is “to help a patient recognize personal strengths,” and so develop what another practitioner described as “the ???preferred stories’ of success and achievement in the patient’s life.” On one level, this strikes me as an accurate description of what we do when we tell ourselves our own stories, revising as we go, until our lives end up with the kind of narrative arc that would make a Hollywood producer happy: we find our strength, triumph over adversity, and write a best-selling memoir (loosely based on a true story) that ends with us smiling on the couch with Oprah as the final music swells.
But it turns out that such narratives may not be necessary to achieving our bliss. A recent study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology suggests that as little as two minutes a day of “expressive writing” twice a week can lead to improved health. It’s being called the “two minute miracle” by some researchers. While the results confirm previous studies about the health benefits of daily writing, those studies required participants to write for 15-20 minutes each day. According to the University of Missouri psychologists who conducted the most recent study, measurable improvements in mood and physical symptoms show up even in these very brief writing sessions. As a form of therapy, writing no longer needs to be like going to the gym. Now it can be like sex. (Or is that just me?)
But all this raises an obvious question: if writing is so good for your emotional health, why are so many writers so miserable?
One possible answer seems as obvious as the question: while the participants in the study reported clear psychological benefits from their daily writing exercises, it seems fair to assume that none of them were trying to make a living from it. It’s a sad truth that when you take something you enjoy and try doing it for money, all the pleasure vanishes. What rushes in to fill up the void is professional anxiety: Will I get published? Will I get reviewed? Will I see my book on the front table in Barnes & Noble? And how does Carrie Bradshaw afford all those fabulous shoes writing one column a week?
But then, I suppose there’s a deeper question here, in which the chicken and the egg carry on their eternal struggle. What leads one to become a writer, anyway? Is it the experience of childhood misery, which we instinctively learn to control by transforming it into stories? Could it be the humiliations that come with enjoying books in American middle schools? Are we simply self-medicating, and in higher doses than those recommended for good mental health?
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always felt that writing can be intensely satisfying, but it can also make you crazy. Being a writer is like having a second love life: when it’s going well, you feel elated. When it’s not going well, you feel frustrated and inadequate. And when it’s not happening at all? That’s when you sit watching Carrie Bradshaw muse over her weekly column in her lingerie, and you want to throw a shoe at the screen, except that all your shoes are old and she’d certainly throw them back.
Maybe what we need are clearer warnings about the possible side-effects of writing, like those that appear in tiny print on medication bottles. And so, as a service to our readers, let me try to offer a partial list:
Side effects may include:
Abnormal dreams, anxiety, childish glee, contempt for gainful employment, cursing, delusions of grandeur, diminished sex drive, dizziness, dry mouth, envy, feverish intensity, flirtatiousness, flushing, freecell, gas, headache, hipsterism, inspiration, impotence, insomnia, irony, loss of appetite, loss of fashion sense, lycanthropy, masturbation, metaphor, multiple personality disorder, murderous hatred of editors and critics, nausea, nervousness, obsession with Carrie Bradshaw, pacing, pondering, publication, rash, repetition compulsion, repetition compulsion, rhyme, sexual voracity, sleepiness, sleeplessness, snacking, sweating, students, terror, three-act structure, upset stomach, vomiting, weakness, weight gain, wit, wryness, yawning.
Do not take this drug while raising children or if you hope to purchase real estate. Symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder may take up to five weeks to appear, so remain vigilant. Avoid operating ATM machines. In rare instances, tenure may occur.
Reading the results of the University of Missouri study, I’m reminded of the Russian immigrant who approached me at the end of an ESL class some years ago:
“Teacher,” he said, “what are the people like who are living in misery?”
Perplexed, I answered, “Well, I suppose they are very unhappy.”
He looked dismayed at my response. “Even in St. Louis? I have cousin there. There is job for me.”
I felt terrible at the time for misleading him. Looking back at it now, the conversation seems to me strangely profound. One might say that we all live in misery. But there is job, so we make best of it. And now that I’ve written about it, I have to admit that I do feel a little better.