By Paisley McFarland
The Scene staff
While juggling school, work, relationships and other responsibilities, it’s easy for college students to forget to set aside moments for themselves.
The society we live in is built to value being more productive — achieving more, earning more, having more.
Sometimes this mindset, which is often engrained in us, serves us well. But other times, it can really have a negative impact on our mental health. It is important, now more than ever, to find outlets to cope in our busy, structured world.
As a kid, writing was a safe space for me. I could come up with my own rules, my own explanations and my own thoughts about whatever was on my mind. I could write in any genre I wanted and allow myself to enter a “flow state,” letting my imagination run wild.
In my experience, school assignments often require writing to be structured and analytical rather than creative. There are very few chances to break away and find joy in expressing thoughts in a new way.
Don’t get me wrong, writing and thinking convergently can be just as engaging and beneficial for your brain. But with creative writing, you let go of the reins of traditional academic standards and let your mind flow.
This not only feels great, it also has some significant positive effects on your mind. So I find creative writing to be an essential part of my happiness.
It’s not just what I think. There is a lot of research proving that writing improves your mental state in different ways:
1.Creativity is good for the brain.
Studies have shown that creativity is linked to a healthier brain and lifestyle, according to a 2021 report in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
In studies involving university students engaged in different creative activities, those given tasks involving divergent thinking show a higher self-evaluated mood score than peers given convergent thinking tasks.
Breast cancer patients participating in art therapy during treatment recalled those experiences as “an opportunity for personal transformation and growth.” Students in Iran who showed high levels of creativity also had high levels of self-reported mental well-being. These effects possibly support the theory that creativity has a positive relationship with “subjective well-being,” according to the report.
2.Writing engages multiple parts of the brain.
While writing, different parts of your brain work together to encode your thoughts into words and phrases, according to a 2019 report published by the University of Waterloo Writing and Communication Centre in Ontario, Canada.
Say you’re recounting a childhood memory about getting ice cream on the beach with your parents. Your frontal lobe would be responsible for organizing and collecting memories and information. Broca’s area would put these thoughts and memories into language form.
Your visual cortex is responsible for imagination in the process of writing, allowing you to get a picture of the story you write as you write it. And lastly, as you continue to write more stories, the caudate nucleus turns these repetitive actions into adapted patterns, basically serving as the bridge between different parts of the brain, making it more effective and building skill.
Creative writing also can improve self-esteem and build emotional intelligence and empathy, according to a 2018 report in Frontiers in Psychology. It summarizes studies showing that there is a strong correlation between emotional intelligence and creativity.
In an experiment testing the impact of emotional intelligence on creativity in various settings, researchers found that high emotional intelligence can increase creativity, and that different parts of the brain (such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex) are actively engaged when emotional intelligence is being used.
In conclusion, it’s not just my story. Educated people have conducted studies proving what I already knew to be true. Creative writing is criminally underrated. I urge you to take this information and act on it. Become an avid creative writer, and see how it can change your life.