My guess is that it is not necessary to do ALL of the weeks to receive some benefits from this expressive writing intervention, which was meant to target stress and increase feelings of growth in response to the pandemic. On the last page above are the general themes for the 6 week intervention. Each of these likely have some benefit if you do not want to do all of them.
Week 1: Focused on emotional expression/their own feelings toward the pandemic.
Week 2: Wrote a fictional, compassionate letter to a friend coping with the pandemic.
Week 3: Wrote a gratitude letter and poem to someone you either know or don’t know but appreciate.
Week 4: Wrote about personal strengths, encouraging others, and a vision for the future.
Week 5: Wrote about any benefits from COVID and savoring those positives.
Week 6: Wrote about lessons learned and what lessons to pass along.
The blog post for this week (coming out on Saturday) will go into a lot more detail on the prompts and things you can try at home!
Citation: Bechard, E., Evans, J., Cho, E., Lin, Y., Kozhumam, A., Jones, J., ... & Glass, O. (2021). Feasibility, acceptability, and potential effectiveness of an online expressive writing intervention for COVID-19 resilience. Complementary therapies in clinical practice, 45, 101460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2021.101460
