From psychologytoday.com
Writing about the bad can be good for you
Many people associate diary-keeping with the tortured musings of adolescents dealing with romantic crushes or social isolation.
There is some truth to this stereotype, since a 2023 survey by Statista found that fully one fifth of American participants aged 14 to 25 engaged in journaling to help them manage their mental health. Yet adults actually may do so at even higher rates: a 2025 YouGov survey found that only 47 percent of respondents said they “never” write about their personal thoughts.
But what makes this activity so popular? The simple answer is that it seems to make you feel better.
This intuitive belief has been the subject of much research on what researchers call expressive writing or emotional disclosure. Crucially, this refers to writing down one’s feelings and reactions as opposed to just recording the events of one’s day.
What Research Tells Us About the Benefits of Emotional Disclosure
James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, conducted pioneering work on this topic beginning in the 1980s. He and his collaborators asked college students to write about traumatic personal experiences for short periods across several days. Compared to a control group writing about mundane topics, those who had written about their significant emotional experiences were found to benefit in a variety of ways.
Across Pennebaker's studies, it's been demonstrated that the expressive writing participants report lower levels of distress and depression, fewer physical symptoms, and even better grades. The researchers also documented, in follow-ups with these participants, fewer visits to physicians and even long-term immune function improvements in the days and months following their expressive writing (Pennebaker, 1997).
In other words, writing about emotional events may not just make you happier—it may also make you healthier.
Researchers later combined the results of many similar studies to conduct meta-analyses of this research. Frattaroli (2006) included 146 studies in her analysis and found small but significant beneficial effects for expressive writing. A later meta-analysis by Guo (2023), which included studies employing longer-term follow-ups, also reported a beneficial effect.
In 2009, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his collaborators described a possible physiological mechanism to explain why such writing is helpful. Research participants in a neuroimaging study were asked to provide a verbal label for an affective display, such as an angry face. Compared to a control group, these participants showed greater activity in a part of the brain that dampens the neural activity associated with strong emotions (Lieberman et al., 2007).
In other words, the act of identifying or describing negative emotions may help to attenuate them.
Does Writing Always Help Us Feel Better?
It should be noted, however, that expressive writing isn’t some magical elixir. One important caveat is that, immediately after writing about traumatic events, participants in research studies frequently report feeling worse—not better.
This phenomenon was first noted by Pennebaker and Beall (1986), and several later studies have also observed this effect. Some researchers have reported that the negative feelings may persist for an hour or two—making it comparable to the short-term decline in mood after watching a sad movie.
Still, even these brief episodes of negative affect may be one of the reasons that so many people abandon journaling or keeping a diary after only a few days. This is unfortunate, because it means that they never reap the long-term benefits of writing about their feelings.
It’s also the case that people who tend to ruminate—that is, those who engage in repetitive and prolonged thinking about negative experiences—may be adversely affected by engaging in expressive writing.
A study by David Sbarra and his collaborators found that, among research participants who had recently separated from a spouse, those who scored high on a measure of rumination reported more distress following sessions in which they wrote about the dissolution of their marriage. In addition, these negative effects persisted for up to nine months following the writing sessions (Sbarra et al., 2013).
Another study found that an expressive writing intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic had the effect of elevating participants’ stress levels, and these effects were still seen at a one-month follow-up (Vukčević Marković et al., 2020). However, this result may only obtain when people are experiencing a high degree of fear or uncertainty—such as during a global health crisis.
In general, however—for most people and most of the time—writing or journaling about one’s emotional experiences can pay lasting dividends. Short-term negative effects are typically transitory, and the benefits can be long lasting.
References
Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823-865.
Guo, L. (2023). The delayed, durable effect of expressive writing on depression, anxiety, and stress: A meta-analytic review of studies with long-term follow-ups. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(1), 272-297.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labelling disrupts amygdala. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
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