I caught a recent Andrew Huberman podcast detailing a writing protocol found to influence long-term outcomes in health and short-term indicators of physiological arousal and reports of negative moods, first introduced by Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Pennebaker et al. found that writing about traumatic or even trivial events can have therapeutic effects that lead to significant positive impacts on participant well-being. Over four consecutive days, participants in the study were instructed to write about an upsetting event that had occurred in their lives. Full instruction listed below:
Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it. In your writing, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved or love now, or even your career. How is this experience related to who you would like to become, who you have been in the past, or who you are now? Many people have not had a single traumatic experience but all of us have had major conflicts or stressors in our lives and you can write about them as well. You can write about the same issue every day or a series of different issues. Whatever you choose to write about, however, it is critical that you really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts.
To determine effects on well being, the researchers monitored health center visits and found that those exposed to the writing protocol were associated with significantly fewer visits than the control group in the six months following the experiment. Extending this work further, Pennebaker et al. (1991) used analysis of three linguistic factors that reliably predict improved physical health. First, the more that individuals journaled positive affect words—words often associated with positive emotion—the better their subsequent health. Second, a moderate number of negative emotion words predicted health. Both very high and very low levels of negative emotion words correlated with poorer health. Third, and most important, an increase in both causal and insight words over the course of writing was strongly associated with improved health (Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, in press). Further analysis found that the increase in cognitive words covaried with a panel’s evaluations of the construction of the narratives. In other words, people who had benefited from the writing protocol began with poorly organized descriptions and progressed to more coherent and clearly written stories by the last day of the protocol.
Post-writing analysis instructions
Pennebaker et al. provide a set of instructions for post-analysis following the four-day protocol. First, don’t look at entries for a week or more. This delay period allows for more objective review of the terms used following the writing sessions. After this delay period, schedule time to read through and track the words that reflect a negative affect state across the four entries. Then, compare the number of negative affect terms across the four entries. Examine the patterns. Are the negative affect terms reduced across the four entries? Increased? The same?
I’ve pasted my findings over the four entries below. Note the average increase in positive affect terms used over time. Also noteworthy is the reduction in emotive terms by the last session. On further review, entries became more action-oriented over time, detailing what I can do now and in the future, rather than ruminating about past events.
| Entry | Positive | Negative | Total | % Positive |
| 1 | 10 | 23 | 33 | .30 |
| 2 | 13 | 27 | 40 | .33 |
| 3 | 18 | 15 | 33 | .55 |
| 4 | 14 | 17 | 31 | .45 |
Pennebaker noted that the language analyses are particularly promising because they suggest that certain features of essays predict long-term physical health. Questions remain on the degree to which cohesive stories or narratives predict changes in real-world cognitive processes. And it is yet to be known the causal mechanism behind coherent stories about a trauma and the improvements in health. One current theory is that the mere act of journaling about a traumatic experience reduces ruminations or flashbacks, effectively placing the event in the past in one’s conscious and subconscious mind, thus allowing the person to get on with life.
Sources:
Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162-166. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x
Vine, V., Boyd, R.L. & Pennebaker, J.W. Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being. Nat Commun 11, 4525 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0
A science-supported journaling protocol to improve mental & physical health. Huberman Lab. (2023). https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/a-science-supported-journaling-protocol-to-improve-mental-physical-health