Writing your way through anxiety

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

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