The Science Of Journaling: How Writing Reduces Overthinking, Rumination, And Anxiety | Dr. James Pennebaker (Co-Interviewed By Dr. Bianca Harris)

Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing? All right. I'm going to admit here from the outset that I've long had a little bit of a bad attitude about journaling, which is weird because I spent 30 years of my life working as a journalist. I dismissed journaling as some sort of like new agey thing, but then I started to see a bunch of science that really changed my mind.

Side note, this is a bit of a pattern for me. I reflexively judge something only to have my mind changed by the evidence. This happened over and over again. And in the case of journaling, the evidence is quite abundant. According to research, journaling can be an effective way to reduce stress and anxiety, to biggies, to perennials sadly in my life. And that's not all. Various forms of journaling practice have been shown to increase immune response, sleep, memory, focus, time management, and decision-making.

Today I'm talking to the guy who really pioneered all of the science around journaling. Dr. James Pennebaker is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He's published over 300 articles and written or edited 12 books. I interviewed Dr. Pennebaker jointly with my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris.

because she and I recently designed, wrote, and published our own journal, which you can order right now over on DanHarris.com. We called the journal, dump it here because, frankly, getting shit out of your head and onto the page can make said shit much more workable. Like I said, you can order the journal right now in the shop over on DanHarris.com. It's the perfect holiday gift for the warriors and overthinkers in your life.

Anyway, enough shilling out of me. In this conversation with James Panabaker, we talk about the specific form of journaling called expressive writing or therapeutic journaling that he invented and then studied. Other kinds of journaling, such as to-do lists and gratitude lists, and there's evidence for both of those. Why writing things down helps shift our perspective on our stress or trauma.

how that can lead to a cascade of benefits from improved sleep, to improved working memory, and even improved social lives. And finally, why Pentabaker, who, as you will hear, is a very laid back dude, is also very laid back about how often you need to journal in order to derive its many benefits. We'll get started with James Pentabaker right after this.

But first, a little blatant self-promotion. I want to let you know about an exciting new thing. We're dropping in the shop over at DanHarris.com. It is our first custom journal. We're calling it Dump It Here because the science shows that getting it out of your head and onto the page. In other words, journaling can be a very effective way to reduce stress and anxiety.

It's a sleek black-bound journal with line pages, and it includes some suggestions for journaling practices that you might want to try. For more on how journaling can be useful, you can check out our most recent podcast with Dr. Jamie Panabaker, who's done the research. And of course, you can check out the new Dump It Here, a journal by going to DanHarris.com and clicking on the shop tab.

Meanwhile, over on the Happier app, they've got personalized meditation practices that fit any schedule, which is especially relevant in the midst of the holidays and all of the stress that comes with it. From quick meditations to mindful cooking videos, Happier can help you stay grounded through the season. And now through December 6, you can get 40% off a yearly subscription. Go to Happier.com slash four zero to get your discount.

Dr. James Panabaker, welcome to the show. It's nice to be here. And welcome back, Dr. Bianca Harris. Thank you. Okay. So let me start here. I'd love to hear a little bit of your origin story, Jamie. And by the way, just for the listeners, he told me I can call him Jamie. How did you get interested in the subject of journaling in the first place?

I actually wasn't that interested in it. When it happened early in my career, I was doing work on physical symptoms and how people come to know how they feel. And I was writing a book on it and I thought, I should have my chapter on what kind of people report lots of physical symptoms. So I put together a questionnaire and I worked with my students to come up with what kind of questions should we ask? Can we ask all sorts of things? And somebody said, how about this?

Prior to the age of 17, did you ever have a traumatic sexual experience? This was 1979, and I thought, yeah, that was good. So we threw that one along with dozens, maybe hundreds of other questions.

And we discovered that one question was associated with every kind of health problem imaginable. And we ended up doing a more national sample and found the same thing. I became fascinated by this. What was it about a traumatic sexual experience that could have been years earlier that was associated with reporting symptoms but also other objective health problems? One of the things that emerged was it was secret. And we did later studies and we found that having any kind of trauma was bad for you. We'd always known that.

But if you kept it secret, it was much more toxic. And this made me start to wonder, if keeping secrets is so bad for you, what if we brought people in the lab and had them talk about it? Talking was too much trouble. And from a research perspective, I thought just having them right might work.

We ended up doing a study where we asked people to come in and either write about a deeply upsetting experience, ideally one that you hadn't talked in any detail with others, or to write about superficial topics. They gave us permission to get access to their health records. And what we found was that those people who wrote about these traumatic experiences ended up going to the Student Health Center at about half the rate of people in our controls.

That was a profound finding for me. And even back then, I thought, you know, this could be a big deal. That really was what spurred by interest. I had written occasionally when I was going through upsetting experiences. I would just sit down and I'd just write, what the hell's going on with me? Why am I feeling the way that I am? And I would generally just write once. And I noticed I felt a lot better. I saw this with people in our study and that was what got me into it.

Just to sum that up, there were two findings that set you off on this path. One was if you have a secret trauma that has potentially deeply destabilizing health impacts, psychological, physiological. And the second is that if you write about it, it can reduce those negative impacts. That's exactly right.

I'm interested Bianca were early in this interview, but those two findings. How do they land for you when they go through the prism of your mind? I love it. The first thing I think about is.

