Does Journaling Actually Work? (Journaling 101)

today we're going to talk a little bit about journaling and if you're like me journaling actually sounds like a terrible idea I'm supposed to put down my deepest darkest thoughts on a piece of paper and then somehow that'll magically improve the problem yeah thanks but no thanks what difference does it make if I just write down all of the things that I can't fix is it like journaling actually just magically makes things better when we just write about them and I know this sounds absolutely insane but the answer is yes actually yes that's exactly how

it works we have no idea how this actually happens but it seems like there's actually really strong evidence that journaling just magically makes things better now you may be confused by that what do you mean it magically makes things better so here's just an example of a couple of really interesting studies so the first is that a group of psychologists have repeatedly measured students who journal and they Journal about all kinds of different things so sometimes they'll talk about their emotions sometimes they'll talk about what they're doing that day but the one thing that's really

bizarre is journaling seems to increase their grades another example of things kind of magically getting better that we don't understand comes from studies of physiology so people will do studies on the effects of journaling on things like antibody responses the immune system response to cancer treatment and vaccines their studies about how journaling improves like blood pressure and even like improves some degree of like blood glucose control and all kinds of unrelated things hey there thanks for watching and I'm glad these videos have been helpful a lot of times I'll read the comments and see people

asking well what do I actually do about it which is a great question and unfortunately the resources out there haven't been that great which is precisely why I started HD in the first place HG coaches are trained on a curriculum that integrates my understanding of what motivates us what paralyzes us and most importantly what leads to Lasting behavioral change if you're ready to take the next step HG coaches can help you build the life that you want they've helped people build careers help people find relationship steps build networks of friends and even do things like

discover their passions or pursue Hobbies so if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in check out the link in the description below so what do we know about how it works right so okay if you're thinking listen to this and you're thinking okay wait so like if I start journaling it's going to improve my blood pressure make me physically healthier and all also increase my grades like that sounds really bizarre like how on Earth can it possibly do that and so let's try to dive in and understand a little bit about the mechanisms

of journaling so the first thing that makes journaling actually kind of hard is if you have a problem in life you spend most of your time avoiding that problem right so like if I'm if I'm worried about what my friends think of me I'm not going to spend my time thinking about her I don't want to spend my time thinking about it because spending my time thinking about it like having a thought Loop about it seems to not help at all and instead what our mind naturally wants to do is distract ourselves from problems so

your mind may be kind of like this like you may be thinking okay if I can fix something I'm happy to think about it so I'm happy to work on a problem when it results in something productive but I don't want to spend time thinking about something unless it actually like moves the needle forward in some way right so completely natural so when you Journal about something that is emotionally challenging it tends to evoke those emotions and this is exactly what we spend most of our time avoiding right this is why we will spend time

on social media or play video games or whatever like because we want to avoid these negative emotions but there's something that's really interesting that happens when you Journal so when you Journal you start to evoke these emotions but you evoke them in kind of like a diet sort of way so it's not like regular Coke it's like Diet Coke or Diet soda and and if you think about the the emotional burden that you feel when you Journal is less than the actual experience so some people have hypothesized that this is almost like trauma exposure therapy

where you are exposing yourself to your negative emotions in small small small doses and what we tend to see over time with people who Journal is like yeah the experience of journaling is kind of uncomfortable but what it actually does is teaches you how to tolerate discomfort and so if you're thinking about if you Journal about let's say an uncomfortable social situation an awkward social situation like you're at a restaurant and a waiter walks up to you and says enjoy your meal and then you say thanks you too and then you're cringing about it for

the next couple of days and as you're trying to fall asleep you just think about this really cringe moment where you're terrified right there's nothing you can really do about it as you Journal that the cringe comes up and the interesting thing is that as you experience more and more of that negative emotion while you're journaling over time people have done studies on this the amount of negative emotion that you experience or really the amount of stress that you experience when recalling the emotion actually goes down and so as your stress level goes down you

start to resist negative emotion and then what happens is something actually really cool is now that you no longer need to fear negative emotion you can actually have cringe moments and not worry about them so it seems that journaling actually increases our ability tolerate negative emotion so the more we Journal it seems like one of the biggest advantages is that increase in journaling decreases our avoidance of negative things or things that make us feel bad there are a couple of other angles of journaling that people have sort of hypothesized or explored so another good example

of this is building a narrative so there's a lot of research that shows that if human beings go through a traumatic experience they don't all develop PTSD so for example there are human beings that will go through a traumatic experience and like half of them will enter into something called post-traumatic growth and pro post-traumatic growth is when something kind of bad happens to you but you grow as a person and you actually end up kind of like better than you started off and there are some people that I've talked to that were super bizarre but

