Writing is Good for You

Turns out filling up all those journals with my daily angst is good for me. (Maybe not as good as following the new USDA food pyramid and its mandated 9 servings of fruit and veggies a day, but, hey, I'll take what I can get.)

Two Temple University psychologists just released a study that says poouring out your emotions on paper is good for you:

[W]riting about a traumatic event in your life, in the right setting, can have a significant impact on both your emotional and physical health, according to researchers at Temple University. Clinical psychologists Denise Sloan and Brian Marx have studied close to 500 trauma survivors and found that people who write about their experience are sick less, visit the doctor less and exhibit marked increases in cortisol, an important stress hormone associated with better adaptive functioning. ...

"Overall, written disclosure does seem to work. And emotional expression in the writing exercise does seem to be the key," said Sloan, principal investigator in a host of studies on emotional expression and written disclosure.

... In Sloan and Marx' written disclosure studies, participants are asked to use as much emotion as possible as they write about their most traumatic experience. They're left alone in a quiet room, located on the eighth floor of Temple's Weiss Hall, and write-in longhand-for 20 minutes. The process is repeated over three consecutive days, each for 20 minutes per session. The control groups in the study are instructed to write matter-of-factly about how they spent their time that day.

The full release about the study can be found here.