Not a writer? You can still use a journal to create your own masterpiece, and the words will be yours. Finding your own words is important in life. Sometimes, if you trust someone deeply, you will let them hear the most private of these utterances. At other times you can’t express these feelings to anyone because the right words aren’t there. Keeping a journal helps you identify and work with your feelings. Through this you can communicate with greater clarity. Yet the benefits of keeping a journal don’t end with effective communicating. In fact, that’s just the beginning.

The physical effects of journaling

I’ve always intuitively known that writing was good for me. I started keeping a diary at age nine. I would write about what happened on the playground, who was hogging the slide and how unfair it was that my mother wouldn’t make us pancakes for dinner. Writing down these troubles made them feel erasable. My nine-year-old problems seem silly in retrospect and in 10 years time the trivialities I journal that loom large now will diminish. This isn’t the point. What bothers us matters and, since even our closest friends are sometimes deaf to our concerns, it’s important to have an alternative source to disclose to.

Why bother? Modern science has given us ways to measure everything. In 1988, a pioneering study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that writing about what bothers us can improve our health. Researchers for the study profiled 50 American undergraduate students and assigned them randomly to two groups. One group spent 20 minutes on each of four consecutive days writing about traumas, while the other group wrote about trivialities. The researchers found that those who wrote about their traumas, which were as minor as family quarrels, were significantly healthier afterwards. Despite making no other changes to their lifestyle, their immunity, blood pressure and lung function had improved. In addition, at a three-month follow-up it was found that subjects who wrote about their traumas were significantly happier than those whose writing was non-emotional.

Journalling can ease the stress of upcoming events. Stephen Lepore, Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, found that students who wrote expressively about their emotions before an exam experienced less mental distress. This was despite having the same number of disruptive thoughts as those who wrote about superficial things.(2) Why is this? The simple act of writing dulled the power of their problems to cause them upset. (This ease under stress can also be developed through a meditative practice known as vipassana meditation, or insight meditation, whereby you observe all thoughts without emotional reaction.)

Considering the connection between stress and immunity is clearer every day, this isn’t surprising. But can the stress-reducing impact of journalling reduce pain? Can it heal your lungs? A study published in 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that "patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis who wrote about the most stressful experiences in their lives experienced a reduction in symptoms ... these gains were beyond those attributable to the standard medical care that all participants were receiving."

In this study completed by 107 patients with either asthma or rheumatoid arthritis, 70 of them wrote about the most stressful events in their lives; the writing was undertaken for 20 minutes straight over three consecutive days. The other 37 patients (the control group) wrote about their plans for the day. Four months later, 47 per cent of the group that wrote about past traumas showed clinically relevant improvement. The patients with arthritis showed a 28 per cent reduction in symptoms, including less pain, and greater range of motion. Those with asthma also fared well, increasing their lung capacity by 19 per cent. Even writing about trivialities was healing, as 24 per cent of the control group who wrote about emotionally neutral topics also showed improved symptoms.