I write a lot at various times in my life. I've called it journaling at other times. I've just called it writing since a lot of the sort of personal dump is relevant to what I'm trying to write about in terms of imposter syndrome. But what I really love just at the beginning of what you're saying as a clinician

is that sort of merger of the psychological and the physical. And I say that in part because I've always known that it's been helpful, but to really see that there are measurements and a very difficult thing to measure. I'm sure there's so many confounding variables. I'm sure the types of trauma, how long the secret has been there, the characteristics of the human being, et cetera, but just the broad strokes of it, I find really fascinating.

One of the things that intrigued me from the very beginning was I would start interviewing people who had had, say, a traumatic sexual experience or some other kind of trauma. And what really completely shook me was, as they would tell me about it, they would talk about how keeping this big secret

completely disrupted their lives and their social lives. The very first person I interviewed talked about being molested by her stepfather. She was in this position for that she couldn't tell her mother because her mother was so happy with this new guy that she had married.

So all of a sudden she couldn't talk to her mother because she was afraid that it would leak out. She couldn't talk to her friends because she was only 13 or 14 and she didn't think they'd understand. What was happening was she was getting more and more isolated from her family, from her friends. She couldn't tell anyone. She was constantly on guard. She couldn't sleep. The sexual part of it was in some ways almost a minor part compared to the complete disruption of her life.

And then you can see the degree of stress this has on somebody. Does one need to have a secret trauma in order to benefit from journaling?

None at all. All of us have had major disruptions in our lives. It could be you failed at something that everybody knows about. It could be almost anything. We often choose not to talk about it with others. I don't want to come across as weak. I don't want to come across as vulnerable or whatever.

One thing that I think is important to ask ourselves is why is it usually at the end of the day when we come home, we tell our spouse or friends about what happened during the day, upsetting experiences. And I think one reason we talk about them normally is that it helps to organize them in our minds. And if you have some kind of upsetting experience that you choose not to talk about, you can't talk about because if I've heard other people's feelings,

You don't organize it. And one thing that I started to realize in the studies I did and other people started to do was that putting something into words almost forces some kind of structure, some kind of way of organizing the experience.

How do you know when one is organizing their experience, which I think can only happen according to how that person experienced it? And then there's a story created around it, as we all do. Sometimes that story, and particularly in trauma, may not be fully accurate in terms of how it was

portrayed, which is not to negate the impact of it or say that that story was not the true story to that person, but how might that impact perpetuation of a story of inaccuracy?

That was just something that bothered me early on in my research, but I eventually came to realize, I don't think it matters. Coming up with a story helps to steal the mind. I think one reason we ruminate so much after a trauma, especially when we don't talk to other people about, is our mind is trying to put all the parts together to come up with some kind of meaning to it. And even if the meaning might not be accurate,

If we believe it, we don't think about it as much. It allows us to move on. So I don't think accuracy is the best way to think about it. Obviously, some stories may be self-defeating in some way. So in that sense, accuracy may be very beneficial, but in other ways, I'm not sure it matters that much.

It's really interesting. We are meaning making creatures. Our brains can't rest until we've made sense of something generally. We hate uncertainty, ambiguity. So that definitely lands for me. Now that I'm talking about myself, I'm going to keep pressing on something I asked earlier, which is

I have not had many big key trauma events in my life yet. And not to say that I haven't had ups and downs. And I don't think I've had many secret traumas. Although as I say this, I realize I wrote a memoir about having a panic attack on television and not telling anybody that was caused by taking drugs in my after going to a war zone. So that was a secret trauma that I did write about and it felt better afterwards. But I guess I'm trying to represent the people in the audience who

might not see themselves in either the word trauma or secrecy, but of course have had ups and downs in their lives and are wondering, can I too benefit from journaling?

And I'm kind of in the same boat. I've had ups and downs in my life and I haven't had a major trauma myself. However, what we find in all of this work is all of us have had major stressors and conflicts in our early studies where we had people to write about traumas. I would always add, and if you haven't had the trauma, I would like you to just write about a major stressor or conflict. And it turns out everybody has something to write about. We all are dealing with issues.

And I think one thing that I suggest to people is if you find yourself tossing and turning in the middle of the night about something, if you find yourself worrying about something too much or talking too much to other people about something and you can tell these other people don't want to hear it anymore,

you may benefit from writing. The word trauma has become a very popular term over the last 20 years, but I don't feel this necessarily is a trauma. I would feel writing about something that is weighing on you can be beneficial.

The first study that I did, and this first study was published in 1986. We actually read it in 1983-84. One thing that was surprising about this study was I didn't know how much I should have people write. And I was in this position where I was at a small college, and we had about 50 people who could be in the study. And I thought, well, I should probably have them write more than once.

So I figured they would get five hours of experimental credit. Well, heck, why do we have a right four times? And then I needed to find the rooms and I could only get rooms after five o'clock. And I could only get so many rooms. And so we would essentially line these people up and run them for about four hours. And each person would write for about 15 minutes a shot for each of four days. Half the people wrote about traumatic experiences. Another group wrote about superficial topics.

and the study worked. So afterwards, I thought, well, I guess we should stick with that formula. There have now been probably 2,000 expressive writing studies that have been published. You don't have to write four times. You don't have to write 15 minutes at a time or 20 minutes at a time. There have been all of these variations. And for myself, I don't write four times 15 minutes at a time. Very often,

I don't write very often. I'll probably maybe two or three times a year. Usually there's been a, I've had a fight with my spouse or somebody at work or I'm worried about something. And sometimes I just get up in the middle of the night, sit down right until I feel like I've written enough. And then I go back to bed. I'm not a journal. The idea of writing every day for the rest of my life, I find for me overwhelming and depressing. I just don't do that.

