(2018-04-18) Eurich Journaling For Self-Awareness

Tasha Eurich: Journaling for Self-Awareness. My own research, for example, has shown that people who keep journals generally have no more internal (or external) self-awareness than those who don’t.

The solution lies not in questioning whether journaling is the right thing to do but instead discovering how to do journaling right.

Psychologist James Pennebaker’s decades-long research program on something he calls expressive writing provides powerful direction in finding the answer. It involves writing, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time, on our “deepest thoughts and feelings about issues that have made a big impact on [our] lives.”

Even though some people find writing about their struggles to be distressing in the short term, nearly all see longer-term improvements in their mood and well-being.

Intuitively, one might think that the more we study positive events in our journal entries, the more psychological benefits we’ll reap from the experience. But this is a myth

Another trap journalers can fall prey to is using the activity solely as an outlet for discharging emotions. Interestingly, the myriad benefits of expressive writing only emerge when we write about both the factual and the emotional aspects of the events we’re describing—neither on its own is effective in producing insight.

To ensure maximum benefits, it’s probably best that you don’t write every day (anti Daily Writing). Pennebaker says, “that people should not write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel-gazing or cycle of self-pity. But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”