Poetic power: well-being via writing

The words I’d never dare to speak,
the hidden bruises that I keep
buried in my chest, my fight,
the battles that keep me awake at night,
the feelings I could never talk about;
These lines will tell you stories I could never say out loud.

Some of my fellow poetry-lovers may relate to this feeling: Your mind is full of thoughts that are spiralling eternally, dragging you down with them and even if you wanted to speak about what is occupying your mind, you would not even know where to start. But as you grab a pen and allow the chaos to spill onto paper, the knot slowly unravels and everything starts to make so much more sense. There is a certain clarity gained from confessing your feelings to this piece of paper and once all the thoughts and emotions are out there, they may also not weigh on your mind as heavily any more.

Within psychology, the value of utilising creative methods as therapeutic tools to express oneself, regulate one’s emotions or process challenging memories has long been recognised and may be done via methods like movement, painting or sculpting (Van Lith, 2016). Another form of art that can be implemented for well-
being purposes is poetry and research has begun to explore how reading, writing or listening to poetry may positively affect us.
Although there currently is some variation in how precisely poetry gets integrated into therapy sessions, the overall research literature points towards beneficial effects of poetry for people’s mental well-being. Besides alleviating stress, incorporating poetry into the therapy process has been implicated in reducing symptoms of depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (Kassab et al., 2026). All of these psychiatric conditions are associated with considerable distress and exploring new avenues of treatment therefore poses great potential for the area of clinical psychology (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). One of the mechanisms that may make poetry therapy effective could be its value in drawing awareness to one’s thoughts, feelings and inner sensations which might go hand-in-hand with other beneficial processes like creating a sense of connection with oneself and others (Alfrey et al., 2021). This is supported by findings demonstrating that poetry can elicit measurable emotional bodily responses like chills and goosebumps, next to activating brain regions implicated in emotional processing and the experience of pleasure, even when negative emotions may be processed in the poem (Liu et al., 2015; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017).

But the beneficial effects of poetry are not limited to the therapy room. Challenging emotions or thoughts form a natural part of live and finding strategies to adaptively process them is important for anybody’s well-being. Engaging with poetry can be one such approach and it has been suggested that university students could form a group of people whom poetry may be a particularly valuable resource for (Majorana & VanDeusen, 2022). High stress levels, academic pressure and major life changes during the transition from high school to university are factors that can leave students vulnerable to experience mental health challenges (Sheldon et al., 2021) and utilising poetry may help students cope with these.

In summary, poetry may have beneficial effects for people’s mental health and well-being, not only when applied as a tool in the psychotherapeutic context, but also when incorporated into one’s personal life – for instance as an emotional outlet during stressful periods when studying at university. Engaging with poetry can take many forms, may it be via encountering pieces that emotionally resonate with us, discussing poetry with others or getting creative ourselves in order to make sense of what weighs heavily on us. So, if you are now thinking about grabbing that pen and paper: Amazing! Give it a try! Just write about whatever comes to mind or, if starting still feels a bit daunting, maybe find a prompt to guide you for your first steps. Do whatever feels most comfortable, because the good thing is that, as with any form of art, there is no right or wrong. Poetry becomes meaningful when it means something to you, because a poem is not supposed to be perfect – it should be real.

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