like I remember seeing you know working with cancer patients when I was a medical student and an intern and them saying weird things like cancer survivors like yeah cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me and I'm sitting there thinking like what do you mean how on Earth can that possibly make sense cancer sounds devastating and they'll say this weird kind of stuff like oh yeah like cancer made me realize like how much like life is how amazing life truly is it made me appreciate life so much more it made me appreciate the

people around me and like all this kind of like super positive stuff and I'm kind of scratching my head but like okay if that's what you say on the flip side so sometimes if you have a traumatic experience it's not what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger the other unfortunate truth is that what doesn't kill you can you for the rest of your life and this is the case of something like PTSD where a trauma lingers and continues to damage someone then some researchers got kind of curious and were trying to figure out okay

what's the difference between going to post traumatic growth route and going the post-traumatic stress disorder route what determines whether someone is able to like heal from trauma and become a stronger person one of the major variables is something called narrative so people who are able to construct some kind of narrative about their life are the ones who will like grow from negative experiences this is where doing something like journaling can actually help us construct a narrative it is a very very cohesive exercise that can help us make sense of the events around us there's studies

that show that people who Journal will change their pronoun usage now we're not talking about transgender kind of stuff what I mean is that if you normally think about a situation so let's say that you're like you have social anxiety and you sort of think about a situation and as your mind understands the situation you think oh my God I look so stupid Oh my God these people don't like me um I I don't know how to behave properly people must think I'm awkward people must feel like I'm a third wheel people must not like

the way that I I think and so if you think about those thoughts what is the subject of those thoughts I'm saying people people people people people people think this about me people think that about me people think this about me people think that about me and so one of the really interesting things is that when people are stuck in a negative cognitive pattern they tend to be focused either too much on themselves I'm I'm at fault this is all my fault this is my problem I'm a waste of space people I don't like hanging

out with people or whatever it's i i i i i or it's people people people people and if you look at someone like a narcissist this is a really good example so a narcissist when they construct a narrative about their life other people are always messing with them these people don't like me they don't respect me they don't love me despite everything that I do they don't experience any gratitude for me so someone who's narcissistic is always thinking about them them them them on the flip side if someone has something like a mood disorder and

it isn't a depressive episode the person who's always at fault is themselves I'm a waste of space my family is better off without me Etc et cetera et cetera I don't like the way that I look when I look in the mirror I'm ugly I'm this I'm this I'm this I'm this I'm this so the key thing though is that narcissists always use they in them or people and people who are depressed will always always use III so there's data that shows that when you start to journal that becomes fluid so literally people will analyze

the pronouns that are used in journaling and at the beginning of journaling you'll say III or you'll say they they they they they but as you Journal more you start to mix the two statements and so like this is an example of let's say a narcissist two journals will say these people don't like me these people don't respect me and then over time as they Journal they'll start to say well sometimes I don't behave respectfully towards them sometimes maybe I'm the one who's actually at fault I could have started doing this better and for people

who are depressed you'll see the opposite I'm a waste of space I'm not valuable other people sometimes don't treat me with respect and I sometimes can be valuable but people don't give me what I deserve so what will literally see is a fluctuation in the pronoun usage and what that sort of indicates is that people are changing their narratives so as a narcissist starts to journal they start to realize and they start to use more I statements and start to realize oh maybe I am at fault this is really cool because once you start to

realize okay wait wait a second maybe they're not to blame maybe I'm to blame you may need that or the flip side if you have super low self-esteem is you're always going to be blaming yourself and you'll start to hold other people accountable so it seems like journaling helps us kind of change perspectives and build a more cohesive narrative so I think part of the reason that sometimes we get stuck in life is because we don't actually learn from our mistakes right so if you play like a video game for example you can be hard

stuck at bronze for like years and sometimes in real life that's sort of true too a good example of this would be something where you feel like this kind of stuff keeps happening and you find yourself in the same situation over and over and over again and one of the interesting things things there is that if you look at something like therapy or coaching these are things things that help you understand where the problem is and journaling can sometimes help you do that as well I think of journaling kind of like replay analysis where if

you think about okay I can play five you know rounds of a particular video game but which one will actually teach me more if I play five rounds of a video game or if I play three rounds of a video game and I spend two hours like analyzing my replays and thinking about what I could be doing better and it turns out that that's true of journaling as well because as we go through life we never really sit down and like think about in a kind of objective cohesive way what we could be doing better

our mind May generate all kinds of thoughts but it's different right so if you sit down and actually like watch one of your replays you're going to notice so much more about what you could be doing anyone who plays a game and loses a game will immediately if you ask them some kind of question hey why did you lose this game they'll jump to some answer right they'll give you an answer they'll say oh I lost this game because of a b c and d they think they know what the answer is but if that