I'm right when something bad happens and I want to get over it and move on. I find that so liberating. The fact that you, the patron saint of journaling, the scientific guru of journaling, see it as a very useful tool that you do deploy, but really kind of an extremists, not as some death march that you have to go through every day.

That's right. I view it like kind of an antibiotic. I got some kind of health problem, give me drugs for a few days, and then I don't want to take them anymore and I move on with life. I guess it depends on the person. Bianca, what you were saying, you like to write a lot. I have a lot of people who talk to me and they tell me how they do it.

You know, I don't want to write a lot. I write only when I'm happy. When I'm happy, I would never write. Why do I want to write when I'm happy? I just want to enjoy the happiness. And how people write is tremendously different. So for example, early on, one of my students

said, well, she writes, then after she writes, the next day she'll go back and she'll revise what she's written, and she'll do that over and over again. I'm thinking, I would never do that. Reading what I've written is too depressing. Why would I ever want to read it again? But I do know many people really benefit. And one of my primary recommendations is

I am not a guru. I don't have truth. I don't know why it works exactly. And there's not one true way that everyone needs to be their own researcher, their own scientist, and experiment to see what works best for you. That makes perfect sense. I think the thing that works best for me right now, and I've been writing now for years, is to understand the narrative

both in terms of what it had been, where it is, and where I would like it to be in terms of personal health. And what I find very interesting, and I'm not sure if you've looked at this or could look at it, is let's just take one event, for example, that somebody writes about, what does that event on paper look like over time? Because I know that I've written about aspects of

a single event many times over the years and sort of taking the 30,000 foot view now, which I'm much closer to than I was before, the narrative around it really has changed, which is a goal of mine personally. First, it was about the purge and saying things that I couldn't say out loud, whether it was a secret or it was a fight that I wanted to have with someone but didn't know how, I could put it on the page.

But over time, it became more of this sort of really expressive writing where ideas behind it came through. And as a result of that and the change over time, there are many more positive emotions than negative ones because a lot of what triggers me to write is not a sit down and write moment. It's an insight, sometimes it's distress. Usually it's an insight either coming from just my own feelings or from reading something and I have an idea. And once I start writing,

than the interesting stuff happens. So it's a lot, not for everybody, but that's really what has served me well. I've spoken with so many people about their varying experiences and yours is a very common one. I've worked quite a bit with people who have really used writing much of their life and they say very similar things.

My wife sometimes rolls her eyes the fact that I've become known for expressive writing because she's far more introspective than I am.

You know, mine is put a band-aid on it and let's just keep trying to move. And I do want to understand it, but once I'm there and it's I have a good enough idea, am I able to move forward and have a good day or a happy life, at least for the foreseeable future until the next miserable thing I'm confronted with.

I love that thing about your wife. I have a wife. I think she rolls her eyes at me being a quasi-happiness expert, given that she knows me as a barbarian. Exactly. That was not my word. I can say other words. Notice she's not disputing the characterizations. It's not her word. The first word. But I do write about you a lot. Where are you keeping those journals?

Lock and key, lock and key. Coming up, Dr. Jamie Panabaker talks about his protocol for expressive writing, tips for writing if you're feeling sheepish or nervous about it and why people who do expressive writing see changes in their social life.

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All right, well, let me ask sort of a technical question, Jamie. Your protocol is called expressive writing. You've been very clear in a helpful way that one does not need to follow the exact directions that you use among your study participants, but it might be worth your describing what directions you do give to people so that we're aware of it at the very least.

When I'm talking to a person who's not in the experiment, my recommendation is, look, go find a place where you won't be bothered and you can set aside, let's say 15, 20 minutes a day for at least three or four days. Once you are able to go to this place where you feel secure,

Just sit down and you can write. You can write on a computer. You can write a long hand how you write entirely up to you. And really let go and explore your deepest thoughts and feelings about the issues or issues that are weighing on you. And in your writing, really let go and explore your very deepest thoughts and feelings.

And in your writing, you might tie what you're dealing with with other events that might be similar to this. You might be related to your childhood, your relationship with your parents or family of origin or issues going on in your social life right now or loves or career issues. And you're free to write about that same upsetting experience each day or something different each day that's entirely up to you. But whatever you do, just really let go and explore your thoughts and feelings.

And in reality, you might find that after the first day, you feel fine and you don't feel like writing anymore. Great, don't write anymore. Or you might start writing and you start to get extremely distressed. Then you know this is going to bother you even more. Stop writing. Writing does not work for everyone all the time. You need to pay attention to how you're feeling during and afterward.

I recommend writing three or four days. Some people feel like they need to write more afterwards. Sure, do it. Sometimes they want to write more than 15 or 20 minutes. Great. It's free. Do whatever you want. Some studies people have just written two minutes or three minutes a day and it's beneficial. Be your own scientist. You know what's best for you. Much better than I do. And what topics you choose? Well, what topics are weighing on you?

