Melia Grasska

It’s not breaking news that journaling has been proven, again and again, to be good for you—mind, body, and soul.

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 now shows that confronting your deepest traumas and experiences in order to put them on the page not only makes you feel better, but can even help heal you. One remarkable scientific study demonstrates how.

Landmark study indicates that “expressive writing” has healing powers

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.

In an interview with the American Psychological Association, Pennebaker recalled wondering, “If secrets are so bad, what if we brought people in the laboratory and had them talk about them… [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.”

Pennebaker’s remarkable research revealed that expressive writing could improve mental health, boost the immune system, and reduce doctor visits. In 2013, a group of researchers wanted to see whether these benefits could carry over even further into the physical world.

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.

One group was assigned to perform expressive writing for 20 minutes per day, writing about its deepest thoughts and most upsetting life experiences.

The other group, rather than not writing at all, journaled daily about its activities but did so in an emotionally neutral register.

Just 11 days after the biopsy, 76% of the expressive writing group had fully healed. That’s almost double the rate of the control group, of whom only 42% had healed.

A thorough review found almost no other differences in the adults’ cognitive or physical health, which makes a powerful case that the expressive writing exercises were responsible for the improved healing.

Why emotional writing can have a physical impact

Pennebaker, for his part, recognized that deeply emotional journaling is not just about the physical act of writing.

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.

“Getting people to actually sit down and confront it and to write it, you don’t have to write a lot, but you have to first of all just acknowledge it and put it into words,” Pennebaker said. “And that was really for me, the breakthrough.”

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’s better able to do its job of warding off sickness and healing wounds.

According to Harvard Health Publishing, “The process of writing may enable [people] to learn to better regulate their emotions. It’s also possible that writing about something fosters an intellectual process — the act of constructing a story about a traumatic event — that helps someone break free of the endless mental cycling more typical of brooding or rumination.”

The power of “letting it out”

A majority of scientific research agrees that learning to understand and express what’s happening inside us is a key component of mental health.

“Labeling and expressing what’s going on inside can calm our nervous system. It also gets us in touch with our internal senses and what’s going on beneath the skin, in the heart, and in the brain,” said Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, a licensed therapist. “The connection of thoughts flowing through and out may be similar to ‘name it to tame it,’ a concept related to calming emotional distress and increasing emotional regulation.”

It can be dance, it can be art, or it can be talking it out with a therapist or friend. The important thing is that expression, or disclosure, is necessary. The unique power of expressive writing, however, is that it forces us to address our biggest sources of pain and anxiety head-on.

Expressive writing has its limitations, of course.

It’s not necessarily a cure-all for people suffering from serious mental health conditions like chronic anxiety or major depression. And it can’t cure cancer or miraculously heal a broken leg.

Some research also shows that expressive writing can temporarily make people feel worse before the mental health benefits kick in. And for people who have recently undergone trauma, it may simply be too soon to write about it. Pennebaker himself advises therapists not to assign expressive writing to patients until at least a few months after an incident.

However, the study is fairly undeniable evidence of the mind-body connection. Science shows us that placebos can work wonders, even when people know they’re taking a placebo. And expressive writing research is beginning to show just how incredible the physical benefits of relieving psychological stress can be.