"As close to magic as you can get"

A notebook and pen can dramatically improve your emotional life

Image: ‘Sappho Fresco,’ from Pompeii: Roman painting of a woman holding a writing tablet and stylus pen, 1st-century AD. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Photo by Alison Fisk. (I can’t get over how contemporary she looks.)

The University of Texas social psychologist James Pennebaker got married soon after college graduation.

But when he and his wife started fighting, he started drinking and smoking, got depressed, and withdrew from the world. Until one day he wrote some things down. Not an essay or a tract. He just wrote the contents of his heart; and he noticed that the more he wrote, the better he felt. He opened up to his wife again, and to his work. His depression lifted.

In 1986 Pennebaker decided to study this phenomenon, and he didn’t stop for the next forty years. His results have been nothing short of astonishing.

In one study, he divided people into two groups. One group was asked to write about their difficulties for 20 minutes a day, for three days; they wrote about sexual abuse, breakups, abandonment by a parent, illness, death. The other group wrote about everyday things, such as what shoes they were wearing.

Pennebaker found that that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers. Even months later, they were physically healthier, with lower blood pressure and fewer doctor’s visits. They had better relationships and more success at work.

Art: Gabriele Munter. Twenty centuries after ‘Sappho Fresco,’ here is another woman, another writing tablet, another pen.

In another study, Pennebaker worked with a group of despondent senior engineers who’d been laid off four months earlier by a Dallas computer company. Most were over 50 and had worked at the company their entire adult lives. None had found new work.

Once again, Pennebaker divided the men into two groups. One group wrote down their feelings of rage, humiliation, and fear of the future; the other group described neutral topics. And once again, the results were almost too remarkable to be true. Within months, the men who’d written out their cares were three times more likely than the control group to have found work.

Results like these are why the psychologist Ethan Kross described “expressive writing”, in our Candlelight Chat, as being “as close to magic as you can get.”

*

I’ve been struck by Pennebaker’s work from the moment I heard of it, probably because it so closely reflects my own experience. I kept diaries throughout my adolescence. They were the place I made sense of myself – of who I was then, and of whom I hoped to be, and eventually became. Throughout college and early adulthood, I kept my diaries in an old red backpack, zipped shut with a combination lock. At that stage of life, you move around a lot, from one dorm room or shared apartment to another. Everywhere I went, I dragged that backpack with me. Until one day, during one of the moves, I lost it. Left it behind in some closet. Maybe because I’m forgetful by nature. Or maybe because the diaries had already done their work, and I didn’t need (want?) them anymore.

And here is one more…(with apologies to our male readers for not including images of you! These are the works that happened to come to me while I was preparing today’s Kindred Letter.)

“Expressive writing” encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws, but as the seeds of our growth. Pennebaker found that the writers who thrived after pouring their hearts onto the page tended to use phrases such as “I’ve learned,” “It struck me that,” “I now realize,” and “I understand.” They didn’t come to enjoy their misfortunes. But they’d learned to live with insight.

If you’re intrigued by the idea of expressive writing, I’d like to suggest a new daily ritual for you: Find a blank notebook. Open it up. And write something down.

If you’re having a great day and you don’t feel like plumbing your depths, write down something that elevates you. Over my writing desk, I keep a post-it that reads: “It is urgent to live enchanted.” It comes from a poem by the Portuguese author Valter Hugo Mae, and it reminds me to focus on the wondrous.

If you’re having a terrible day, write that down too. Write down exactly what’s wrong, and how you feel about it and why, write down why you feel disappointed or betrayed, what you’re afraid of. If you feel like writing down possible solutions to your problem, that’s fine. But you don’t have to. It doesn’t have to be great prose, either. All you have to do is write.

*How about you: do you keep a journal, or otherwise engage in expressive writing?

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P.S. This Kindred Letter was adapted from my book, BITTERSWEET.