I've had the experience of thinking I was really upset about a particular topic and I started writing and I was bored writing about it after two or three minutes and then I realized, wow, that wasn't the problem at all. It was something else that was related to it that was really bugging me. Let your writing guide your own thoughts about what are the issues that are important to you right now. But the primary issue is there is not one true way and

really experiment. I want to send some compassion out to my younger self because I did keep a journal, which I'm sure we call diaries in our adolescence, that was useful, but also distressing to look back on and I threw it out. Then I took a long vacation away from journaling. And then when I started again for a brief period of time,

years later, when I look back on that, I ripped out the pages that I didn't want to read, just like we select photos for an album where we don't look terrible. And the first time I did it, I threw out the journals, it was because it hurt me too much. The second time I did it was because I didn't want somebody else to find them and realize what I felt about myself. There's some sort of progression or growth in there, I suppose.

But it did dawn on me in reading about you before starting that would it have been worse for me to not have written or to have written and thrown away? Because in some ways I was invalidating everything that I was experiencing by saying you are not worthy of being here. It's not really an answerable question, but it is one thing that I thought about keeping the ugliness. Many people ask me about what should they do with their writing samples.

I recommend starting your writing with the intention of destroying it when you're finished. In other words, this writing should be for you and you alone. The one thing that I caution people is

you need to be able to put this right in some place that nobody else can find it. Because one reason you are writing this stuff is because perhaps you're afraid someone else will see it or you would be humiliated or would break up, you know, would hurt other people. All of us have heard stories where someone found their diary and it led to the kinds of things that they were fearing in the first place. So be very sensitive with what you do with this writing.

so that it is maximally beneficial for you, but not harming other people. I'm just keying in on that phrase for you and you alone. I have never done the type of expressive writing or journaling that you're describing here. However, I've written one and a half memoirs, one that's been published in another toiling away on

And I find that I get a lot of the benefits you're describing, which is that it helps me make sense of my life. It helps me see things more clearly, process ups and downs in my own life. And yet it's not for me and me alone.

You might just try this. Set aside some time and simply write for 20 minutes for you and you alone and throw it away when you're finished. In other words, one reason I like you and you alone language is because it forces you to be truly honest with yourself.

And when you're writing a memoir or you're writing it for somebody else, you can't help it twist it when you kind of want to look good. Even if you say bad things about yourself, you kind of twist it a little bit. So you're looking a little bit better than you really know you were. In addition, if you're writing a memoir, you have your dark, real memoir. And then you have the, you know, the gut seed up for it.

I like that. I like that a lot.

Bianca, just going back to you for a second, we've been talking a lot about the value of meaning making, you know, processing, making sense of the hard stuff in your life. And it just reminded me that you, I know, have an interest in, you took a course in narrative medicine. And I think are looking into it, of course, about narrative psychiatry. And so I don't even actually know if I know what those things are. So maybe you could describe that and see if it ties to what we're talking about here.

Well, I can't fully describe narrative psychology. I was only introduced to that recently as something I'm really interested in looking at. And maybe you could tell us more, Dr. Pennabaker. So I'll put a pin in that for a second. My understanding, though, is it's just around how people tell stories and create meaning and how that shapes their lives. And because it's a formal or

informal. I don't know how common it is practice within psychology. There are ways of doing it with some sort of rigorous methodology in terms of measuring things that other people write about. But coming back to that in a second, the first part of what you were saying, Dan, about narrative medicine, that's a really, I think, really important feature that is probably not

focused on enough within medical training because it really brings you to the bedside next to the human being. And it's about not only patients being able to express themselves and what they're experiencing and as the provider, you being able to better understand who they are, but also as a provider. There's lots to write about where you can certainly then discover

not only what your issues are that may or may not help you help somebody else, but really just helps you be in the moment and benefit your patient as much as possible because of this connection and deep understanding. And nobody shows up in an exam room with

a piece of writing to hand to their clinician and vice versa. But in essence, we would like to have what's on the other end of that. And that would take time and conversation, which most clinicians don't have. So the narrative medicine, I took a course in it, not a master's degree, which does exist. And there's a great one through Columbia University.

is really about not only practicing writing, but practicing reading other narratives and really getting into what people are saying and how they are saying it, which I think Dr. Pennabaker probably has something to say about as well.

I have spent some time with people in the narrative medicine world and I've been impressed with their emphasis a lot on literature in terms of reading stories of illness and healing in classic literature as well as other kinds of narrative.

And I think it has real strength to do just what you're saying is making a physician more aware of the person and the context of their illness. What I would love to see more of in medicine and in psychotherapy as well is

trying to appreciate that illness does not occur in a vacuum. Dealing with relatives who have been having health problems, I'm fascinated that the kidney doctor just looks at the kidney and ignores the rest of the body. And the one doctor looks at that and nothing else. And nobody ever says, well, what's going on in the person's life? That, you know, what we think of the old family doctor

who went around with a little black bag as a true holistic medicine expert. But our training is so specialized now that we just don't do that. And I do think trying to understand the context of what's going on with the person is so important. But again, the economic models of medicine now don't allow it. That's true, really. What resources are being poured into is dealing with

the burnout and the fallout of not doing those things, which actually does involve writing. That's right. Yeah.

The other thing you said earlier, Bianca, that I don't want to get lost in this discussion is you honed right in on whether the story should be accurate. I think that's a really interesting question. I understood Dr. Pennebaker's answer, which was, well, you know, I'm not dismissing the value of accuracy, but the real point of this exercise is a kind of a purge, getting it out there and making some sense of it. But I just wanted to make sure I'd give you a chance to come back to this if it was something you wanted to say more about.

