The surprising power of expressive writing for long covid recovery

On this site, I review the strategies that helped me recover from long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome. See all long covid recovery posts.

This is for information purposes only and nothing I share should be considered medical advice. What works for me may or may not work for you. Please do your own research and consult with your own trusted medical professionals.

What is expressive writing?

Expressive writing for chronic symptoms is based on Dr. John Sarno’s research in resolving chronic pain and other chronic symptoms. It’s not journalling or writing about your day. It’s about going deep to express and release repressed emotions that are causing you stress.

I’ve pieced together how I do expressive writing through several different sources:

• Curable app
• JournalSpeak by Nicole Sachs
• Writing to Release Chronic Pain by Anna Holtzman

Creating a list of topics

One of the ways to get started is make three lists: past stressors, current stressors and personality traits.

You want to list anything you’ve experience that you would not want a friend or loved on to go through. (Yah, it can be a big list.) You don’t need to do this all in one sitting. Self-compassion and gentleness are more important than completion or speed.

Now you have a list of topics to write about!

How to write

Before you get started, you usually commit to deleting or destroying whatever you write immediately after you are finished. This ensures no one will ever read what you write — most importantly YOU will never read it. This helps you have the freedom to express what you need to express.

Then you set a timer for 5-15 minutes. You want it to be long enough to actually get into the meat of things. But also not make it so long that you will avoid writing. I find that I naturally run out of things to say point at it feels complete. That’s OK too.

When it’s time to write, you want to write with your heart and not your mind. Focus on feelings, body sensations and emotions. Say things you’d never say to anyone, including your best friend or therapist. Don’t spell check or grammar check. This is stream of consciousness to get stuff out of you.

I tend to intellectualize things by explaining to myself why it’s happening and reassuring myself that it’s not that bad. This is not expressive writing. If I start going down this path I change paths so I can stay focused on feeling emotions, usually fear or anger.

How to wrap up

Some programs want you to follow up emotional expressive writing with some reflection on what you learned, what you want to let go of and what you want to do moving forward. My brain does WAY too much of this already, so I skip this.

I also really like NOT having a resolution to the writing. This felt uncomfortable to me at first, like what was the point if I didn’t solve anything? But then I noticed just how much my life was changing from pure expression. It helps me develop trust in my body and my intuition that I will make the necessary changes without needing to intellectualize it.

What I never skip is taking a few moments to comfort and reassure myself. This can be just taking some slow breaths and feeling my feet on the floor. Or I may do a comforting meditation.

Results

To be honest, I don’t like expressive writing and I often procrastinate it. But I think this is sometimes a clue that there is something valuable in there for me. For this reason, I commit to doing about two sessions a week for around 10 minutes. I have already seen the results, even with so little practice.

I worked through my past stressor list first and wrote about things that I obsessively still thought about. Expressive writing, paired with therapy, helped this just melt away.

Now I write about my current stressors whenever I feel that tension in my chest, that feeling of barely suppressed bubbling. I write about the things I really want to talk over with a friend. But unlike talking to a friend, a few minutes of writing makes it feel lighter and like I can move forward. (Not that I don’t like talking to friends, but venting serves a way different purpose than expressive writing.)

Now what does this have to do with long covid recovery? Well, the hypothesis behind mind body syndrome is that chronic symptoms are caused by chronic stress. And repressed emotions are a huge source of chronic stress. Learning to feel and release emotions lowers stress and also lowers symptoms!

I would never have believed it if I hadn’t personally experienced it. But it absolutely was a crucial part of my recovery.