How Blogging Became The Go-To Tool For Mental Health

The original purpose of blogging was to provide value to audiences and provide helpful information to them over the internet. Thousands of people set up blogs in the early days of the internet, becoming miniature independent publishers overnight. 

What happened was so dramatic that futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, said that it might comprise the bulk of occupations in twenty years. That didn’t quite happen, but he wasn’t far wrong. Blogging exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry, spawning the more recent influencer movement that’s worth even more money. 

But, curiously, the role of blogging is changing. It’s not so much about business or making money anymore (though that’s still a part of it). It’s also about improving mental health. 

According to Blogger Tuesday, a website that covers blog-related issues, writing is becoming increasingly valuable for people who want to manage their mental health concerns and those of the people who follow them.

“We recently published some fascinating articles on the research linking writing to mental health,” the outfit says. “It’s interesting that writing is a whole-brain activity, which means it recruits multiple systems, shifting the individual’s consciousness away from rumination and onto the ideas on the page. Writing is very much a productive distraction for many individuals, as well as being an outlet.”

Finding A Voice

Blogging was always a channel for people to find their voice. But there are now dozens of blogs dedicated to dealing with mental health issues upfront. We see blogs changing attitudes towards stigma and silence, helping more people come forward to discuss their struggles. Platforms are becoming places where individuals can break free from the constraints imposed on them by society and speak freely about their struggles and challenges without having to worry as much about discrimination. 

Finding a voice is hard in today’s society when there are so many opinions. However, blogging provides a route for many people, including the bloggers themselves and their audiences. 

“It’s all part of a trend that’s making blogging more conversational and interactive,” Blogger Tuesday reports. “It’s about people coming together outside of the conventional social networks and building private digital communities where they can discuss these issues more freely without having to worry so much about the stigma. Communities can converse on much the same wavelengths.”

Sharing Diverse Experiences

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Blogging also became a tool for mental health by facilitating the sharing of diverse experiences. Bloggers are becoming better at hitting on topics that chime with more members of their audiences (mainly thanks to analytics). These become talking points in associated forums, helping people come together and discuss their issues. 

It’s also one of the reasons why so many of these blogging sites include chat features. Having the ability to talk to each other has a tremendous effect on individual well-being and enables interaction and content discovery to extend well beyond the reading of the blog itself. 

Empowering Information

Blogging is also exposing individuals to empowering information that they can’t find elsewhere. Bloggers who have lived through difficult times in terms of their mental health can give a more honest or raw account than politically correct medical establishments, often written by individuals without the same history of mental health issues. 

This empowering information takes various forms, such as evidence-based tips for managing health and approaching different treatment options. Bloggers are providing their personal insights that offer information that simply isn’t available through mainstream channels concerned about their brand or professionalism. 

“Bloggers are taking up the mantle of providing these services to their audiences,” says Blogger Tuesday. “While it requires a little education and care, many of these writers enable a higher quality of information to pass through to their audiences that they simply can’t find when they enter keywords into Google.”

The democratization of mental health information via blogging is profound. Now, anyone can learn about conditions to any level of detail they want, discovering more about their triggers or thought patterns that might make symptoms worse. 

Flow State

Blogging is also good for bloggers with mental health issues in that it can help them enter the flow state. Getting into this mental realm can radically reduce external thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand. 

Individuals know they are in the flow state if they lose track of time. Everything becomes about the task of writing, with less focus on negative thoughts. 

A Beacon Of Hope

Blogs also serve as a beacon of hope for many individuals. Discovering and learning more about the journeys of other people can be a powerful source of inspiration for readers, helping them to better understand the landscape of mental health problems. 

“Many people don’t realize how common their mental health issues are,” Blogger Tuesday says. “It’s only when other bloggers describe them eloquently that they finally discover that they are not alone.”

The great thing about these blogs is their capacity to show readers the path through. Many writers describe the effects of depression to a tee but also provide their readership with careful guidance to help them through. Consulting with these blogs can be almost euphoric as readers find out that they aren’t alone and that other people have been through their experiences and come out the other side. 

Breaking The Stigma

Finally, we are seeing blogging becoming a tool for mental health by breaking the stigma around it. While things have changed significantly over the last twenty years, it’s critical to remember that it isn’t just about societal change in general. Blogging clearly played a role. It started an online conversation that eventually drew in enough people that it became mainstream. 

Breaking the stigma mainly means challenging societal misconceptions about mental health. Perhaps the biggest message to come out of the movement is the idea that mental health challenges can beset anyone, regardless of how healthy they seem outwardly. The genius of these bloggers is how they have been able to collectively articulate this idea, bringing it to public attention. This action changed the conversation on every level, making it possible for people to discuss issues freely.