Before signing off for bed recently, a friend told me, “At the end of a day during which I’ve written something, I feel that the day, the entire day, has been well spent.”
Unfortunately, I haven’t been writing frequently enough to know that feeling, but I remember it. It also reminded me of what I think the most valuable function of poetry might be for a society: It helps us sleep at night.
I’ve often said that the collective health of a culture could be measured in the volume of poets it produces, and there’s actually a large body of scientific literature that suggests this might be true to some extent.
Studies on the positive effects of expressive writing began in the 1980s when psychologist James W Pennebaker and his colleagues asked undergraduates to write about personally traumatic experiences for four consecutive days. Six weeks later, those students reported more positive moods and fewer illnesses than the control group, which wrote about trivial matters. Later studies included blood draws, and showed enhanced immune and cognitive function within the trauma-writing groups.
A 1999 study by Joshua Smyth and Arthur Stone at the State University of New York’s Stony Brook campus gave the same task to patients with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis, who then demonstrated improved lung capacity and a reduction of disease severity. While it wasn’t clear what was causing these salutary effects, it was strong evidence that psychological factors inherent in the act of writing itself can have a real influence on physical health.
Most people are familiar with the concept of catharsis, a Greek word which means “a bodily purging.” In a Freudian sense, it means the expulsion of the emotions that are supposedly clouding and confounding our minds. But writing requires more than just a simple release of raw emotions to be effective. As anyone active on Facebook or Twitter knows, simply ranting about the problems of the world doesn’t make anyone feel better. What matters seems to be an attempt at making sense of the world.
An intensive journaling study by Susan K. Lutgendorf and Philip M. Ullrich in 2002 found that the writing needed to include cognitive processing — and not just emotional expression — to be beneficial. The writer has to find meaning from the experience, to find a way to learn or grow from it, in order to reap the positive effects of the writing process.
And this is where poetry comes into play.
What is a poem, if not a little linguistic meaning machine? Like any work of art, what a poem strives to do is carve some new sliver of understanding out of the emotional and physical caldron of chaos that is human experience. As readers, what we enjoy is that someone dared to explore the unknown, and brought us back the poem as a map we can follow along.
When asked how he felt winning the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow is said to have replied, “I don’t know, I haven’t written about it.” That statement is exactly how poets and artists live in the world.
A poem almost always starts with an itch, some kind of irritation or lack of understanding that we’re struggling to wrap our minds around. Something bothers us, gnaws at us subconsciously until we finally sit down to write. That quest to figure out what the trouble is becomes the poem, which is an articulation of a journey into the unknown — so that we can name it, so that we can map it, so that we can bring it into the light of understanding.
This process is fundamental to the development of cognitive function in homo sapiens. It’s the reason why the first task we’re given by God in Genesis is to name all of the living creatures: If we can name them, we can tame them, and then maybe they won’t kill us. This is what the human mind was evolved for; learning from experience to plan for the future. Is it any wonder that there are beneficial health effects that come along with it?
Being linguistic creatures, poetry is the most powerful place that this meaning-making process can occur — in the landscape of words, which is the landscape of our ideas and emotions.
As Pennebaker and Smyth explain in their book “Opening Up by Writing It Down,” what seems to be happening is that effort to bury our experiences, rather than exploring and taming them, becomes physical work. If we don’t take the time to organize our thoughts, so that we can capture and store them, they continue to take up space in our working memories; we continue to gnaw at the itches, whether we want to or not. It raises our cortisol levels, which increases our heart rate and hinders our ability to rest.
Poets are able to scratch those itches so we can get to sleep.
http://www.pe.com/2017/12/03/suffering-from-insomnia-heres-how-writing-a-poem-could-help-you-sleep/
No comments:
Post a Comment