Can Writing Help With Loneliness?
Writing is a great way to cope with feelings of loneliness; however, it shouldn’t be your only means of dealing with being lonely.
Humans have utilized writing along with other creative outlets to express emotions for centuries — ever since we figured out how to create markings on clay tablets in 3400 B.C. This tells us one pretty important thing about human nature: that people find solace in being able to express how they feel, whether it’s happy, sad, angry, heartbroken, and yes — lonely.
Writing is one way humans can deal with strong feelings like loneliness, and while you shouldn’t rely solely on writing to fix your situation, it can be a motivational way to cope with your emotions, and it can even be the kick-starter to actually doing something about it.
Writing Can Help You Process and Cope With Your Feelings
Writing requires more cognitive effort, and therefore helps you to process information and emotions better.
When we write, we focus our attention on every word, we use planning and forethought, we often have to organize our thinking to get our thoughts on paper in a way that makes sense, and we have to read over what we wrote. All of these things require great detail and brain power, which is why writing can help us to better understand why we’re feeling lonely, and eventually what we can do about it.
Writing Can Motivate You to Overcome Loneliness
After you’ve written down and processed your emotions, you might feel motivated to take some action to improve your situation.
It’s important to remember that writing is a great way for you to cope with loneliness, but if it ends on paper, how will it improve our lives? We should take the time we need to process those feelings with our writing, but then we have to take actionable steps to overcome those feelings. That means pinpointing why we feel lonely, finding simple, everyday fixes we can do to stop being so lonely, and most importantly, going to therapy if your feelings of loneliness start to get overwhelming.
What Types of Writing Can I Do?
There are a plethora of writing genres you can try to help you process your feelings, but I’ve broken them down into two main categories for simplicity’s sake:
Journaling: If you are more practical-minded, you might enjoy journaling, which is a unique genre because it’s simply writing down your thoughts and feelings to understand them more clearly.
Creative Writing: If you have a more creative mind, you might enjoy delving into more creative types of writing. This includes poetry, short stories, fictional stories, fantasies, or any other literary genre.
What should I write about?
In my experience with journaling to cope with loneliness, I’ve found that it’s best to write prompts that have an end goal of overcoming those feelings in mind.
Writing down your emotions is good for processing them, but if you stop there, it likely won’t help you overcome your loneliness. You need to include some solutions and goals for yourself instead of wallowing in self-pity — and believe me, I know a thing or two about wallowing in self-pity.
If you need some help coming up with journaling prompts, click the button below to get 13 free journal prompts to help you cope with loneliness:
Has writing helped you with your battle of loneliness, and how? Let me know by contacting me via email, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter in the footer of my site for more helpful content tailored to introverts and loners.