If I could just bring up something about the metaphor you implied, I don't view expressive writing as a purge at all. I don't view it as allowing the pot to boil over to get let all the emotions out. I view this as a much more cognitive process. That is, it's a quest for self knowledge, self understanding.

Why am I feeling this way? So at the end, you walk away with greater insight in terms of why you've been so upset about this experience, why you've been obsessing about it, because you really need to understand what's happening.

It's not that you're flushing the emotions away. It's not that you're purging anything. You have come to a new understanding of your situation, why you did what you did, why the other people did what they did, and also ways of how do I move forward from here. So it's not a purge. It's a shift of perspective. Right. And a new understanding. Right.

I think that all sounds just right. And the partner to that, which I think comes through writing around illness and going back to narrative medicine is that so much of trauma is locked in the body. So they may be secrets that you don't even know that you have cognitively. And when you start writing about things that

you actually physically feel whether you're distressed or not, or you relate to an illness and start exploring that, there's a whole other world of experiences that you may not have tapped into that also shape how we think.

And that, to me, it's interesting. As a child, I had asthma, and I grew up in West Texas. It's a dry world. It's lots of dust and nothing else. And I'd usually have asthma in the fall. It was just dust and stuck pollen. And then I went off to college.

I'd been there a while, and my parents came to visit, and before they actually came to see me in my dorm, I developed asthma. And I remember thinking, oh my God, that my asthma was related to my relationship with my parents, especially my mother. And it was kind of like, oh my God, I had no idea. And that, ironically,

pretty much cured me from my ass, but once I saw that relationship. Amazing. But Bianca, just go back to accuracy. That feels like something it's maybe worth running down because I know for me,

so many of the stories I'm telling myself benefit from some fact-checking, from some mechanism to call bullshit on them, either through talking about it with somebody else or shifting my perspective internally. So I just want, I don't want to let that pass if you know I'm going with this. I don't know if it's about fact-checking because I think the experience is the experience, sometimes perhaps something

was said that we don't remember or vice versa. It's more the interpretation of it and the putting together effects in a particular order. And for me, the writing is very much integrated with the talking. And so there is an ongoing conversation with my therapist, not after every writing, of course,

But sometimes it does take somebody else seeing it. I think you have to sort of graduate to that point. But in a safe space, being able to feedback what they've heard versus what you've been saying, what they maybe know about you now versus the story you've told yourself from 30 years ago. Because no matter how healed you think you may be, there's always more to learn. You don't have to learn at all. But

I think two things can happen. One, again, a therapist or a friend or some safe person that has without judgment and with great care held some of your secrets and pain for you and is able to circle back with things that help either validate or reshape what you have told yourself if it's not beneficial. Also, sometimes going back to the players.

And as a mature adult versus a little kid going to a mom or a sister or whomever and saying, hey, is this what you experienced?

I am revisiting several of those things right now and it's fascinating because one of the main things that comes out of trauma therapy in particular that I feel super excited about is that once you really unearth your negative memories, there's a whole boatload of positive that you've suppressed with it.

even within the moment of trauma, or maybe not the exact moment, but within that time frame. And you can't access those huge, huge swaths of your life have been totally overshadowed by short moments, not to minimize those moments again.

But part of retelling the story, reframing the story and taking from it is recognizing that, oh, that year wasn't all shit. There's a lot that happened that is still true and real and impacted me in a way that I can use now.

Dr. Paner Baker, I know that or I believe I know that one of the benefits that you've found among the folks that you've studied who have done expressive writing, which again is your journaling protocol, you see social changes that they're more likely to talk to their friends about their stuff and they're increasing their social engagement generally. Am I stating that accurately? That's correct. It's been very interesting.

Years ago, I worked with a very interesting project when I was in Dallas interviewing people who had survived the Holocaust. They had been generally in concentration camps in World War II.

They had moved to Dallas. These people now were, had kids. And I did surveys before we did these interviews with the survivors. And the majority of people had not talked to other people in any detail about their Holocaust experiences. This was part of an archive project where people came into a television studio and we interviewed them.

And then we gave them a copy of their videos, and then I contacted them again several weeks later. And the average person now had shown the video of their testimony to at least 10 other people. And they now were talking about it, and they never had because they were afraid that other people would be too distressed by it.

And I found this over and over again in our studies that after writing about an upsetting experience, people are much more likely to talk about that experience with others. And also the studies that we did, this is some other projects, what we would do is we asked people to wear a little tape recorder. It would have a pale mic. The recorder would come on for 30 seconds and go off for several minutes and then come on again. They never knew when it was on and off.

And we'd asked them to wear this for two days in the week before their writing and then again about a month later. And what we found was that people on questionnaires would say this study didn't affect my social behavior at all, but in fact it did.

In the month afterwards, they were talking more with others. They were laughing more. They were using more positive emotion language. They were better friends. They could listen to others. They could respond in ways that they couldn't do prior to the writing.

And I think part of this goes to some research that was done showing that people who do this expressive writing, they have more, it's called working memory. They can think better, they're able to remember things better, they have more capacity if you like, because they're not worrying about the things they were worried about before the experiment.