same person actually sits down and watches a replay what they'll discover is ten thousand things that their mind didn't immediately jump to so hopefully by now you're willing to kind of give journaling a shot and so then the next question becomes okay how do I journal and this is super cool because a lot of people have tried to figure out okay like what's the right way to journal so just to give you all a couple of examples there are some studies that look at journaling like 15 minutes a day for seven days in a row

there are some studies that look at journaling like 30 minutes once a week for like seven weeks there are all kinds of different like dosages and frequencies and durations of journaling so here's what we kind of know about journaling the first is that journaling can have delayed effects so there are some studies that show that even a single episode of journaling can lead to some kind of or Improvement or Revelation up to six months away so I know it sounds kind of bizarre but this is one of the reasons that it's hard to journal because

we don't really see the benefit right away so it does appear that journaling can have very delayed benefits that are kind of unexpected the next thing is that there isn't really a magical formula so I'd say kind of do what works for you you need some degree of consistency so I'd say anywhere between 15 minutes and one hour and as frequently as every day if you feel like it or up to once a week now what kind of stuff should you Journal about now this is what's super interesting so there's some data that shows that

it doesn't matter what you Journal about you're going to get some kind of benefit but what I found to be consistently useful for psychological things is first of all that you write about some kind of emotional experience that you've had and what do we mean by emotional experience we don't really just mean something that that happened bad like if you had an awesome week you can could talk about like how awesome your week was and how grateful you are to your friends because expressing gratitude and journaling is a whole different area of research that shows

all kinds of positive benefits the second thing is that I would strongly recommend that from time to time you actually read your journal and for those of y'all that are paranoid that someone else is going to find my journal and read it just think about this for a second okay we have professional authors who have dedicated their entire life to writing something to entice someone to read it these are things like best-selling novels and if you were to pick up a best-selling novel today what do you think would happen you'd read a little bit of

it and you'd set it down our attention span is now so short that no one will have the attention span and dedication to sit down and read through some kind of amateur fan fiction autobiography crap that is your life so if you're like me you're terrified that people are going to read your Journal but they don't have the attention span for it so you can write whatever you want and it doesn't really matter right for you okay so write about emotional experiences if you can you want to read it from time to time one thing

that I highly recommend is that you physically write so a lot of people will like to journal using something like you know a word editing software or something like that Microsoft Word Google Docs or whatever and you can journal on a laptop there's no like big deal with that or desktop or whatever but what are there a couple of things about physically writing that I think are really important the first is that physically writing slows your thoughts down if you slow your thoughts down you're you'll kind of sit with them a little bit more and

you'll be able to process things a little bit the other really interesting thing about writing is that writing commits things to memory if you have some kind of insight like this may have happened to you before where you kind of have This brilliant idea as you're going to bed at night and what happens the next day do you remember what your brilliant ideas the next day you wake up that kind of disappears right you have This brilliant idea oh my God this is how I'm gonna make a billion dollars I just had this great product

idea I have this great idea for a story I had all these great ideas and they just disappear into the wind another simple example of this is you can read something like study something for school and you can understand it while you're reading it and the next day where does it go it disappears so one of the cool things about journaling is that chances are that when you Journal it'll whatever you write about will sink into your memory more I kind of think about journaling like getting into a canoe and kind of going down river

where the part that you control is like sure you're paddling a little bit here or there but it's primarily the river that's carrying you Downstream right and the same thing kind of happens when you Journal is that sure you can pick a particular topic but if you journal for 30 minutes I can almost guarantee you that where you end up will be very different from where you started at the end of the day a lot of people are really concerned about journaling right so we've like heard that journaling is good for you like you can

look at like oh this article about like how to deal with burnout on LinkedIn written by some guy with an MBA says oh yeah journey is really good and you can hear about psychiatrists like myself or therapists or other people like maybe your friends who are like yeah like journaling has totally helped me like journaling helps so much but if you're kind of like me you don't really know how to journal right because no one ever teaches you how to journal you're kind of confused like how is this supposed to help me it doesn't actually

fix any of my problems all it does is even if I write about the terrible stuff first of all it makes me feel terrible when I write it secondly like it doesn't actually fix the problem and thirdly like what if someone reads it this sounds like a terrible idea you're asking me to commit the most painful thoughts that I have to a piece of paper and then it's going to be vulnerable and like anyone could read it that's not like a terrible idea it sort of does sound like a terrible idea and that's why if

you really understand how journaling works if you really understand some of the data behind the evidence behind journaling and you start to understand a little bit about how to actually do it you will be amazed at first of all how easy it is and second of all how much it actually helps you