If the anxiety of performing an upcoming task is giving you
stress, simply writing about your feelings may help you perform the task more
efficiently, suggests new research.
The research - published online in the journal
Psychophysiology -- provides the first neural evidence for the benefits of
expressive writing, said lead author Hans Schroder, a doctoral student in
psychology at Michigan State University (MSU) in the US.
"Worrying takes up cognitive resources; it's kind of
like people who struggle with worry are constantly multitasking -- they are
doing one task and trying to monitor and suppress their worries at the same
time," Schroder said.
"Our findings show that if you get these worries out of
your head through expressive writing, those cognitive resources are freed up to
work toward the task you're completing and you become more efficient,"
Schroder said.
For the study, college students identified as chronically
anxious through a validated screening measure completed a computer-based
"flanker task" that measured their response accuracy and reaction
times.
Before the task, about half of the participants wrote about
their deepest thoughts and feelings about the upcoming task for eight minutes.
The other half, in the control condition, wrote about what they did the day
before.
While the two groups performed at about the same level for
speed and accuracy, the expressive-writing group performed the flanker task
more efficiently, meaning they used fewer brain resources, measured with
electroencephalography, or EEG, in the process.
While much previous research has shown that expressive
writing can help individuals process past traumas or stressful events, the
current study suggests the same technique can help people -- especially
worriers -- prepare for stressful tasks in the future.
"Expressive writing makes the mind work less hard on
upcoming stressful tasks, which is what worriers often get 'burned out' over,
their worried minds working harder and hotter," Jason Moser, Associate
Professor at MSU.
"This technique takes the edge off their brains so they
can perform the task with a 'cooler head,'" Moser added.
