A surprisingly healthy habit for 2024 that doesn't involve diet or exercise

Journaling techniques for mental AND physical health benefits!

Happy New Year!

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The holiday season is, for better or worse, an intense time. Even for those who attempted to stay tucked away from the hustle and bustle (me), it was palpable on the streets. For some, it’s is an annual high point in the calendar, bringing the comforts of loved ones near, holiday merry making, and the scent of fir tree and gingerbread wafting through the house. However, for others, it might be a repeating episode of chaos, overstimulation, and a certain kind of loneliness that can occur even when swimming in people. Whether starting from a high or a low point coming into the new year, staring out into the cold, dark abyss of January can feel a little uncomfortable and I’m here to share something that may help 2024 be your best yet.

I have heard it estimated that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February and I expect this is largely due to a reliance chiefly on willpower alone. I too have fallen into the trap - I am a hopeless optimist and devout “self-improvementalist” who, for years, stewed over the careful selection of my resolution, only to watch it flail and fail within weeks. This always led to a few more weeks of self flagellation and eventually the realisation that perhaps much of what I hoped to achieve on the outside, was more of an inside job. Enter journaling: a slow living ritual and daily tool which yields clarity and health benefits!

There’s something about writing down our experiences that strikes me to be primal and necessary. Humans love, and perhaps need to tell stories, to say or etch them into permanence – on cave walls, in notebooks and the hearts and ears of those who will listen. To physically, with spoken word or scribbled language, get that which is in our minds eye out into the world is a joy and a relief. We communicate to others to process ideas, share information, and pass down lore; is it any wonder that writing can be simultaneously a creative outlet and therapeutic?

I started journaling at the age of nine, romanticizing the idea of someone finding my journal hundreds of years in the future, and treasuring it like an uncovered hieroglyph. In truth, I was shy and emotionally suppressed. I felt a pull to preserve memories perhaps in place of knowing how to open up and, in the process, I felt both achievement and relief. Fast-forward a couple of decades, I see clearly now that journaling has been a gift that has helped to find my way and, is a staple ritual of my wellbeing. My stack of mismatched and weatherworn journals rests on the bookshelf. The contents of each as colorful and unexpected as its cover. I notice them from time to time and upon taking a minute to pluck one off the shelf and read a passage of my past, I’m filled with quiet delight to have, right here in hand, a collection of unique gems, details of the learned, the lost, and the loved in my life - many of which I may have otherwise forgotten.

Research on various types of journaling tells that it’s useful to reduce stress and to grapple with emotions and traumas. If you’re new to journaling, it can be enough to spend just a few minutes each day recording what happened and how you felt about it. Beyond that, journals that include daily/weekly prompts are very helpful to know how to begin or, if you’re wanting to try some specifically therapeutic approaches, read on.... I’m particularly excited to share a technique with you that has been compared to therapy in its effectiveness – and requires only an hour of time total!

I’m particularly fond of Rifle Paper Co. journals, as well as PaperBlanks, the classic Moleskin, and Coppenrath notebooks (Germany).

Visual Journaling

The hot-fudge sundae of journaling - it’s pleasing to the eye, fun, and usually messy. Research has concluded that as little as 5 minutes of this kind of journaling can have health benefits, such as boosts in serotonin and dopamine (Zaidel, 2014), leaving you full of warm satisfaction, without the sugar high. This is my favorite style to get out of my head and into the flow of expressing, especially when I want to be creative but lack patience for the tedious effort of an actual art project that I want to turn out “nice”. It also makes for something eye-catching - I’ve personally experimented with paper collage, photos, pressed leaves and petals, as well as all types of drawings made with everything from glitter gel pens to charcoal from the campfire. Visual journaling is using both writing and drawings, collage, or photographs and gets your creative juices flowing in an anything-goes king of way. Let go of perfectionism or trying to make something pretty and just create.

How To: Start with writing down your thoughts and then create art to represent it… Or, start with art and then write about what you have created, describing what it represents, what significance it has, or how it makes you feel.

Discussion-based

This style of journaling is to have a written conversation with yourself (present, past, or future) to gain perspective or even to show compassion. It can be used to converse (imaginatively) with another person, either in preparation to talk with that person in real life, or to gain closure and “re-write” how a talk actually went down. This kind of journaling always reminds me of the scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – when Harry converses with a person from decades in the past by writing on a blank page of a magical diary. The ink slowly disappears into the paper only re-appear to Harry’s surprise, with a reply. You may be surprised to find that coming up with the other person’s side of the exchange comes quite naturally.

It can be a powerful exercise in self-forgiveness to write a dialogue with your past or future self.

How To: Start by addressing the person (yourself or another) you wish to talk with and write a question or statement. Respond from the perspective of that person and let the discussion unfold without judgement.

Stream-of-Consciousness

This is exactly what is sounds like: writing non-stop for a few minutes without trying to make sense or be grammatically correct; just get the words onto paper. It's believed that this is a way to access thoughts and emotions in the subconscious that may be otherwise obscured. In my own experience, it takes practice AND being in the right mood to find this enjoyable, but a specific prompt or situation in mind helps get things going. Writers and creators sometimes use this method as a sort of brain dump of ideas and surrounding notions before getting to work.

How To:  Set aside a set amount of time, even 5 minutes is enough, and write whatever comes to mind or about a specific event.

And now for something *really* cool: In a recent episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman Ph.D., discusses a simple but powerful therapeutic writing exercise that is based on the stream-of-consciousness journaling style. The instructions are to choose a current or past stressful event and write about it for exactly 15 minutes in a continuous stream of consciousness. This is to be repeated a total of 4 times, on consecutive days or once per week. The amazing (and lasting!) of this exercise include: changes in neural plasticity, improved sleep and immune function, and reduction in severity of symptoms in chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome, to name a few (Huberman, A., 2023).

The protocol is based on the research of Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986), and has been studied extensively since then with newer insights that Andrew Huberman explains, including that the use of language in the writing can be revealing of health status and stress level - essentially, people with larger positive emotion vocabularies tend to have better health and less stress (Huberman, A., 2023) (Vine, V. et al., 2020). Another win for the optimists: there may be health benefits for choosing to be positive in the face of stress or negativity.

I personally did this exercise last month and although it did require some discipline to complete, I was astounded at the differences in the tone of my writing from the first to last session and that after I had completed all four sessions, I stopped having reoccurring bad dreams about the event that I had written about! While this exercise is specific to stressful and negative events, it’s also interesting that a newly published study Jafariathar, Z., et al., (2023), explored the effect of job-related stress for nurses who wrote about positive experience repeatedly, finding that the exercise significantly decreased stress.

However you choose to journal, the key to getting the most benefit is to experiment and find what works for you.

Another sample from my collection

If this was helpful to you or if you’d like to see a post on a specific topic, let me know in the comments.

As always, thanks for reading!

xx Chesica

References

Huberman, A. (Host). (2023, November 11). A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health. (No. 151). [Audio podcast episode]. In Huberman Lab. https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/a-science-supported-journaling-protocol-to-improve-mental-physical-health

Jafariathar, Z., Haghighi, S., Jahani, S., & Maraghi, E. (2023). Investigating the impact of written emotion disclosure on the level of occupational stress among intensive care nurses. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 1064189. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1064189

Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274

Vine, V., Boyd, R. L., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2020). Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being. Nature Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0

Zaidel, D. W. (2014). The biological and neurological aspects of creativity, brain, art, and imagination. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 389. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00389