Written words can do more than communicate. They can also unlock the writer’s ability to process distress, identify hurtful feelings and take control of personal conflict.
Emily Johnston, a writing studies professor at UC Merced, has researched how the act of writing rewires the brain to build resilience — the ability to bounce back and remain strong when facing difficult challenges. She shared her findings about writing’s superpower in a recent online essay and is preparing a book on the subject.
The writing doesn’t have to be as formal as a journal or diary, Johnston said. “Maybe the feelings are too fresh and you don’t have the words yet. So write a to-do list. Write about the cup of coffee on your desk. You’re still exercising that writing muscle. ‘What are the words I’m looking for?’”
We asked Johnston some questions about writing, resilience and her own academic journey:
You describe writing as a way to build a healthy distance from a difficult experience. How does seeing our problems on paper or a screen help us handle them better?
Writing is a tool we use to communicate, but also to process. It helps us sort out and even change our thinking.
Writing creates an interruption between something that’s happening and our thoughts about it. This interruption can regulate our nervous system and clarify how we want to respond. I think of writing as a disaster preventionist: It ever-so-subtly closes the emotional floodgates and keeps us from reacting.
To write, our brain has to switch gears. Our motor systems and language network fire up. How do my hands need to move? Which words will capture what I want to say?
Let’s say I’m in the middle of a disagreement with my partner or just remembering a heated exchange we had last week. I could keep arguing or ruminating. Either is likely to lead me to say things I’ll regret or tumble into an anxiety spiral.
If, instead, I pick up my journal, open my phone’s Notes app, or create a Google doc and start putting my experience into written words, I’m giving my brain something new, yet adjacent, to focus on. I’m directing my attention toward witnessing the experience. I’m not running away from the problem. I’m creating a record of it that I can return to and perhaps share with my partner after we’ve cooled off. Writing is a way to soothe the activation I’m experiencing (heart beating faster, palms sweating, brow furrowed, etc.), allowing me to think through how I want to move through it.
You say that labeling an emotion, even with an emoji or a colorful phrase, can calm the brain. Why is this so effective at reducing a fight-or-flight response?
From a brain perspective, with a difficult experience such as arguing with a loved one or crashing a bicycle, pain isn’t the only damaging agent. It’s also our concepts of what that experience means.
But when we label emotions, like pain, with a grimacing emoji or a colorful phrase, we give them physical form. Our brains can shift from threat-detection mode to making meaning.
For instance, in selecting a grimacing emoji to label our feelings, we not only proclaim something like “I feel frustrated,” we shape a playful relationship with that frustration. Threat is dialed down.
Let’s say that we include a four-letter word in a text message to a friend because we’re flummoxed by a chemistry lecture. Or maybe we press hard with a pen to scrawl the word next to our lecture notes. In either case, we’re refusing to be swallowed whole by the confusion we feel. Threat is still present, but we have reclaimed a sense of agency.
Some see resilience as an ingrained trait — you have it or you don’t. Explain how you see it as something to be developed, with writing as a learning tool.
Yes, I see resilience as something we practice every time we write. Whether it’s a postcard, a dissertation or a tenure file, we take risks and enact change.
In writing a grocery list, I might forget to include something. But I still transform my family from a hungry household into satiated humans. In writing a dissertation, I went from “graduate student” to “doctor.”
I talk to my students about the material effects of their writing — from social media posts to essays they write when applying for internships, grad school or jobs. What you write might miss the mark, I explain, but you’re putting yourself out there. You’re communicating, “this matters to me enough that I’ll risk rejection to be heard.”
When we write, we exercise agency and open the door to change. We cultivate our resilience.
Sometimes you ask students to set aside their laptops and write on paper. Why?
Writing by hand activates a different cognitive process than typing does. We engage our motor systems more intensely, modulating the pressure of our hand on our pen and the pressure of the pen on the paper. Our visual systems have to work harder to ensure what we’re writing aligns with our mental models of the letters we’re producing.
This heightened brain activation means we’re more apt to remember what we’ve written down and to make connections between ideas. (See this NPR article.)
I ask my students to write by hand when they take notes. Because most people can’t handwrite as quickly as they can type, students have to make choices about what to write in full, what to abbreviate, and what to let go of. That’s processing in real time. That’s critical thinking.
In a world where traditional writing is a fading art, you describe it as a builder of well-being. How can we broaden our definition of writing to take advantage of its benefits?
Actually, writing isn’t disappearing so much as it is changing forms. We write all the time — social media, email, chatting with a chatbot, texting. Global literacy rates have skyrocketed.
We also need to embrace a broader understanding of what writing does. Yes, it communicates. But it also helps us regulate, think and create meaning. Writing a to-do list, for example, can turn down the noise from the demands on our time and help us prioritize. It sends a “slow down” signal to our brain.
More formal forms of writing, such as keeping a journal or composing a memo or dossier, work similarly by making concrete the things we value and signaling to our brain that we’re taking action on those values.
Try this broadened definition of writing on for size: an everyday practice of thinking on the page that continuously shapes and reshapes who we are.
You have said that students in STEM fields, who may not see themselves as writers, can find value in this process. How?
Writing is at the core of every discipline. It’s how knowledge circulates.
Without writing, there would be no STEM disciplines. Lab reports and lecture notes are forms of writing as much as literary analysis essays and research proposals are. Every field produces journal articles and books.
In the professional worlds students will enter, writing is everywhere. Marketing campaigns for new products, patient charts, internship applications — all involve writing. Even with the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s important to remember that large language models are trained on literature and that humans type chatbot prompts.
I talk to STEM students about forms of writing in their work. We discuss thought leaders and innovators they admire in their fields. More often than not, those people share their knowledge through writing.
Writing is part of deciding how they want to participate in their fields. They write things that people in their disciplines will read. They write to get their writing out there, to stakeholders beyond our course.
You initially didn't see yourself graduating from college, let alone becoming a professor. What was the turning point?
I struggled in college with addiction and surviving domestic and sexual violence. I stopped going to classes, my grades dropped, and I was put on academic probation. I eventually left school altogether.
When I found my way back and the dean told me this was my last shot, I enrolled in a Native American women’s poetry course. There, I encountered the work of Menominee poet Chrystos. They write in raw, unflinching terms about the violence and addiction they experienced as a lesbian who is Two-Spirit (a term used by Indigenous people that encompasses sexual, gender and spiritual identities). The very existence of their writing was evidence that Chrystos wasn’t consumed by trauma. They were doing what writing does for people: bearing witness, refusing silence, transforming pain, regulating.
It occurred to me that I could support other survivors — not by becoming a therapist or psychologist but by putting my story on paper. I made it possible for someone else to see me and perhaps see themselves.
The professor of that class encouraged me to apply for the University of California, Washington, D.C., program, where I interned for the Feminist Majority Foundation and researched law enforcement responses to domestic violence. My project won the Outstanding Research Award. I graduated. A couple of years later, I went to graduate school, where I also started teaching first-year writing. The rest, as they say, is history.
