Keep Stress Away With Expressive Writing

Are you troubled with stress and anxiety due to an enthralling task handed over to you at work or by a professor in college? Well, there is a way out. You can get yourself out of this stress without having to affect your work. The way out is to express those feelings on a sheet of paper to cool your brain. This has been proved in a study that writing out your feelings on paper can help in reducing stress levels greatly and assist you to do your task well at the same time.

Researchers reveal that worrying about work can take up your intellectual resource. When you are stressed or anxious, you start multi-tasking. One side your mind is trying to focus on the task and on the other it is trying to suppress the stress.

"Our findings show that if you get these worries out of your head through expressive writing, those cognitive resources are freed up to work toward the task you're completing and you become more efficient,"

says Hans Schroder, lead author and doctoral student at Michigan State University (MSU).

"Expressive writing makes the mind work less hard on upcoming stressful tasks, which is what worriers often get 'burned out' over, their worried minds working harder and hotter," added Jason Moser, Associate Professor at MSU.

"This technique takes the edge off their brains so they can perform the task with a 'cooler head'," he explained.

For the study that was published in the journal of Psychophysiology, the college students who were recognized as chronically anxious by means of a validated screening measure, completed a 'flanker task' (computer-based) which measured their response accuracy and the reaction times.

Before this task, half of the participants wrote their deepest thoughts and desires about the upcoming task for eight minutes. Whereas, the other half, who were kept in the control condition wrote about what they did the previous day.

Though the two groups performed with the similar speed and accuracy, the group which engaged in expressive writing performed the task more efficiently. 

With inputs from IANS