Writing the dreaded English essay spikes anxiety for thousands of students, but is there a way for writing to boost students’ well-being instead?
I wanted to know if a new approach to teaching literary studies could tap into the feel-good side of writing and make essays a path to wellness, so I designed an English course to try it out at Nipissing University.
We know that university students are at risk of mental-health struggles, particularly depression and anxiety. If writing can help instead of stress them out, it could be a refreshing change for English studies — and a new way for teachers to introduce essay writing.
Studies show that writing can boost your mental and physical health if you focus on expressing your emotions and digging for insight.
Paying more attention to the positives in our lives, specifically by writing them down, could further enhance short- and long-term well-being.
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Starting with journalling
(Logan Weaver/Unsplash)
Students first need to find out that writing can actually support well-being.
In the course, they took up a journalling habit, but it wasn’t just about venting their feelings or writing whatever came to mind. We looked at studies on how writing can reshape your thinking and boost positivity.
Three methods stood out:
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Write down “three good things” about each day and, importantly, your own role in bringing them about. This technique was pioneered in a study led by psychologist Martin Seligman. Participants who adopted the approach reported feeling happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month and six-month points. It’s now been widely shared, and it’s a great way to start a new journalling habit because it’s straightforward and effective.
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Look to the future and write about your best possible self. When you imagine a fulfilled version of yourself, it will motivate you to do the hard work to get there. According to psychologist Laura A. King, when you imagine a fulfilled version of yourself, you can experience the health benefits of writing without revisiting negatives from the past.
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Add creativity to your journalling. Turn a moment from your day into a comic; narrate your day as if it were happening in Middle Earth; write a haiku about your toothpaste. A diary-based study of more than 600 young adults led by psychologist Tamlin Conner showed a straightforward effect where being creative one day boosted well-being the next.
Case study on the self
Where journalling provides a space to play around with techniques, essays give students a place to reflect on their efforts, report on the results and hypothesize about positive effects of the experience.
One of the fascinating things about writing for well-being is that no one knows for certain why it works. Across studies it shows reliable, modest benefits, but the underlying mechanism for its effects hasn’t been pinned down — so students’ own theories could contribute to solving a real mystery.
Writers feed off inspiration. Showing students that authors have been using writing for well-being — and making great art in the process — gives them that extra push to keep writing and go deeper.
Inspiration from literature
(CP PHOTO/National Archives of Canada/C-011299
Among Canadian authors, L. M. Montgomery’s story is especially compelling. Her famous books like Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon have made a utopia of Prince Edward Island; but inwardly, Montgomery experienced deep mental anguish, leading to addiction in her later life.
Her journals detail this other side to her life and show how she used writing to ease her mental suffering. As she memorably notes in an entry from 1904:
“I feel better for writing it out. It is almost as efficacious as swearing would be and much more respectable.”
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Playing detective with Canada’s female literary past
Looking to Montgomery as a mentor helped students realize how creative and immersive personal writing can be, in turn motivating them to push forward with their own journalling.
Discussing Montgomery’s life writing in their essays made sense because they could see how her efforts to find solace through writing were relatable to their own.
(CP PHOTO/ Anne Marie Tobin)
Easing back on literary jargon
Poetry can beautifully map a state of mind. But traditional approaches to teaching it have a tendency to suck the life out of literature that should be a joy and a delight.
Instead of taking what some teachers call a “technique spotting” approach where you count up the metaphors, teaching English from a well-being perspective taps into poetry’s healing qualities.
In the United Kingdom, the Poetry Pharmacy movement spearheaded by publisher and arts advocate William Sieghart focuses on the healing power of poetry.
His curated poetry collections pair thoughtfully selected poems with one-page prescriptions, highlighting each work’s curative potential for conditions like insecurity, regret, loneliness and more. Both the poem itself and the interpretation serve to advance self-knowledge and alleviate mental suffering.
Students easily ran with this idea. They found joy in poems that spoke to their lived experience, used empathy to recommend poems to others in need and wrote movingly in essays about the mental-health issues they face most often — like academic pressure, fear of failure, homesickness, social anxiety, perfectionism, procrastination and more.
The poetry-remedy concept also lent itself to experiential approaches where students could tape a chosen poem on their mirror, make it the lock screen on their phone, share it with a loved one, create a painting or visual, text it to a distant friend — and ultimately share the story of what happened in essay form or classroom discussion.
Read more:
Why reading and writing poems shouldn’t be considered a luxury in troubling times
Turning away from AI
Essays are a notoriously difficult part of academic life, which is why generative AI presents such an irresistible pull to the stressed-out student. If essay writing is no more than a tedious recital, it’s no wonder they would gladly pass along what AI spews out on such topics.
Writing instead about your own interior world, finding evidence in your own experience and using literature to light a personalized path to growth are tasks that cannot be easily farmed out to a text-generator — because they speak directly to your own humanity.
The idea that writing can offer fresh avenues for growth and betterment is a welcome reminder of what genuine human writing is truly for.
In teaching a course on it, I found writing for well-being to be an exciting expansion of English studies broadly and essay writing in particular. It can support students’ writing and communication skills while genuinely enriching their lives, and it can help us inspire students with what’s most important in the study of literature: a lifetime love of reading and a willingness to take up the pen.
