Can writing letters improve your health? The surprising benefits of putting pen to paper

When I was in boarding school, we were made to write a letter home every Sunday, right before the Sunday special lunch of our cook Mariamma chedathy’s famed chicken biryani.

For most of my classmates, letter-writing was the torture to be endured before the treat (biryani) could be enjoyed. Their letters—of the ‘I had volleyball practice yesterday’ and ‘I fell down on my way to the physics lab’ variety—might have tested the patience of even their parents, the only people genetically programmed to love them unconditionally.

I, on the other hand, loved letter writing. Laying out that blue slip of paper on the table with a pen poised to fly over it was the true treat for me.

My parents were the recipients of flowery reports on my school life, my friendships and fights, studies and competitions, triumphs and tragedies.

Of course, I maximised my achievements and minimised my failures. Of course, I made it look like I was the most popular, studious and exciting girl in my class. Of course, I never confessed my deepest fears or dreams in those letters. Even so, amidst all the superficiality and the embellishment, there was a peculiar pleasure in putting pen to paper, the essence of which is difficult to describe.

In some ways, it was like I was writing those letters more for myself—constructing versions of myself that existed at the intersection of imagination, desire and aspiration—than for my parents. Letter writing was one of the formative experiences in my life that cultivated in me a love for writing.

That’s why one of the two books that won the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction recently—Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent—struck an immediate chord with me. The book is about Sybil, a retired divorcee in her early 70s who writes letters to everyone important in her life, including her children, her neighbour and her favourite writers (Kazuo Ishiguro and Joan Didion). It elaborates on themes of forgiveness, hope and the rigours of ageing through letters that are by turns empathetic, witty, emotional, imaginative and tender. Critics called the book “a paean to the art of correspondence” and “a love letter to connection itself, the way words can wound, heal and bridge years of distance”.

Unfortunately, the art of letter writing has all but disappeared. I cannot remember the last time I received a handwritten letter. This is remarkable when you consider the power of letter writing in the past. Some letters have served as the hinges on which history itself has turned—like the love letters from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn. The affair caused him to break with the Roman Catholic church so he could divorce his first wife and marry Anne, which restructured religious life in England.

Then there was Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham Jail in April 1963 with the iconic line that bolstered the Civil Rights movement: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Charles Darwin introduced the idea of evolution for the first time in a letter to his close friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. Churchill’s letter replying to his private secretary, who had asked him to make a deal with Nazi Germany (“I am ashamed of you for writing such a letter. I return it to you—to burn and forget.”) was auctioned for Rs 40 lakhs at Christie’s in 2010, together with the private secretary’s letter.

Some of the best letter writers have been the best writers, period. Take Virginia Woolf’s passionate letters to Vita Sackville-West or John Keats’s beautifully poignant missives to Fanny Brawne. As a writer myself, I am well-acquainted with the pleasures and pains of writing. There is the frustration of shaking loose a thought stubbornly lodged in the farthest outposts of your mind, the agony of capturing an elusive word that refuses captivity, the struggle to say what you want to say the way you want to say it. But then, there is the climactic pleasure of the ‘flow’ state of writing—when words come gushing forth and your pen rampages across the page to keep up with the fire and fury of your thoughts. There is the absolute bliss of putting down an idea that you know is not just a rehashed version of something you read online.

Health benefits:

It can hardly be surprising that this kind of writing has immense health benefits, from lowering stress and anxiety to triggering the release of dopamine. According to one study, writing for 20 minutes on three consecutive days a week helped patients with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis get better. Another study found that writing improved the immune functioning of those with HIV/AIDS.

Unfortunately, in today’s clickbait society, writing has become about likes, clicks and shares. Nowadays, it is not just the medium of communication that has changed (from letter writing to social media posts), but even the language. Gen-Z has butchered English into slang that sounds like a toddler’s sleep talk. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this. Language is only a mode of communication, and if the youngsters want to slice it into ‘danks’ and ‘boujees’, I have no complaints. And most of what we write is for an audience. Anyone who says they “write only for themselves” doesn't know the pleasure of pleasuring someone else with your writing.

The problem is when you compromise content for virality. When you start writing to impress and not express, you miss the chief joy of dredging that indefinable something that’s lodged deep within your soul—your linguistic fingerprint that’s unique to you and beyond the grip of ChatGPT.

Thoughts, perspectives and views that are shaped by your beliefs, your personality, and your upbringing. It is the lay of a land that only you can see. Writing is the attempt to make it visible to others. It is a deep struggle and often an exercise in futility. But there is nothing as rewarding as those brief moments when you can make one of its towers or turrets shimmer in the noonday sun, unveiled for the whole world to see.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.