Therapeutic Value of Blogging
It wouldn’t surprise me one day to wake up and hear a news report stating the benefits of a sedintary lifestyle that incorporates smoking coupled with asbestos and bacon sandwiches.
Doesn’t it always seem that what’s good for us today is bad for us tomorrow – an vice versa?
Take the recent article from the New York Times that made a weak attempt to intimate that blogging is a contributing factor to life-shortening health woes.
Scientific American begs to differ. The article “Blogging – It’s Good for You” outlines the therapeutic benefits of writing your personal thoughts, feelings and experiences.
Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.
I’m not sure if blogging is killing me or healing me, and I don’t really care. I enjoy it, and I’m sticking with it, no matter what the next report says.
I tend to agree with this notion – blogging is an expressive, creative outlet for me. And it allows me to get interesting stuff or updates to friends & family who’re spread out all over the country (and a few abroad) in a single shot.
Yeah but you’re talking two different types of blogging. If you’re doing it for fun, it’s therapeutic. Writing a journal has always been touted as a therapeutic activity. On the other hand, if you’re doing it to make a living, it can be very stressful.
I agree. Blogging is therapeutic. Just getting words down on a page, in your journal, is one thing, but all this chatter and communication, and *responses*, it really is an amazing feeling, especially when you consider the geographic spread of most of us in the blogosphere.