Writing your way through anxiety

01/05/22 • 20 min

It is a well-documented belief that writing your feelings down can make you feel better. A range of people, from seasoned mental health professionals to anguished teens, will agree that writing a diary, or ‘journaling’, to invoke the current buzzword, can help you to clear your head and make important connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Writing stuff down can help us to identify the things that bring us down, the events that trigger anxiety and low mood, and the actions that make us feel better.

Journalist and writer Harriet Walker is no stranger to the healing and reassuring powers of writing. As The Times’ Fashion Editor and recently published novelist in her own right, she says using the disquiet in her own mind to create something much more dramatic on the page can become a type of helpful catharsis. Harriet joins us to discuss her strategies for using writing to overcome and exorcise feelings of anxiety, and to share ideas with listeners of how to incorporate therapeutic writing into their own good mental health practice

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Managing behaviour between Home and School

What impact have the past couple of years had on our young children’s behaviour? Our children played in person, in the park, in the playground for several hours a day: they negotiated, disagreed, made up, compromised. Overnight, their schools closed and they suddenly had only their siblings, their parents and themselves for company, at home, all day, every day. How did this sudden shift in home life affect families, and how have we readjusted? And what are the implications moving forward, as we are firmly told that Covid is part of the new normal, on top of the ongoing challenges of everyday family life?

Our guest on this episode of Raise Her Up is Livvy Gormally, a behaviour expert who works with families and schools to share her specialist knowledge of Early Intervention, Behaviour Management and School Inclusion. Livvy will talk us through the impact the past couple of years have had on our kids’ development, will offer her tips on how to recalibrate our childrens’ behaviour and manage our own expectations, and how to navigate the at-times challenging Christmas period ahead.

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Next Episode

Empowered: living your life with passion and purpose

This week on Raise Her Up: youtube, education activist and visionary Vee Kativhu on being empowered, overcoming adversity and living life with passion and purpose. We are grateful to Vee for sharing her story, including her experiences as a victim of racism. It can be hard for people to talk about the racism they’ve suffered, and we’re grateful to have the opportunity to learn from her. Although Vee did not attend a GDST school, we can all learn from testimonies such as the one she shares with us in this episode.

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