But not all journaling is created equal. Writing about what you did that day and your future plans has a profoundly different effect than writing about your deepest emotions, especially the upsetting ones. A growing body of research<\/a> now shows that confronting your deepest traumas and experiences in order to put them on the page not only makes you feel better<\/a>, but can even help heal you. One remarkable scientific study demonstrates how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The body of research around expressive writing had been growing for years. American social psychologist James Pennebaker is considered one of the leading voices in pioneering this area of research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an interview with the American Psychological Association, Pennebaker recalled<\/a> wondering, \u201cIf secrets are so bad, what if we brought people in the laboratory and had them talk about them\u2026 [but] that turned out to be way too complex. How about we just had them write about it? And that was kind of the birth of expressive writing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pennebaker\u2019s remarkable research<\/a> revealed that expressive writing could improve mental health, boost the immune system, and reduce doctor visits. In 2013, a group of researchers<\/a> wanted to see whether these benefits could carry over even further into the physical world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the study, two groups of adults ages 64 and older underwent a simple biopsy procedure. It left a small wound on the upper arm that was uniform in size across all participants and could easily be monitored for changes in healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One group was assigned to perform expressive writing for 20 minutes per day, writing about its deepest thoughts and most upsetting life experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other group, rather than not writing at all, journaled daily about its activities but did so in an emotionally neutral register.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just 11 days after the biopsy, 76% of the expressive writing group had fully healed. That\u2019s almost double the rate of the control group, of whom only 42% had healed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A thorough review found almost no other differences in the adults\u2019 cognitive or physical health, which makes a powerful case that the expressive writing exercises were responsible for the improved healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pennebaker, for his part, recognized that deeply emotional journaling is not just about the physical act of writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to write about upsetting experiences in your life, you have to turn them over and over in your mind and confront them head-on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGetting people to actually sit down and confront it and to write it, you don\u2019t have to write a lot, but you have to first of all just acknowledge it and put it into words,\u201d Pennebaker said. \u201cAnd that was really for me, the breakthrough.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emotional writing eases psychological stress. Feelings like anxiety and stress can have severe negative health consequences, so it stands to reason that relieving some of that stress should have a positive payoff. Less stress on the immune system, for example, means it\u2019s better able to do its job of warding off sickness and healing wounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Harvard Health Publishing<\/a>, \u201cThe process of writing may enable [people] to learn to better regulate their emotions. It\u2019s also possible that writing about something fosters an intellectual process \u2014 the act of constructing a story about a traumatic event \u2014 that helps someone break free of the endless mental cycling more typical of brooding or rumination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A majority of scientific research agrees that learning to understand and express what\u2019s happening inside us is a key component of mental health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLabeling and expressing what\u2019s going on inside can calm our nervous system. It also gets us in touch with our internal senses and what\u2019s going on beneath the skin, in the heart, and in the brain,\u201d said Alli Spotts-De Lazzer<\/a>, a licensed therapist. \u201cThe connection of thoughts flowing through and out may be similar to \u2018name it to tame it,\u2019 a concept related to calming emotional distress and increasing emotional regulation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nLandmark study indicates that \u201cexpressive writing\u201d has healing powers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhy emotional writing can have a physical impact<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The power of \u201cletting it out\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n