How writing transforms us - even our health and wellbeing

Andrew Kauffmann, who will be teaching a series of workshops with us, shares his expertise on the power of writing to transform our lives.

To mark a new year, I celebrated with a few friends at a jazz concert. Sitting in the front row of a grungy bar, I was only a couple of feet away from the lead musician. I was close enough to see the sweat forming on his brow and staining his shirt sleeves. Observing his ecstatic facial expressions and how he seemed to be fully present in the moment, I thought about how we lose ourselves in our acts of creativity. He certainly seemed lost in the joy of playing the saxophone and I, too, got lost in the intensity of his and his bandmates’ performance.

As a writer and a tutor who promotes the health and wellbeing effects of creative writing, I was absorbed by the state of ‘flow’ the saxophonist seemed to achieve playing his instrument. Watching him, I tried to picture those moments I have achieved a state of flow, as I play, not with a musical instrument, but with a blank sheet of paper, and even on my laptop keyboard.

On this concept that as writers and artists, we can reach a state of ‘flow’, psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi wrote about how, in certain conditions, we can become “completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. And new ideas emerge.”^[1] Many of us yearn for and might revel in this experience of feeling a kind of flow in our writing, but in practice we know it can be asking a lot. It’s hard to achieve.

Since Csíkszentmihályi’s work in the 1970s, new research demonstrates the neurobiological effects of any involvement in the arts (including writing) and how this works on our brain: as Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross argue in a recent book ‘Your Brain on Art’, the arts “transform us”.^[2]

Whether it’s music, the visual arts, or writing, we’re told “they can help move you from sickness to health, stress to calm, or sadness to joy, and they enable you to flourish and thrive.” Not only does getting creative alter our mood, together with other researchers, Magsamen and Ross suggest that participating in a creative activity, such as writing, can change our very physiology.

These are big claims. When we’re struggling to find the right words to describe how we’re feeling, let alone finding the motivation to begin writing, it’s hard to feel anything other than frustration. However, as a facilitator of writing for wellbeing workshops with health and care charities such as Carers UK, Kidney Care UK, and brainstrust, I’ve come to see how transformative writing can truly be, for our self-esteem, and for participants’sense of optimism.

I’ve also come to observe how the commitment that comes from writing - writing any words at all, be it a new poem, or in a journal - can create a sense of purpose and structure. Writing expressively and from life material matters to me as a man with a chronic health condition, and indeed as someone who recognises that without writing my sense of wellbeing can wobble a bit. It matters because there have been times, with the right support, where I’ve felt I’ve had the platform to express myself personally, and this has felt like a way of reclaiming my voice.

The research appears to back up this idea that writing is a means of reclaiming our voice or our identity, whether we have a health condition, we find ourselves becoming a carer, and where perhaps we also experience confusion, shame or stigma. James Pennebaker undertook pioneering work on the health effects of inhibiting what we say or concealing what we feel about difficult life experiences, and the radical effects of writing intentionally about the tougher aspects of our lives instead.

Research suggests we don’t even need to write about trauma or difficult emotions to feel positive health benefits, and we don’t need to have clinical health needs to benefit from a more expressive style of writing. Putting down some words as we attempt to visualise our future ‘best self’, or looking to identify positive things in our lives, even where we’ve faced challenges, can also improve our sense of wellbeing. Writing just that little bit, even in a context where we’re experiencing huge constraints on our time, energy and our attention, has significant benefits.

A gentle, inclusive approach to writing new material will be the focus in the forthcoming series of Live Online workshopsWriting Our Health and Care Stories, that I’m leading from 18th February. The underlying aim will be to encourage writing, in all its forms, however writing works best for you. Drawing on source material from poets, novelists and writers of nonfiction and memoir, we’ll be considering the many varied health and care stories we can tell, and the many ways in which we can tell them. Where personal care experiences provide us with source material, we’ll confidentially explore and write down where that material now takes us in terms of how we’re feeling and what stimulus it might provide us with, to generate new stories. Recent works of fiction and creative nonfiction including Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, and Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata will give us diverse examples of health and care stories to draw on, together with classic works from Clarice Lispector, Audre Lorde and Derek Jarman.

In our first workshop Writing What’s Within, we will reflect on what we are feeling physically or emotionally, and give ourselves permission to access and tell some of our more challenging or intimate stories. We will consider the ways in which we can safely tell these stories within clear boundaries, and read works from writers who have attempted a more embodied approach to writing their health and care experiences.

In Health and Illness as Metaphors, our second LiveOnline workshop,on March 11th, we will pick up a theme Lily Dunn writes about and teaches, which is how we can use language, and specifically metaphor, to tell our stories in a way that sits appropriately with our deeply personal life experiences. Drawing on works by Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf and Anne Boyer, we will examine the ways in which health and care needs can be brought both vividly and thoughtfully to the page.

Concluding this new series of Live Onlines, we will finish on April 1st with a workshop on how we might Lay Bare Our Experience where the questions of storytelling perspective, and how we might narrate or give form to our health and care stories will be the main focus. We will look at the increasingly fragmented ways in which writers write about their health experiences, and where they seek to be faithful to these experiences by shunning the conventions of linear storytelling.

Each workshop can be booked separately at £25 a ticket for each live workshop, or a combination £70 ticket can be purchased which includes all three workshops at a £5 discount. These sessions are designed to work as a series, with a successive series of writing exercises to engage with to help develop your story. I very much hope to see you joining, and would like to underline that everybody is welcome, whatever your experience.

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Andrew Kauffmann is a coach and a tutor of expressive and therapeutic writing. The Centre for Mental Health’s 2024 Writer in Residence, he has lived with a mental health condition for over 20 years. A kidney donor, and a campaigner with extensive experience working for health and care charities such as Age UK, Macmillan Cancer Support and Royal National Institute of Blind People, he has recently run writing workshops for members of Carers UK, Renal Arts Groupand Kidney Care UK. He delivers writing for wellbeing workshops for members of brainstrust, a UK based brain tumour charity. Elsewhere, he’s led workshops on writing challenging material for The Literary Consultancy and The Write Salon. He has completed a CPD-accredited introduction to Therapeutic and Reflective Writing with The Professional Writing Academy, and undergone training with the Institute for Narrative Therapy on turning life events into stories. A coach who focuses on stories as a tool to support individuals undergoing life transitions, Andrew is undertaking an MA in Creative Writing and Wellbeing at Teesside University. Andrew has worked with individuals with a wide range of health and care experiences. The workshops place a priority on respecting every single experience and providing space for every experience to be listened to.

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^[1] Mihály Csíkszentmihályi wrote a number of books on Flow, including Flow: The Psychology of Happiness

^[2] Magsamen, Susan & Ross, Ivy. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (2025) Canongate Books