WHY A JOURNAL IS SO GOOD FOR YOU

WRITING about negative events and past failings is one of the most effective ways to reduce stress and give you a new lease of life, a recent study claims.

Acknowledging and analysing what went wrong during prior setbacks gives people insight that helps them cope better in future stressful situations, researchers from Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, found.

According to the research, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, simply thinking about negative events could help people manage stress better, and improve performance in many areas, including therapeutic settings, education and sports.

Previous studies have shown that paying close attention to negative events or feelings — by either meditating or writing about them — can actually lead to positive outcomes.

‘Acute stress can harm performance,’ said researcher Brynne DiMenichi, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University-Newark. ‘There is little physiological evidence for whether writing about past failures or other negative events improves performance by reducing stress.’

In collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University in North Carolina, DiMenichi examined the effect of writing about past failures on future task performance in 86 people.

Volunteers were split into a test group and a control group. People in the test group wrote about their past failures while those in the control group wrote about a topic not related to themselves.

The stress hormone cortisol was measured in their saliva at the start of the study. The volunteers then performed a new stressful task while their cortisol levels were continuously monitored.

Researchers found that those who wrote about their past failures had lower cortisol levels compared to the control group when performing the new challenge.

‘We didn’t find that writing itself had a direct relationship on the body’s stress responses,’ DiMenchi said. ‘Instead, our results suggest that, in a future stressful situation, having previously written about a past failure causes the body’s stress response to look more similar to someone who isn’t exposed to stress at all.’

The study also revealed that those who wrote about a past failure made more careful choices while performing the new stressful task, and performed better overall than the control group.