The Psychological Benefits of Writing About Past Trauma | Jordan & Tammy Peterson

what people could do to maintain or enhance their cognitive ability as they age because your cognitive ability declines is exercise there's nothing better than physical exercise cognitive exercises um they don't work they don't make you any smarter but exercise physical cardiovascular and weightlifting improves your cardiovascular fitness and that keeps your brain healthy and that keeps you from degenerating as you age and at 50 you can revert your cognitive ability back to 30 year old levels with a good course of exercise so so that was interesting but then the other thing we found two things was

that um writing seemed to help people and writing about past difficult experiences traumas to use a word that's been beat to death past traumatic experience writing diligently about past or even badly for that matter merely writing about past traumatic experiences seemed to be a little distressing in the short run two weeks or so but beneficial physically and psychologically three to six months down the road and there was 30 research articles indicating how did you measure that the physical improvements were measured by number of times people went to visit the physician and then the psychological measures

were various measures of mental health mostly susceptibility to depression and anxiety and so and so imagine that you can detect a traumatic memory by reviewing your autobiography and noting that you have memories that are older than 18 months there's a reason for that older than 18 months that still cause you emotional distress when they appear in the theater of your imagination and so what that means is your brain has marked the territory that's represented by those memories as dangerous and that's what the anxiety system does and your brain doesn't like noticing that you've been in

places that you couldn't master so it marks those as potential trouble and the marking is the remnant emotional significance of the memory danger here danger here those obsessive recurring anxiety-provoking memories is an alarm system in your brain saying you might go here again you might go here again beware your old self telling you in the present that there's danger that there's still danger because even though there isn't well there there may still be but there may not be well there won't be if you don't go there but you had been there and that means you

might be there again and so what your emotional systems want to see is that you've mastered all the territories that you've encountered and mastery means that when you go somewhere you've matured partly partly that you've developed the requisite competence to navigate through that landscape and it's a navigation problem so that you have a map that will guide you in that territory without without trouble on your part and all the places you've been where there are pitfalls are marked in your memory by remaining negative emotion and that actually that actually causes chronic stress so imagine that

one of the things your body tries to do your emotional systems is to calculate the proportion of territory that you've been in that's dangerous compared to productive and safe okay the more it's productive and safe the less stress you carry because your psychophysiological self assumes safety and it lets you dispense with emergency preparation but if everywhere you've gone there's been trouble then you're like this all the time and that makes you old and the reason it makes you old is because it's too physiologically demanding you're burning up excess resources all the time being ready for

the next catastrophe and so if your past is full of unresolved traumas and we'll get to what that means then your psychophysiological self and your emotional systems are going to assume that the environment is dangerous and they're going to keep you in a state of chronic hyper preparation now if you go back to those old memories and you plot a new course like let's say you were bullied when you were a kid right and so you're still leery of people in some fundamental sense but maybe you don't have to because let's say well when i

was a kid for example i didn't get bullied a lot but i got everybody does to some degree and so what did i get bullied about well i was small you were young and i was young for my age young for my grade because i had skipped a grade and i was small despite that and i was less athletically able because i was smaller and younger and so when i ran into bullies those were the uh aspects of my being that they would capitalize on and so but now i'm not like that i'm not young

for my grade i'm not small and and i'm as athletic as i need to be so carrying that is not helpful because i've actually solved the problems that produced those those experiences but you and that's what your brain wants to see your psychophysiological self it wants to see that you've solved the problem now so if you go back and you think well i'm still scared of people why am i scared of people well because when i was young here are the limitations i had but i no longer have those limitations and none of those dangers

exist and now i've thought that through now you have a map of that territory that's hippocampally instantiated by the way that's the part of the brain that inhibits the amygdala which is an emotion center and now the brain can say okay we'll just shut off the residual hyper preparation associated with that danger so you go back through your whole past eh and you figure out where the pitfalls were and then you see as an adult if you generated new strategies of representation and navigation that would enable you to bypass those problems in the present and

the future