Examine your traumas by writing

One of his findings is that examining your traumas can actually improve your physical health. Another is that doing this examination through writing is one of the best ways of achieving this. “Health gains appear to require translating experiences into language,” he writes.

In one experiment, Pennebaker’s team took a group of university students and recorded the average number of visits they made to the health centre. They then had some students write about their feelings, another about general topics, and another which didn’t write at all. Pennebaker found that, while the second and third groups showed no change, the number of health centre visits in the first group dropped. Another experiment, in which his team measured blood samples of volunteers further confirmed the health benefits of writing. “People who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding traumatic experiences evidenced heightened immune function compared with those who wrote about superficial topics,” Pennebaker says.

Another finding had to do with the role of writing amongst job-seekers. Pennebaker’s team found a group senior engineers, averaging 52 years of age, who had recently been laid off. Half of the men wrote about their feelings and thoughts about getting laid off for 30 minutes a day for five consecutive days; the other half wrote about how they used their time now that they were unemployed. “The potency of the study surprised even us,” Pennebaker writes. “Within three months, 27% of the experimental participants landed jobs compared with less than 5% of the men in the time management and no-writing comparison groups. By months after writing, 53% of those who wrote about their thoughts and feelings had jobs, compared with only 18% of men in the other conditions.” Pennebaker speculates that those men who wrote about their feelings were able to come to terms with their resentment at being fired, whereas the other men carried this hostility into job interviews.

Why does this approach work? “One reason that writing about traumas can be so beneficial is that it is a powerful tool to discover meaning,” Pennebaker explains. While his research has concentrated on writing, he notes that speaking into a tape-recorder has also been shown to be effective. So the issue is not expressing to other people, but simply expressing. Indeed, Pennebaker warns about over-disclosing. Overdisclosers are the kind of people who tell everyone about their intimate lives. Far from benefiting from this, such persons, usually women, often suffer health problems such as uterine cancer, ulcers, and glandular imbalances. “They are divulging traumatic events in a repetitive fashion without self-reflection,” Pennebaker observes.

But a crucial facet of getting health through writing is also what Pennebaker calls high-level thinking – i.e. thinking that is characterised by a broad perspective, self-reflection, and the awareness of emotion. Pennebaker also warns about the consequences of rigid thinking. “…when people are mindless, they perform poorly on tests of creativity and complex thinking,” he writes. “Mindless people are also far more likely to be persuaded by con artists, television advertisements, and political speeches.”

James W Pennebaker

The Guilford Press, 1997

ISBN 1-57230-238-0, 249 pages.