Combing the pain away

Writer Virginia Woolf suffered bouts of severe mental illness.

During World War II, a young woman imprisoned in a concentration camp witnessed her family being killed. Yet after the war she was found to be in pretty reasonable shape, psychologically speaking.

She said she realised if she thought at all about what had happened she would go crazy and die. So instead she decided not to think about it and to concentrate on her hair.

She spent the duration of the war grooming her hair and focusing only on that. When I read about this - the anecdote comes from Andrew Solomon's brilliant book The Noonday Demon - I think I understood what she meant.

I admired her bravery. My endless ruminations are obnoxiously trivial in comparison yet I find it impossible to stop myself thinking the same things over and over. Things you can't change. Things you ruined. Bad things you can't forgive yourself for.

I wish I could stop trying to make sense of things in the past. Some things are not in accordance with logic or order. Some things are horrific in all the standard ways, yet defy any kind of standard classification or understanding. Some things are better just left alone.

Even happy memories are too painful; they trap you in a past you may simultaneously venerate and abhor. Instead, you can try to distract yourself, in any way you can. Some distractions are more practical than others. I have very ugly hands.

My fingers are sausage-like - peasant paws - and my nails are dry, short, soft yet brittle. Yet when I find myself nauseous with despair, I file them, and shape them and paint them jaunty colours: Animalistic, Marrow, Formidable, Pamplona and Four in the Morning.

Or I have other distractions. I play an app called QuizUp ("You are fourth in the world for Literature!"). Or I look at real estate pictures of properties I can't afford to buy, inhabited by heteronormative Caucasian nuclear families with pedigree dogs and white sofas.

Actually, that doesn't help much. I don't know who said it, but comparison is the thief of joy. The alternative to distraction is writing. "Take notes and the pain goes away," Virginia Woolf said.

It might be better to set aside how that advice did not ultimately save Woolf's life. Nevertheless, she may have been right. Research 100 years later by Professor James Pennebaker, the founder of writing therapy, found that trauma victims who wrote about their very deepest thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes every day for four days had better health outcomes and visited the doctor less often.

Pennebaker's work has spawned more than 200 further studies on beneficial effects of expressive writing, especially on the immune system. Our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us. But sometimes we have to accept all we can do is put things in a pattern without order. When a traumatic event occurs or we undergo a major life transition, our minds have to work overtime to try to process the experience.

I think the word "process" also has special powers. It excuses you from not yet having arrived at the finish line with streamers and fairy dust and trophies.

You see I have been doing the Pennebaker writing drill for years - you should see all my journals - but I'm starting to think maybe I've been doing it all wrong. Instead of writing about painful things, it is almost magic to write about good things instead, even if you actually don't feel them.

"When you find yourself ruminating on the wrongs done to you by others, and you are distinctly not sympathetic to their plight, try 30 days of praying for their wellbeing. It does not even matter if you don't feel as if you mean it," psychologist Margaret Wehrenberg explains.

I try to pray for that person to have every good gift - wisdom, honesty, kindness, fulfilment of their needs, or even a minimalist house with a white sofa and an expensive dog.

This really works. Or you can just comb your hair instead.