As I often do in tough times, I turned to journaling. I decided I’d keep a record of my quarantine life through the month of April, a way to remember this crazy historical moment and process my feelings.
Now it’s August, and my daily journal continues. I’ve left my building about two dozen times since I started journaling, so its contents aren’t all that exciting—tidbits of everyday life, news about social distancing rules and reopening stages, moments of worry and loneliness and cabin fever and gratitude.
The power of opening up
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.Why do we avoid journaling?
Can your diary keep you healthy?
Other research finds that writing specifically boosts our immune system, good news when the source of so much stress today is an infectious virus.According to blood tests, the group who journaled about upsetting experiences had higher antibodies right before the last dose and two months later. While the other group had a perfectly healthy response to the vaccine, the authors write, journaling could make an important difference for people who are immune-compromised or for vaccines that don’t stimulate the immune system as well.
“Expression of emotions concerning stressful or traumatic events can produce measurable effects on human immune responses,” write the University of Auckland’s Keith J. Petrie and his colleagues.
Why journaling works
What’s the secret to the humble diary? It turns out journaling works on two different levels, having to do with both our feelings and our thoughts.First, it’s a way of disclosing emotions rather than stuffing them down, which is known to be harmful for our health. So many of us have secret pain or shame that we haven’t shared with others, swarming around our brains in images and emotions. Through writing, our pain gets translated into black-and-white words that exist outside of ourselves.
“I’m able to organize thoughts and feelings on paper so they no longer take up room in my head,” says Allison Quatrini, an assistant professor at Eckerd College who has been journaling for years and started a COVID-19 journal in April. “If I get them out on the page and clear the mental decks, it sets up the rest of the day to not only be more productive but be more relaxed.”
On the thinking level, writing forces us to organize our experiences into a sequence, giving us a chance to examine cause and effect and form a coherent story. Through this process, we can also gain some distance from our experiences and begin to understand them in new ways, stumbling upon insights about ourselves and the world. While trauma can upset our beliefs about how life works, processing trauma through writing seems to give us a sense of control.
How to start a journaling practice
While you can journal in many different ways, one of the most well-studied techniques is called Expressive Writing. To do this, you write continuously for 20 minutes about your deepest thoughts and emotions around an issue in your life. You can explore how it has affected you, or how it relates to your childhood or your parents, your relationships or your career.Expressive Writing is traditionally done four days in a row, but there isn’t anything magical about this formula. Studies suggest you can journal a few days in a row, a couple times a week, or just once a week; you can write for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes; and you can keep journaling about the same topic or switch to different ones each time.
- Social life: How is your social world changing, how does that make you feel, and how are you handling it?
- Work and money: How do you feel about your financial situation, and how has your job changed?
- Uncertainty: Where is your anxiety and sense of uncertainty coming from, and how can you cope with it?
The do’s and don’ts of a diary
A 2002 study does suggest that journalers should beware of rehashing the same difficult feelings over and over in writing.In the experiment, over 120 college students journaled about a stressful or traumatic event they were experiencing, like troubles at school, conflicts with their partner, or a death in the family. They were instructed to write for at least 10 minutes, twice a week, over the course of a month. Some students wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings—including how they try to make sense of the stress and what they tell themselves to cope with it—while others wrote about their feelings only.
This has been the case for Allison Quatrini, who usually writes for a half hour in the morning about whatever’s going through her mind—from the losses she’s experiencing during the pandemic to her work or romantic relationship. It allows her to put into words how much her life has been disrupted, normalize the range of emotions she’s been feeling, and brainstorm ways forward.
“It helps me make sense of the way that I’m feeling right now,” she says. “Why do I feel not very motivated, why do I feel bored, why do I feel sad? It’s also useful in admitting to myself what is going on [and] why it’s been very challenging to deal with this.”
Freedom of expression
Sharing with a trusted confidant might seem even better than writing down feelings, as it serves a similar purpose and offers us warmth and validation that a piece of paper can’t provide. And that’s probably true, write Pennebaker and Smyth in Opening Up by Writing It Down.Therapy also seemed to be less unpleasant than writing. In fact, when Pennebaker originally envisioned journaling as a mental health exercise, he was inspired by the benefits of therapy—but mindful that not everyone has the means or the inclination to talk to a professional about their problems.
Of course, confessing to friends or partners isn’t without its complications. Sometimes our loved ones are overloaded by their own stresses, or they can’t offer the right kind of support—and may even make us feel worse. Other times, our secrets feel too vulnerable to speak out loud.
No matter what, if we’re talking to another human, our brains will be doing a constant calculation about what to say or not say, how they might react, and how we will be perceived, says Smyth. Confiding on paper can be a valuable alternative and a way to express ourselves with absolute freedom. Journaling lets us process secrets before we reveal them to others.
For Quatrini, who researches and teaches about China, the stress of the pandemic has an extra layer: With the disruption to U.S.-China relations and travel, she’s concerned about the future of her research. The immensity of that loss and uncertainty—and how it was affecting her day-to-day feelings and relationships—only became clear to her when she wrote about it.
“My entire life has been turned upside down and I don’t know if it will ever right itself,” she says. “Without the journal, I think I would not have figured that out.”