The following: 5 Reasons Blogging can Be Your New Therapy, is a guest post by Kelly, the founder of RegularityFitness. Read more about her below!
There are many ways to improve mental health. Perhaps one of the most surprising ways to boost your mood is through blogging!
Through creativity and imagination, we find our identity and our reservoir of healing. The more we understand the relationship between creative expression and healing, the more we will discover the healing power of the arts. (1)
One reason for this is that expressive writing is therapeutic. This doesn’t mean you have to write about mental health. You can write about nearly anything you want to, from hobbies to travel, from your pets to your children. Blogging about any of these topics will help improve your mental health, for nearly anyone. Once you have established a domain name, built an audience and optimized your site you can even make a little money on the side with your blog!
5 Reasons Blogging can Be Your New Therapy
The following are five reasons why improving your mental health can be satisfied through writing a blog.
Connect with a Community
One of the things a blog does for you is it paves a way to connect with other like-minded people. From online knitting circles to fitness groups and cycling clubs, there is a long list of communities that have been created online using blogging. Why are there so many? Because people are different and emphasize different things on their blogs. This attracts different readers and community members.
The beauty of blogging communities is that everyone can choose their level of participation. Some people will just read, others will comment, and still others will provide content, real feedback, and engage on a deep level.
Why is this good for mental health? Because a big part of a healthy mind is social connection. For some, in person social connections are incredibly difficult and require a real stretch on their part. For others, this social interaction comes easily. A blog allows for a social connection on individual terms at the time of their choosing but can also stretch them to connect more socially.
Connecting with a community is just the start of the mental health benefits of blogging.
Develop Curiosity and Satisfy It
Remember the old saying that curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought him back? It’s true. Being curious is a great thing for your mental health. Satisfying that curiosity is even better for you. The process of research, study, and understanding makes your brain work in ways it does not with other activities. This stretches not only your mind, but your opinions as well.
For this to work, your blog needs to be about something you are curious about.
This can be any number of topics, but they all have one thing in common: they are something you enjoy and want to learn more about. It can be an area where you already consider yourself proficient and want to learn more, or it can be an area where you have a lot to learn and know very little.
The other requirement is that you be able to satisfy your curiosity with a reasonable amount of research. You don’t want to have to get a college degree to understand the topic, but it does need to be deep enough to inspire the curiosity of others also. This is how you will build an audience for your writing. You will learn something new, and your audience will learn with you.
Image by Brandy Dopkins via Flickr.
Continue Learning
This leads to the next topic: keep learning. Lifelong learners, those who go to school, take on second careers, or simply have jobs where they learn constantly tend to have fewer mental health issues, suffer less from dementia and other common mental diseases. They also tend to have a higher IQ.
It is rare to find a field that has any depth where you can learn all you need to learn in a few simple lessons. Most are lifelong pursuits that are never really completed, and mastered only after years of in-depth study.
Those are the topics your blog should tackle. The deep subjects that keep you guessing and learning for years or even decades.
Give Back
By writing a blog and sharing with your readers, you are giving back to the world the things you have learned.
One of the keys to mental health is to give back, show kindness to others where you can, and be generous with both your time and money.
Blogging allows you to do this in unique ways, ways that trigger other acts of kindness and positive thoughts in your brain. These thoughts give you a better self-image, a higher opinion of others, and helps you dwell on the positive rather than the negative, all things that lead to improved mental health.
Work it Out
A big part of better mental health is getting out there and getting active. What does that have to do with writing a blog? Well, blogging has to be about something, and often that something is an activity or thing you are passionate about. Blogging about it can inspire you to go out and do more of it.
In order to learn, to have something unique to share with your readers, you need to be doing that thing. If you are, you can write with more authority and gain mastery yourself.
Blogging provides several paths to better mental health. How you take them, and what you do with them will determine the improvements you make.
We wish you the absolute best at trying your hand at something new.
About the Author
Kelly is the founder of RegularityFitness, where she and associates blog about the best fitness exercises, weight loss methods, diet, muscle building. That will help you get a good shape and healthy. You can also connect with Kelly on Twitter.
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