Why I Keep Coming Back to Writing

I have been thinking about journaling for a long time. Not as a hobby. As a question.

When something hard happens, I go back to the page. Most people I know do something like this. Some write. Some talk. Some run. The page is mine. And every time I sit down with a hard thing, I notice the same thing — by the end, the thing is smaller. Not gone. Smaller.

For a long time I thought this was just a feeling. Then I started reading the research.

It turns out that writing about hard things has been studied for over thirty years. The original work came from a researcher named James Pennebaker in the mid-1980s. He asked people to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about painful events for fifteen to twenty minutes, a few days in a row. Then he watched what happened. People who wrote about hard things had fewer doctor visits months later (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). They reported less stress. Their immune systems looked stronger.

This was a strange result. Writing is not medicine. But the data kept coming.

A big review in 2006 pulled together 146 studies on this kind of writing (Frattaroli, 2006). The effect was small but real. Writing about hard things helped, on average, across many kinds of people and many kinds of struggle. A more recent review of journaling for mental health, looking at 31 different studies, found that about 7 in 10 of them showed clear benefits — less anxiety, less depression, fewer trauma symptoms (Sohal et al., 2022).

The Question I Find Interesting

So journaling works. That part is settled enough.

What I find interesting now is a different question. Not whether writing helps, but how. And what to do when it does not feel like it is helping. Because I have had those days too. Days when writing about something hard just makes the hard thing louder. Days when I close the notebook feeling worse than when I opened it.

I used to think this meant I was doing it wrong. Or that journaling was not for me on those days.

Now I think something different. I think the page can do many things. And the way you write, on a hard day, might matter as much as whether you write at all.

A few months ago, I came across a 2025 study from researchers in Shanghai and Oxford that looked at this question (Zhou et al., 2025). They worked with bereaved people — people carrying the heaviest kind of writing prompt. The kind of grief that does not lift on its own.

What they found was simple and small. The act of writing helped. And one tiny shift inside the writing — a shift you could miss if you were not looking — helped even more.

The Bridge

The next chapter walks through what they actually did. Three studies, real method, careful design. The findings are not dramatic. They are quiet. But they pointed me toward something I had not noticed before about my own writing.

References

Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823–865.

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.

Sohal, M., Singh, P., Dhillon, B. S., & Gill, H. S. (2022). Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Family Medicine and Community Health, 10(1), e001154.

Zhou, N., Ren, F., Cao, C., She, Z., Smith, K. V., & Xi, J. (2025). Can self-distancing benefit adjustment to bereavement? A multi-method investigation. Social Science & Medicine, 367, 117743.