How can journal writing be meaningful

As I often do in tough times, I turned to journaling. In fact, hundreds of people have written journal entries on the Pandemic Project website , a resource created by psychology researchers that offers writing prompts to help people explore their experiences and emotions around COVID At a time when the days blend into each other, journaling is helping people separate one from the next and clear out the distressing thoughts invading our heads and our dreams.

Research also suggests it might be helping our health and immune systems, the very things many of us are worried about. People had been keeping diaries long before scientists thought to put them under microscopes. But in the past 30 years, hundreds of studies have uncovered the benefits of putting pen to paper with your deepest thoughts and feelings.

In a study , nearly young adults were asked to spend 15 minutes journaling or drawing about a stressful event, or writing about their plans for the day, twice during one week. The people who journaled saw the biggest reduction in symptoms like depression, anxiety, and hostility, particularly if they were very distressed to begin with.

This was true even though 80 percent had seldom journaled about their feelings and only 61 percent were comfortable doing so. Cathartic is probably a better word. In fact, some research suggests that we can feel more anxious , sad, or guilty right after we write. But in the long term, we can expect to cultivate a greater sense of meaning as well as better health. Various studies have found that people who do a bout of journaling have fewer doctor visits in the following half year, and reduced symptoms of chronic disease like asthma and arthritis.

Other research finds that writing specifically boosts our immune system, good news when the source of so much stress today is an infectious virus. One older study even found that journaling could make vaccines more effective. In the experiment, some medical students wrote for four days in a row about their thoughts and feelings around some of the most traumatic experiences of their lives, from divorce to grief to abuse, while others simply wrote down their daily events and plans.

Then, everyone received the hepatitis B vaccine and two booster shots. According to blood tests, the group who journaled about upsetting experiences had higher antibodies right before the last dose and two months later. Petrie and his colleagues. In another study , researchers recruited undergraduate students who tested positive for the virus that causes mononucleosis, which persists in the body after infection and has the potential to flare up.

Three times weekly for 20 minutes, some wrote about a stressful event—like a breakup or a death—while others wrote about their possessions. It also seemed to help them gain a deeper understanding of their stress and see more positives to it. It turns out journaling works on two different levels, having to do with both our feelings and our thoughts. Through writing, our pain gets translated into black-and-white words that exist outside of ourselves.

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