That is so interesting that if something is bothering you, whether it's a secret trauma or a sort of more mundane vexation, it's taking up bandwidth that once you write it down, process it, get a greater understanding of it. I know you don't like purging, but let's just say unburdening yourself to a certain extent, then actually you have access to parts of your brain that were previously being chewed up by this noise.

That's exactly right. The first study that did this was looking at the college freshman during their first weeks of college. You know, if you think back to when you get a new job, you start college, you start anything, those first few weeks are overwhelming. Am I doing the right thing? Am I, you know, how do I negotiate this new life? And by writing about it, it helps to simplify it, to organize it. And now you don't need to obsess as much as you have.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but I do recall, I think that there's something called pseudo dementia that goes with depression and or anxiety. And it really is this sense of having your brain co-opted when it's dealing with intense emotion or secrets or something else. And things as basic as word finding and certainly memory issues. And they can be very scary when they present, but that's real.

We all get stupid when we're under a lot of stress. This has been shown over and over and over again. That's a great quote. I'm writing it down. Let me use it first. Don't be surprised if you see that on my Instagram sometimes, but I'll give you credit.

Coming up, Jamie talks about times in our lives when we may not benefit from expressive writing, what he thinks of gratitude lists. And I'll talk a little bit about how I use journaling in my own daily life. You've done decades of studies on expressive writing. What other benefits have you seen showing up physiologically and psychologically for people?

It's a very, very long list. And I'm very serious. There have been over 2,000 studies done on expressive writing. It's been shown to be related to how long people are in the hospital after surgery. It's associated with wound healing. It's associated with changes in various markers of immune function, kidney function, other kinds of biological markers. It's associated with absenteeism from work. It's associated with reduction in insurance costs. It's associated with

better social lives afterwards. It helps people stop smoking, stop drinking. It helps them almost anything in life. You find yourself obsessing about or worrying about. It helps to organize them. People do better on standardized tests like the MCAT or SATs or GREs if they write about their stress in the days and weeks beforehand. In other words, any place where

Your mind is overactive. You're ruminating too much. Writing can be beneficial. I've also read that it helps with sleep. It helps with sleep. So people sleep better after writing. If people are interested in trying to find out, can this work with this particular problem? Go to Google Scholar and enter expressive writing and fill in the blank. There's probably been a study done on it.

Yeah, I've heard about it helping with autoimmune disorders, with decision making, with anxiety, lots of stuff. Yeah, and chronic pain is one area that there's been some really fascinating research done where it's associated with reduction in chronic pain, PTSD, some of the big issues that we deal with in the mental health world and physical health world.

And also, let me just stop for a second. This is not a panacea. If you write, don't expect, you write for three times and then all of a sudden you're going to win the lottery. Life will be beautiful. The people you have wronged in the past will come and beg to be friends with you again. No, it helps sometimes, but this is not a panacea.

I have two questions. One is, and I grant you that these studies are probably pretty hard to do in terms of in the randomized components, having samples that are

truly randomized versus how are we controlling for mental health disorders and other things that might sway one way or the other. But generally speaking, are there any background mental health issues that either benefit more or perhaps should not be done in solitary, I guess?

If somebody is deeply clinically depressed, I'm not sure that expressive writing is the first method I would recommend. If you've just had a massive, horrible trauma, I don't think writing is necessarily beneficial. And if you happen to be a therapist, I would never ask somebody who's just gone through a major trauma to write about it at the time.

If they want to, that's great. But I think people are particularly vulnerable in the aftermath of a major traumatic experience. I generally think that people benefit most when they find themselves thinking about something too much. And if you've had a major trauma and you're thinking about it all the time yesterday,

You're not thinking about it too much, that's normal. But if you're thinking about it all the time, six months later, that's too much. So that would be my primary recommendation when not to write. And also, if you start writing and you don't feel better, if you don't feel so this is being beneficial, this might not be a good time to write as well. In terms of, are there particular places where it is beneficial?

you have to be your own researcher here. In other words, try it. Think about it. There's no downside. It's free. I'm not gonna ask you to send me $50 because I came up with the idea and I patented it. Nobody patented the idea. And you can throw away what you've written. Nobody needs to see it and probably shouldn't see it. So, try it. That's what I like about it. There's no significant downside that I can see.

It's interesting to what you say about doing it for you because it just makes me think about admissions essays to medical school, to colleges, and how really it's become about proving that you've been through something and that you've overcome, or perhaps you haven't, but you're able to disclose more about it. And for some people that really works, but for others,

And I think for minorities in general, from what I've read about, that can be distressing if it's something that is expected to be brought forward and yet it's being relived and almost objectified in a way as a measure of your worth to an academic endeavor. So yeah, I think really writing about it for yourself is an important note.

That's exactly right. The primary issue is I would urge people when they do this is that this writing is for you and you alone and unless they somehow specify it, there's no feedback that this is something that just gives them the freedom to write. You know, and there can be props as well, questions such as

in writing about this, how might it be related to your family? How does this affect how you are getting along with others, or how is this affecting your health, or things like that? So you could have prompts. There's so many ways you can set it up, but that essence is

giving people the opportunity to put this issue into words, ideally one that they've not spoken to other people about in general, and letting them come up with their own kind of understanding of the experience. You mentioned the journal that Bianca and I have been working on. She and I just

wrote an overview at the top of the journal to sort of describe ways you can use this product. And we describe expressive writing, but we also wrote about other forms of journaling, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. You know, for example, I believe there's been some research on gratitude lists. Is that something you've looked into as well?

