Why write for yourself?  Journaling and expressive writing can make a positive difference in your life, including enhancing your overall health and well-being.

There is a great deal of research across various fields of study including psychology, education, and healthcare that proves the efficacy of journaling and expressive writing for healing and well-being.

James Pennebaker, PhD, (2004) a research psychologist and author of Writing to Heal:  A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval conducted a study in the 1980’s with people who were dealing with trauma and emotional upheavals.  His research showed that individuals who wrote about their traumas needed less medical attention in the following months than they had previously.  His work clearly demonstrated a link between writing and health. 

Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smyth have edited an entire collection of research within their book The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being (2002) where they show evidence that expressive writing/journaling can offer relief from stress and heal the damage that can be done from highly stressful experiences.  For example, there is compelling evidence that stressful life events undermine cognitive processes and that expressive writing can restore these processes.

Lastly, Louise DeSalvo, researcher and author of Writing As A Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (1999), teaches us that we need to write in certain ways in order for writing to be a restorative and healing tool.  Healing narratives are those that involve writing about not what you already know, but rather writing about something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us.  This is what allows for learning, growth and healing.

“We can engage in the act of creation that energizes and enlarges us…  Writing.  A gift that comes to us.  A gift we give ourselves.  A gift we give to others.”  Louise DeSalvo

I share some of these research findings with you because I want you to have faith in the healing power of writing, so that you can trust both the writing and yourself to go to the page for learning, growth and wellness.  You can write for the health of it – simple, profound, and transformational.