Shiny Happy Bloggers

There was a little blurb in Newsweek this week suggesting that bloggers may be happier than non-bloggers. They say it's because blogging is therapeutic.

Mental-health experts say blogs are a step up from plain old diaries, chiefly because of the built-in audience. As kids, we learn that if we air our problems, we get help. We associate communication with consolation, particularly when the going gets tough. Blogging fulfills that primal need for sympathy. "Writing is an effort of the brain to communicate for comfort," says Harvard neurologist Alice Flaherty. "Diaries are a form of that communication, but removed. Blogging gets you closer to that sympathetic audience, and that's what makes it therapeutic."

Kind of interesting. Sometimes I think that my journal-writing has suffered since I started my blog, and other times I think that my blog is what has saved my journal-writing. Whatever the case may be, my blog-writing and my journal-writing are qualitatively different. In fact, my first reaction on reading the little Newsweek blurb was to think that my journal-writing (which tends to be more of my thoughts and philosophizing) is far more therapeutic than my blogging (which still tends towards philosophizing, but is much more centered on just "reporting out" to friends and family). It's not like I bare my soul that much on my blog.

But on second thought, there's something to be said for that two-way communication that Newsweek was talking about. On my blog, I think through things more because there is an audience, and so blog-writing is at least a little productive, rather than just simple venting on paper. And last week during my terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week* I think blogging was very therapeutic. The first thing I thought every time something else happened was not, "woe is me! why does the universe hate me so?" but, "wow, I'll bet I could make a great blog out of this!" Blogging about my car, for instance, turned out to be much more healthy than writing about it in my journal partly because I got surprisingly rapid and sympathetic responses from friends and family, which was what I needed even if I didn't realize it (the universe may hate me, but at least there are some people who don't!), and partly because wallowing in my misfortunes in public actually turned my attention from my wallowing to how I could make my misfortunes entertaining to the masses. And when my misfortunes became entertaining, they were no longer quite as dreadful.

So yeah, I guess blogging is therapeutic, even if I don't bare my deepest darkest secrets. Those I still reserve for my journal, so it won't feel left out.

*If you didn't catch that reference, then I'm sorry. You had a deprived childhood.