Journaling can help us heal from trauma, psychological distress, and other emotional roadblocks by lowering anxiety and depression and boosting our immune system.
There’s a reason that journaling at the end of a difficult day feels so cathartic. Journaling has the power to heal us in life-changing ways — from stopping negative thoughts to unclogging our creative minds. Below are six expert-backed ways that journaling helps you to heal from trauma, psychological distress, and more.
1. Journaling Can Break Unhealthy Thought Patterns
Try as you might, emotional distress from a traumatic event or experience is pervasive. Even when you’re trying to distract yourself with tasks or spending time with your friends or family, it can find its way to the surface. Take, for example, intrusive thoughts — those pesky anxieties that take us out of the moment and into our heads, and often lead to a pattern of negative feelings and behaviors.
Keeping a thought diary, a technique commonly used in cognitive behavioral therapy, can actually help us to cope with these thoughts in a healthier way. Thought diaries ask us to record our intrusive thoughts when and where they happen, so that we can eventually find and break patterns of thinking that lead to negative feelings and behaviors.
“When we’re having these [negative] discussions in our head, we actually don’t have a lot of awareness,” Los Angeles-based psychologist Dr. Marci Flores tells DailyOM. “We’re involved in the conversation as opposed to observing the conversation.”
Because of this, she says, we react to these thoughts as if they’re real life. Journaling allows us to gain some healthy distance from our negative thoughts.
“When we take something and we put it out of our head, whether that’s having a conversation with somebody else or putting it on paper, we can actually see the thoughts that are popping up or experiences that we’re having,” she says. “And we can start to have a little bit more perspective.”
Over time, our newfound perspective then gives us room to decide how we want to interpret our thoughts and move forward. To Dr. Flores, breaking these patterns isn’t about pushing our negative thoughts or memories away, but learning how to integrate them in a way that’s honest and accurate, so they lead to healthier emotions and behaviors.
Interested in learning more? Check out A Year of Writing to Uncover the Authentic Self
2. Journaling Decreases Anxiety and Depression
Expressive writing is a tried-and-true form of journaling that’s backed by science for its healing powers. With expressive writing, you set aside a brief amount of time, around 15 to 20 minutes, three or four times a week, and write specifically about traumatic or stressful events that happened to you, how you feel about them, and how you think you can move on.
The reason that expressive writing works is because it’s a way for us to purge the intrusive reminders of these painful experiences. Research says that expressive writing doesn’t necessarily erase intrusive thoughts, but it gives us the tools to dismiss them more easily because we’ve already dealt with them within the pages of our journal. This prevents them from causing symptoms of depression and anxiety. For those with a tendency to brood (who, us?), expressive writing has been scientifically shown to reduce depression.
But expressive writing isn’t the only way to decrease stress and worry. One study found that both students who wrote about negative events and those who wrote about positive topics had lower levels of distress four months later, and positive expressive writing reduced stress in a group of teachers prone to burnout. This shows that many different forms of journaling will likely help to reduce anxiety and depression, and you can choose to write in the way that best supports you.
3. Journaling Supports Healing From Trauma
Expressive writing can also be used to heal from trauma. One study discovered that writing about traumatic events helped ease symptoms of psychological distress, which can also be described as ongoing anxiety, depression, and other mood disturbances, particularly in those who already had high levels of it. And a review of studies shows that expressive writing is an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, though research is limited at this time.
Keeping a thought diary can also help you to heal from trauma, though Flores recommends using one with the guidance of a therapist as well. “A therapist can help you actually explore how these thoughts are impacting the different areas of your life,” she says. “For instance, if there is trauma, there could be some shame-based thought patterns that are coming up that need to be worked through and processed.” A therapist can help you identify these maladaptive patterns, especially if you’re not seeing them yourself.
4. Journaling Boosts Physical Health
If your mental health tanks whenever you have a medical issue, you’re not alone. Nearly 1 in 3 people who have long-term physical health problems also have a mental health condition. Happily, just like exercising can be great for your mental health, expressive writing can improve your physical health. Trailblazing 1988 research discovered that subjects who wrote about traumatic events in their lives boosted their immune systems and decreased their risk of getting sick. More recently scientists learned that patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis, after four months of writing about the most stressful events in their lives, showed improvements in their diseases.
While there are many studies that prove the benefits of expressive writing on our physical health, scientists are increasingly looking at the value of gratitude journaling, which focuses more on the positive aspects of our lives. A 2016 examination on the effects of gratitude journaling by patients with stage B, asymptomatic heart failure found that the practice helped to reduce indicators of the disease, like inflammation.
But the body of research on gratitude is still growing, and scientists caution that the positive influence of gratitude journaling on many markers of good health, including inflammation, asthma, blood pressure, glycemic control, and eating behaviors, need to be explored further — even though research so far has produced promising results. They did, however, conclude that the research on the positive impact of positive journaling on sleep is enough to confirm that, yes, being thankful will help you get your eight hours.
5. Journaling Helps You Express Gratitude and Heal Your Mindset
Science backs practicing gratitude as a way to improve your mental health. Studies show that being thankful can lessen stress, depression, and fatigue, and boost your mood, on top of providing the physical health benefits listed in the section above. Jenny Talavera, founder of a one-person app development studio called *treebetty, discovered the healing benefits of gratitude at her family’s dinner table.
“My family has a dinner routine where each evening, we would go around the dinner table and share our ‘grace of the day’ or one thing from our day that we’re grateful for,” she recently told DailyOM. “Even if we had a terrible day, the rule was we always had to pick something, even if it was just that the sun came up that day.”
Years later, she would develop the Grateful: A Gratitude Journal app, which gives you a random prompt every time you go to write an entry. You can answer that one or choose another.
One great benefit of keeping a gratitude journal is being able to go back and look at old entries whenever you need a reminder of the abundance you have in your life. “Oftentimes the positive things in our day are somewhat uneventful or can easily be forgotten as time goes by,” Talavera says. “It’s wonderful to be able to remind yourself of them again and again.”
6. Journaling Facilitates Recovery From Creative Blocks
When faced with a creative block, we need to go through a healing process, according to author of The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron. That’s because creative blocks are the result of very damaging ideas that we’ve been taught about art growing up — that creating art is egoistic, reserved for people with wealth and privilege, not sensible, socially unacceptable, and the like.
“We need to heal creatively in order to expand to our fullest potential,” Cameron said when she spoke with DailyOM for this article. “Many of us relate stories of feeling thwarted and discouraged by often well-meaning but ill-considered others.”
How does one recover creatively? One suggestion is a freewriting style of journaling Cameron invented called the Morning Pages, with very specific rules. Though it can be an emotional and difficult process at times, Cameron says it’s a useful tool to heal from the wounds we’ve incurred in our past and allow us to return to our artistic selves. You can also find your own style of freewriting and work toward healing your creative self that way. After all, exploring and discovering your unique voice is a big part of the creative process!
The Bottom Line
For those struggling with painful memories or difficult life periods, or working to overcome traumatic experiences, there is a great deal to be gained from journaling, whether you choose the work of expressive writing or the more lighthearted gratitude journaling. Flores’ No. 1 takeaway? “Be curious,” she says, rather than judgmental of whatever you’re writing down. “That can really help you explore what other areas and paths you want to take forward.”
