Everything Exams

In the last few years, there’s been an explosion of journals being sold online: ones with beautiful flowers on, ones with crazy designs throughout, and some with slightly more controversial covers as well. I’m not sure if this has been caused by Amazon KDP providing a facility for printing books on demand or a realisation that journaling is somehow beneficial and needs more attention focussed on it. In my exploration of what makes children grow up to be happy and resilient human beings, I came across the practice of journaling. I used to think that journaling was just keeping a diary, but it turns out that it can be so much more and that there’s some excellent research out there to draw upon when considering whether to encourage your children to start a journal. It’s a hot topic too: only last week, I listened to an article on BBC news which talked about a new study which found positive benefits for children’s mental health from journaling. So let’s start off with what a ‘beneficial’ journal might be.

What is a journal?

I think the definition of journaling can be kept a little bit flexible and can be left to an individual to take ownership of what they want to record in their journal, as long as thoughts and feelings are part of the mix. Officially, a journal is a place to write about what has happened. Importantly, it should also provide a safe space for the author to discuss their thoughts and feelings about a situation, knowing that it’s for their eyes only. This is slightly more than a diary, which may or may not include more personal reflections on events. Due to the very private nature of a journal’s content, no one should read a child’s journal unless the child grants them permission to do so. For younger children, this may be harder to achieve, but the privacy of older students should be respected. If a child is vulnerable or potentially at risk, then there might be a case for looking at a child’s journal without their permission, but if you find yourself in this position, you should probably seek professional help for your child first.

What does the research tell us?

Journaling has many strings to its bow and a decent amount of scientific research shows that it can benefit children, helping them lead happier lives. Historical evidence shows that people have been journaling for centuries – the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius left behind a mine of information in his journals, as did Marie Curie and Einstein almost two thousand years later. Interest in the benefits of journaling began in the mid-twentieth century and has grown ever since. In one of the earliest studies, a number of students entering university were divided into two groups. Half were asked to write for 15 minutes for a period of four days on a superficial topic and the other half wrote about a traumatic experience they had had. Over the next six months, the number of times the students who were assigned the journaling task visited a health centre for treatment was about half the number of visits the control group made. Writing about their traumatic experiences seemed to enable the students to process their trauma and heal.

Subsequent studies found measurable, physical evidence to support the benefit of writing down your thoughts and feelings – they discovered that participants’ immune systems significantly improved. Somehow, the act of writing something difficult onto paper seems to help a person process it and move forward. Incidentally, physical writing has more impact than online journaling.

Other studies have confirmed that journaling, writing down feelings, expressing emotions with words, and working through traumas with written language can even have a positive effect on inflammatory or autoimmune conditions such as arthritis or HIV. Many of these studies required participants to journal for a matter of days or weeks, so imagine how powerful this could be if a person got into the habit of journaling at a young age and continued the practice throughout their life.

Journaling can have a very positive effect on stress, anxiety and depression too. In a really interesting study carried out by the University of California, 30 candidates did some matching games using photos of real people with different expressions on their faces. Sometimes they were required to match a label of the emotion, such as ‘angry,’ to the photo, and in other tests, they matched an angry face with another face with the same expression. There were also matches for gender. When we are in a stressful, potentially dangerous situation, a part of the brain called the amygdala comes into action. Sometimes this is absolutely necessary, but the stress response triggered in our brains can cause us harm at other times. Incredibly, the study found that simply by labelling an emotion with words, activity in the amygdala was reduced for participants in the study. Essentially, taking emotions and putting them into words measurably reduced the stress response in study subjects.

Much of the research which has been carried out into journaling has been on young people such as university students; studies with younger children on the benefits of journaling have been limited and have largely focussed on children with emotional and behavioural disorders. Interventions with this group have helped reduce emotional outbursts and improved children’s emotional control, and some studies have found that participants improved their grades at school. More research is needed with this age group, but I do feel that the evidence is pretty solid that a routine of regular journaling is a great way to allow young minds to process their emotions effectively and therefore be more positive and happy from the inside out.

As with other things I’ve been looking into to help improve the happiness of young people, journaling can be very beneficial to adults as well; I’ve certainly found that writing something down then discarding it can make me feel lighter and free of something which is troubling me. 

In my next post, I will be looking at ways in which children can start journaling themselves so that they can harness the surprising power of the written word…which reminds me…I do a lot of creative writing coaching and simply writing things down on a regular basis is also great for younger children for building their writing resilience, fine motor skills, literacy skills and so much more more and will put them ahead of the game when it comes to assessments…

References 

1. Pennebaker JW. Expressive Writing in Psychological Science. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2018 Mar;13(2):226-229. doi: 10.1177/1745691617707315. Epub 2017 Oct 9. PMID: 28992443.

2. Smyth JM, Johnson JA, Auer BJ, Lehman E, Talamo G, Sciamanna CN. Online Positive Affect Journaling in the Improvement of Mental Distress and Well-Being in General Medical Patients With Elevated Anxiety Symptoms: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial. JMIR Ment Health. 2018 Dec 10;5(4):e11290. doi: 10.2196/11290. PMID: 30530460; PMCID: PMC6305886.

3. Lieberman MD, Eisenberger NI, Crockett MJ, Tom SM, Pfeifer JH, Way BM. Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychol Sci. 2007 May;18(5):421-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x. PMID: 17576282.

4. Lara, Lauren. (2020). Benefits of journal-writing for students in the emotional/behavior disorders classroom. Journal of Poetry Therapy. 33. 1-7. 10.1080/08893675.2020.1776971.