Economic and Social Research Council
Printable version

Research shows poetry helps against work anxiety

Poetry workshops can help stressed employees ‘voice’ their anxieties over work-life balance, according to new research. Poetry brings emotions such as guilt to the surface, helping to resolve issues around prioritising between work and family or leisure activities.

Work-life balance and how to achieve it is a topical issue, especially as more than one in ten of the UK working population (13 per cent) work 49 hours or more a week. As organisations recover from the economic down-turn, the pressures, choices and impacts on people working in organisations are likely to change, making work-life balance a greater priority.

Research led by Dr Louise Grisoni, from Oxford Brookes University, has found that poetry is a creative way of engaging with this topic. It will be the focus of ‘The Poetics of Work-Life Balance’, an event within our Festival of Social Science.

“What we have found is that poetry gives people a way to express their thoughts and feelings,” says Dr Grisoni, Associate Dean Knowledge and Transfer Exchange in the Department of Business and Management. “They do this through the power of metaphor and similes which enables them to see their issues in a new light, to give permission to their concerns and get to the essence of people’s values.”

Traditional approaches to achieving a better work-life balance have focused on asking people to identify how much time they allocate to different tasks or activities. However, Dr Grisoni has adopted a more ‘holistic’ approach with her research which is based around poetry workshops.

Participants have included local authority managers as well as master’s students mainly working in the public sector. They are encouraged to write their own verse or to create collective poems within the group. In group work participants write one line then keywords, and these words go around the group - people ‘discover’ their own poem from the collective ones.

Another approach is using haiku - a form of three-line poetry - to enable those taking part to access buried emotions.

The following is an example of a verse from a group poem created in one of these workshops:

  • Work-life balance: An ideal to aspire to
  • The ideal slips away as the turmoil rages
  • The turmoil of the 25-hour day
  • Never a fulfilled day: never enough
  • Never, never a question I ask myself whenever I don’t achieve it
  • Wherever, whenever, life to the full.

The ongoing study has highlighted that people are initially anxious about writing poetry because they regard it as ‘highbrow’. Working with poetry also requires different skills to those that many managers have developed and perfected in daily practice. However, it does enable them to depart from traditional ways of thinking, to be creative rather than reinforcing what they already know, and to ‘say the unsayable’.

In addition, the study has identified that people come away from the workshops feeling more in control of their lives and how they allocate their time between work, family and hobbies. “It’s about seeing things differently and thinking differently, not about creating beautifully crafted poetry,” says Dr Grisoni. “I’d hesitate to call it therapy - it’s about exercising other parts of our brain, for example the creative right part rather than the rational left part which is focused on problem-solving.”  

Dr Grisoni is hosting one of her poetry workshops as part of the Festival of Social Science on 13 November, at Oxford Brookes’ Headington Campus. The event is aimed at the general public.

Further information

Notes for editors

  1. Event: The Poetics of Work-Life Balance
    Organiser: Dr Louise Grisoni
    Date: 13 November 2015
    Venue: The John Henry Brookes Building, Gypsy Lane, Headington, Oxford OX3 0BP
    Audience: general public
    Workshops will start at 17.00/18.00/19.00 and are in JHB room 307.
  2. The Festival of Social Science is run by the Economic and Social Research Council and takes place 7-14 November 2015. With events from some of the country’s leading social scientists, the Festival celebrates the very best of British social science research and how it influences our social, economic and political lives - both now and in the future. This year’s Festival of Social Science has over 200 creative and exciting events across the UK to encourage businesses, charities, government agencies, schools and college students to discuss, discover and debate topical social science issues. Press releases detailing some of the varied events and a full list of the programme are available at the Festival website. You can now follow updates from the Festival on Twitter using #esrcfestival.
  3. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest funder of research on the social and economic questions facing us today. It supports the development and training of the UK’s future social scientists and also funds major studies that provide the infrastructure for research. ESRC-funded research informs policymakers and practitioners and helps make businesses, voluntary bodies and other organisations more effective. The ESRC also works collaboratively with six other UK research councils and Innovate UK to fund cross-disciplinary research and innovation addressing major societal challenges. The ESRC is an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter in 1965, and funded mainly by the Government. In 2015 it celebrates its 50th anniversary.

 

Channel website: http://www.esrc.ac.uk

Share this article

Latest News from
Economic and Social Research Council

Spotlight on women at Serco – Anita’s story