Journaling yields incredible benefits for your mental and physical health. Here’s why, along with expert-backed ideas on how you can get started with your own journaling journey.
If you’re like too many of us, your journal is collecting dust in the back of your desk drawer. But countless studies show that journaling is a powerful way to boost our mental health, reduce depression and anxiety, and make us all-around happier and more content with our lives. Here are eight reasons why the experts — including the author of The Artist’s Way — say you should make journaling a habit, as well as suggestions for starting (or restarting!) your journaling practice.
1. Journaling Reduces Depression and Anxiety
Boosting our ability to cope with intrusive and avoidant thoughts is one of the key benefits of journaling. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that students who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings in the month leading up to a big exam had fewer depressive symptoms because they didn’t dwell as much on their intrusive thoughts.
“By putting upheavals into words, we acknowledge the event, we organize it, and often find some kind of meaning,” says Dr. James W. Pennebaker, a pioneering expressive writing (a type of journaling that prioritizes feelings over events) researcher and regents centennial professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. The expert, who was not involved in the study, tells DailyOM, “By doing this, we no longer ruminate and worry about the event at the same rate. We sleep better and our mind is more still.”
For the same reasons that expressive writing helps with depression, it can also reduce anxiety. A 2018 study from the National Library of Medicine found that adults who completed a 15-minute online journaling session three days a week for 12 weeks were less likely to ruminate on their anxious thoughts and better able to move past them.
Interested in learning more? Check out A Year of Writing to Uncover the Authentic Self
2. Journaling Improves Your Memory
If your busy, hectic life causes you to forget things or you are prone to spaciness now and then, you’ll appreciate this one. A 2001 study in the journal of the American Psychological Association found that journaling can improve your working memory. By writing about their thoughts and feelings, study subjects reduced the number of intrusive and avoidant thoughts they had throughout the day, freeing up mental space for memory.
3. Journaling May Help You Get a Job Faster
Losing your job is among life’s major traumatic experiences, in league with divorce. The good news is there’s a way to recover faster, and you’ve probably guessed it. Research from The Academy of Management Journal shows that people who write about their thoughts and feelings surrounding their job loss find jobs faster than those who don’t or those who write about trivial topics. After widespread layoffs due to the pandemic, a journaling practice can be a useful tool for people across the word.
4. Journaling Eases Psychological Distress From Trauma
Journaling doesn’t just aid in moving on from job loss. Another study, published in The Arts in Psychotherapy, found that journaling can actually help to ease the psychological distress we have in reaction to any kind of trauma. Those who journaled for 15 minutes a day experienced a decrease in feelings of depression, anxiety, and even hostility, especially if they were really distressed at the beginning of the experiment. And a 2015 research paper in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy reported that expressive writing helped to alleviate symptoms in those living with post-traumatic stress.
5. Journaling Cultivates Gratitude
Gratitude brings us happiness, reduces anxiety and depression, improves physical health, helps us sleep better, strengthens our relationships, and makes us more resilient — just to name a few life-boosting benefits, and research shows that journaling can help to promote gratitude. Indeed, over the past several years there has been a trend to focus on writing down what you’re thankful for. There are over 60,000 gratitude journals available on Amazon and over 200 gratitude journaling apps available in the App Store. And though experts say that scientific interest in gratitude journaling is relatively new, celebrities and influencers including Emma Watson, Camila Mendes, and Olivia Culpo have touted the practice for transforming their lives.
6. Journaling Makes You Happier
The “Bridget Jones effect” — the real-life mood boost you get just by keeping a journal — won’t make you goofier or more susceptible to Austen-esque love entanglements, but it will make you happier, according to the researchers who discovered it. Matthew Lieberman, the head researcher on the study and a psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, told The Guardian that you can benefit from the “Bridget Jones effect” whether you journal in a diary, write bad poetry, or come up with song lyrics that will only ever see the inside of your shower or car (even if you aren’t dating Hugh Grant and Colin Firth).
