Recent research by Dr Elizabeth Broadbent of The University of Auckland has recently published fascinating research that shows writing about your feelings can speed up healing.
In this randomized controlled trial, two groups of healthy people over 64 years of age were asked to write for 20 minutes a day either 1. about upsetting life events or 2. about daily activities, for 3 consecutive days. Group 1. was encouraged to write openly and freely about how they had felt at the time of a past traumatic event, while group 2. asked to write about practical things, not emotions.
Doctors then measured the rate of healing of identical (deliberately inflicted!) minor skin wounds. Eleven days later, 76% of the group that had written about trauma had fully healed while only 42% of the other group had healed.
So it would seem that old psychological stress can impair wound healing, and that the immune system can be boosted by processing emotional traumas. It will be very interesting to see how research in this field develops.