I have not. I don't know the literature on it. I believe in trying everything. It's really important. There is not a true way. And so try gratitude lists. And if you feel better, if you feel so it makes a difference, fabulous. Keep doing it. That's the most important issue.

I'm not selling a panacea. Nobody is selling a panacea. All of us need to, if you are suffering, try to figure out what works best for you. Yes. Just to emphasize, you're in a welcoming place for people who are allergic to panacea given the name of this show is 10% happier. We're not about miracle cures here.

Just to say on gratitude, I've done a little bit of looking at that. And it does appear that there are some benefits to that. So we are including it. And then there are a couple of other ways that I have found journaling to be helpful. One, there appears to be some literature on the other. I haven't seen anything.

One is that the sort of making and remaking of to-do lists, apparently, I find it very helpful in terms of setting my priorities and helping me make better decisions. And it helps my working memory because I've got it all in one place and I can then focus on what I need to do. And that appears to be backed by some data. And then the other thing I use journal for is when I'm in conversations, in fact, I'm doing it in this conversation, I'm taking a lot of notes.

especially about things I want to say so that I don't forget what I want to say, but I also don't jump in and interrupt somebody else and cut them off. So any thoughts on either or both of those? You know, since I hardly do any to do lists, I don't approve of them. But you know, sure, if they're helpful to do them.

When I'm under stress, when I'm about to move, or when I have a, there are certain times I actually do to do lists myself. And I do think they do exactly what you're saying. They are helping your working memory so you don't have to keep thinking about it. Those thoughts now are transferred to a piece of paper. So that paper is having to do all the work. So in essence, yeah, that makes good sense to me.

So I get anything that we do that you feel is beneficial, do it. I can really see the subjective benefit, certainly the measurements that you've made around physical symptoms and some illnesses. But what do we think the mechanism is behind writing and all of those outcomes? So the way I've

come to think about it. First of all, there is not a single explanation. From a scientific perspective, it's horrible because we want a nice, simple explanation. What I've come to appreciate over the years is it's really a whole cascade of things.

When you sit down to write about an upsetting experience, ideally one that you have not spoken to other people about is the first thing you're doing is acknowledging it has happened. So that's the first issue. The second is you're putting it into words. When you put something into words, you are changing the way that it's organized in your mind. And we know this from research on eyewitness identification and many other places in psychology, putting something into words

really does simplify it in our minds. And it simplifies it in a way that it also distorts things because now it's simpler than it actually was when we experienced it. The next thing is, once you've put it into words, you have to

impose structure on it. Even putting it into a sentence requires that there's a beginning, middle, and end of that sentence. And your next sentence almost innately follows from the first sentence. In other words, when you, you know, you've had an upsetting experience and you're walking down the street, you think about this part of it and you think, Oh, I should have done this. And then if you start thinking about something else and you think about that,

But you're not bringing it all together. And what writing is doing is forcing structure, is forcing you to see things from a broader perspective. And all of this is effectively giving it some meaning, which means now that we don't have to obsess about it or ruminate about it the way that we had been in the past.

which means we sleep better. And we know that sleep is associated with more efficient immune function. It's associated with improved working memory, drops in depression, all of these other markers, which is also associated with changes in our eating behavior. All of these things are related with the changes in social behavior. It allows us to be better friends so we can listen to other people better and we are more socially connected.

So it's a mixture of all of these. And we could also, if we wanted to go in the direction of the brain, there's been research showing there are brain changes, and there's all sorts of changes in autonomic nervous system and immune function systems. So all of these systems are interconnected. That's, on one level, not a very satisfied

mechanism. But the reality is, is when we're dealing with people dealing with major upsetting experiences, their entire lives have been disrupted. They're eating patters, their connections with others, their work life, their home life, everything. And so it's not surprising that writing is kind of one strategy that can help to help align all of these changes that have occurred.

So mechanistically, it might be very, very generally speaking that it's really a modulation of the stress response that then impacts all these other pathways, even changes in the brain.

Yes, but then someone could say, well, it's the changes in the brain that's modulating all these other responses. And then other people say, oh, no, it's changing their social behavior, which changes their brain, which changes. I mean, that's what's so interesting. These are all so horribly interconnected. That's the problem of being a human or actually being a primate, actually even being more than a single cell animal.

I'm picturing Igwasu Falls in Brazil where Bianca and I just went with our son, assist these series of interconnected cascades and that's coming to mind as you're talking about the benefits here.

Now, that's a metaphor. I can work with you. You know, kind of rounding third here into the final section of our time together. But before I let you go in preparing us to do this interview, our producer, Marissa Schneiderman, who's running point on this episode. Every time we do an episode, one of the producers in this case, Marissa gives me or me and Bianca a prep doc.

And in Ris's prep doc, there was a section where she talked about another, and I think maybe related field of study that you've engaged yourself in, which is the psychology of word choice. And so I thought before we let you go, I'd invite you to say a few words about that.

So fortunately, we got another two hours to talk. So the expressive writing research, the first paper came out in 1986. And in the next few years, more and more studies started to show that it was beneficial. And it led me to, and others, to ask the question of why does writing work?

One of the issues I became interested in was, well, maybe we could get a better sense of how people benefit by looking at their actual writing samples. And maybe if I analyze their writing samples, I'd have a better sense of how they would change in their thinking. I gave these samples to clinical graduate students and had them write them along multiple dimensions, which turned out to not work very well. The people didn't agree on their dimensions and there were similar problems.