7. Journaling Even Improves Your Physical Health
This article may be about journaling and mental health, so what does physical health have to do with it? Well, it’s safe to say that our mental health and physical health are linked, and when one takes a hit, the other goes down, too. Results from a groundbreaking study published by Dr. Pennebaker and company in 1988 suggest that journaling about negative or traumatic life experiences can boost your immune system.
A different study showed significant health improvements for those living with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis, and another one found that expressive writing helped undergraduates infected with the virus that causes mononucleosis to produce more antibodies.
8. Journaling Helps You Sleep Better
Are you struggling with insomnia? A study shows that a brief bedtime journaling exercise may help those who find themselves unable to fall asleep due to anxiety and worries about everything on their plate. People who spent just five minutes writing down their to-do list for the day(s) ahead fell asleep more quickly than those who journaled about completed activities, and the more specific they were about their various tasks, the quicker they were to drift off.
Writing About Facts Versus Feelings
Most of the studies discussed above refer to expressive writing, a specific type of journaling that emphasizes feelings over events. This type of writing has proven to be especially beneficial for physical and mental health.
In another one of his studies, Dr. Pennebaker found that only those who did their expressive writing about both the facts of a trauma and their emotions surrounding it gained health benefits, whereas those who wrote solely about facts or exclusively about emotions did not.
Is this to say that intense expressive writing is the only way to journal and receive benefits? Definitely not! In fact, Julia Cameron, author of the seminal book The Artist’s Way, would argue the opposite. According to Cameron, with whom DailyOM spoke for this article, scrawling about superficial thoughts is the key to escaping the bog of our intrusive thoughts and unlocking our creativity.
Journaling Your Way to Creativity
The artist, writer, and journalist invented a practice called the Morning Pages, a stream-of-consciousness style of writing that helps you to purge your trivial concerns and make way for creativity. Cameron says that the Morning Pages need to be done every day as soon as you wake up and handwritten on three sides of 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
“The Morning Pages serve you in all arenas of your life,” she says. “In them you provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize, and synchronize the day at hand. The Pages perform what I call ‘spiritual chiropractic’ — addressing issues that need attention.”
In more practical terms, this practice frees up mental space for the thoughts that actually serve us. “It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action,” she writes in The Artist’s Way.
How Often to Write
While Cameron advocates for writing about superficial topics every day, Dr. Pennebaker is against expressive writing as a daily practice. “This is not diary writing, so I don't recommend doing this all the time,” he says. That’s because spending too much time writing about negative emotions has actually been shown to perpetuate those feelings and result in more doctor visits. “Rather, use expressive writing to deal with a particular issue, and then move on,” he says.
You can still write about your emotions every day. The study above found that moving from emotions to thoughts can help you to grow from your trauma. In other words, describe your emotions and then write about future possibilities and what you’re grateful for.
Finding a Journaling Method
Dr. Pennebaker encourages you to experiment and find what feels best for you. “There's not one true way,” he says. “Sometimes writing three to four times, 15 to 20 minutes a day, works quite well. But some people like to write more briefly or for longer times. Also, experiment with how you write.” If you’re not into old-school pen-and-paper journaling and feel more at home around technology, you’re in luck. “Studies show that both handwriting and typing work just fine. Writing on your smartphone can work well, too,” Dr. Pennebaker says. “The important issue is to put your thoughts and feelings into words.”
The Best Journaling Practice Is One That Works Best for You
If you’re confused by all the different advice on journaling, don’t worry. The takeaway here is that there is no right or wrong way to journal. Start with whatever practice feels right for you — whether that means committing to Cameron’s Morning Pages, sitting down for an intense expressive writing session three times a week, or bullet-journaling in your Notes app. You can even dust off that old diary in your bedside table and pick up right where you left off! However you choose to journal, you’ll be powerfully rewarded for your efforts.