And I thought, well, you know, maybe I could just get a computer to analyze this data. However, to analyze the words as it happened, I couldn't find any.

I ended up working with one of my graduate students at the time, Martha Francis, and she and I put together a computer program that would go through and analyze text and calculate the percentage of words in the text that were say positive emotions or negative emotions or different kinds of cognitive styles, the way people were thinking. And we also looked at other parts of speech, pronouns and prepositions and so forth.

And the computer program ended up giving us some insight that in fact that people who benefited the most tended to use more positive emotion words in their right, which might get back to the gratitude issues.

But what was even more potent was the people who tended to change and increase their use of cognitive words. These cognitive words could be causal words, words like because cause effect. You know, for people trying to understand the cause and effect of issues or insight words, words like understand, realize now that people who increased in their use of those words benefited more than people who didn't.

And this started to get me to think about how we can look at thinking patterns and other psychological patterns in language. And one of the things that popped out also was that

we discover that people who benefited the most, some days would use I words, I mean my words and high rates, and on other days they might use words like he, she, we, you at high rates. Almost as though they were changing perspectives from day to day, and the people who wrote in the same style did not benefit.

And this led me to the last 20 years, 30 years of research focusing on what we can learn about ourselves and about people in general by the way they use words. So for example, we can see personality differences in the way people use words. The good example might be of the people listening to this podcast.

If we went in and analyzed all of your text messages or all of your emails over the last few months, I could immediately tell which people are really sociable and which ones are simply by looking at third person pronouns, he, she, they, or maybe words like we, that people interested in other people make references to other people. There's a big shock.

But what's interesting about this is there are these learned words that none of us ever pay attention to that tell us about others. And that is where I've gone in the last several years. And it's relevant to our ability to see how people think. So we've done research in terms of with Reddit looking at how the pandemic affected the culture and how it has changed the way that we have thought over the last three or four years.

Do we can look at differences between cities and age, sex, social class, et cetera? And it's a really interesting marker of people's psychological lives as it's revealed through language.

Are there takeaways based on this area of your research vis-a-vis the first area, which is journaling? In other words, can we look back over what we've written and use the lens that you just described to help us improve in any way? A little bit. Keep in mind that language reflects our psychological state. It doesn't drive our psychological state. In other words,

We've done studies where we tell people, okay, I want you to write this using this kind of language, and they can do it, but they don't benefit more than otherwise.

But one thing you can look at, you can look at your own emails or text messages over time, and you'll see certain things. So for example, people who are depressed or they're heading into a depression, they're shifting their language some, and one of the best markers is the use of these I words, IV and my. When people are depressed, they use I words at higher rate than when they're not depressed. And people who are bipolar,

who often fluctuate between manic and depressive periods. There have been some interesting Twitter studies showing that in the weeks before they are full-blown depressed, you see this increased use of eye words that is a kind of a leading indicator of psychological stay.

that differences are subtle and a person might not see it themselves, a computer can see it. But the point is that we all are leaking our psychological state all the time through our use of words.

Are there technologies out there that are commercially available that would allow us to do an analysis of everything we've written on email, Slack, social, et cetera, to tell us if there's any warning signs that we should be paying attention to? So I have my own computer program, and there's a commercial version of it, but my computer program is called Linguistic Inquiry and Workout, L-I-W-C. We pronounce it Luke. It doesn't look like Luke,

Hey, it's mine. I call it Luke. And so if you just do a Google search, you can find where it is and you can enter a text and it can analyze it before you can buy the program. And so that there are ways that such programs do exist. The profile would be looking at the text of someone who doesn't use

I or you and just answers in one word, like yes, no, oof. They're deeply disturbed. I'm struggling to guess who she could be referencing. Yeah, I'd be very concerned about them. Bianca, before we go, any more questions on your side?

Not that I can really articulate. I'm just grateful to know more about it. I was a psychology major in college, and I have to say social psychology was tough for me because it was really difficult to sort of define, categorize, measure things. And in many ways, just feels more complete and relatable, at least as a clinical person.

That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you. Jamie, before we let you go, can you please just list some books you've written and other resources you've put out into the world that you would like listeners to know about?

For the language work, I have a book called The Secret Life of pronouns that came out about 10 years ago. I've also written and co-written a few books on expressive writing, opening it up by writing it down words, books like that. So you can just Google my name and go fishing. I also have a website through the University of Texas. And there's lots of publications there if you're interested in the original work.

Okay, we'll put links to the websites so that people if they want to learn more can get it. Having said that, this was a delight. You're really fun to talk to Bianca as always. You did a great job as well. So thank you both. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you guys. Thank you.

Thanks again to Dr. James Panabaker. Don't forget to check out the new journal Bianca and I just released. It's called Dump It Here, and you can get it on the shop over at DanHarris.com. It's not a heavy-handed journal. I write a few pages at the beginning that provide you with some options for how to use the journal, including some basic instructions for expressive writing and many other practices. I also list a bunch of journaling prompts from people like Joseph Goldstein. And then the rest of the thing is pretty much empty and open field for your scribbling.

Dump it here. Check it out. DanHarris.com, just in time for holiday shopping. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who works so incredibly hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pot People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer. And Nick Thorburn of the Band Islands wrote our theme.

If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.