Reporting experiences and emotions in a diary every day allows us to look inside ourselves and has powerful benefits on our psyche.
There are the secret diaries with the padlock from when we were children, the notebooks bound to feel a bit like writers from times gone by, the notebooks with colored covers and sheets: whatever shape they have, diaries are precious witnesses of the life of those who choose to entrust their thoughts, memories, hopes to their pages.
Rereading adolescent misadventures after years can perhaps be embarrassing and retracing complicated phases can be upsetting, but when we take pen and paper to record experiences and emotions we are doing ourselves some good, because according to science, keeping a diary is an excellent recipe for psychological well-being.
THERAPEUTIC WRITING. There is now a lot of evidence: writing down the thoughts of the day is recommended, for example, to people who are facing difficult illnesses, because it has been proven that it can improve the quality of life.
Research published by researchers at Honam University in Gwangju (South Korea) underlined that women with breast cancer who keep a diary show less stress and also greater resilience than those who do not, and similar data also emerged from studies conducted on people with mental illnesses.
Writing in a pandemic. Diaries have come to the aid of many even in one of the most difficult periods in recent history: during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers from the University of Connecticut and Syracuse University (USA) launched the Pandemic Journaling Project, which in two years has collected around 27,000 contributions from over 1,800 people from 55 countries.
Objectives: to have a real insight into what happened in the world and help people feel better, recording on paper – but also in images or audio – the thoughts and experiences of that complicated moment.
EMOTIONS ON PAPER. Even in the normality of existence, however, stopping to reflect and putting your thoughts on paper is good. The first to underline it was James Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, in the 1980s. «He demonstrated that writing is positive because it forces us to make emotions more objective, to give logic to thoughts, to make a cognitive effort to process experiences», explains Antonella Delle Fave, professor of psychology at the University of Milan and president-elect of the Italian Society of Positive Psychology. «Of course, maybe there are those, like James Joyce, who report a stream of consciousness without worrying too much about the succession of events, but usually when you keep a diary you try to give coherence to the internal story, analyzing what you feel.
Doing so inevitably leads us to “look at ourselves from the outside”, to distance ourselves from the emotions we feel, and this helps us to understand and experience them better.”
LOOK AT YOURSELF FROM THE OUTSIDE. In short, writing is a way to grow, but also to attribute meanings to our behaviors, to reactions, to what happens to us: it is no coincidence, says Delle Fave, if «many people affected by an illness write books to testify to their experience. It’s a way to make sense of what happens and share it. In the diary, the interlocutor is generally ourselves, but the healing power is identical. Taking a little distance from what happens to us and describing emotions serves to regulate them, to adopt “adaptive” behaviors for example in difficult situations such as illness, bereavement, loss of job. In negative moments of life one can fall into automatic behavior and thoughts that do not help one overcome difficulties; keeping a diary can be a way to counteract this tendency. It is no coincidence that it is an activity that is often recommended in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy.”
Gratitude journal. This is also because it seems to be an excellent lever for thinking about what is positive in our lives. The psychiatrist and psychotherapist Giovanni Fava, of the University of Bologna, creator of the well-being therapy approach in which particular emphasis is given to the episodes that make you feel good, recommends keeping a diary in which to write down, at the end of the day, what bad but above all good things happened, to acquire a more complete awareness of what happens to us and always be able to see the pleasant aspects as well.
The founder of positive psychology, the American psychologist Martin Seligman, proposes something similar with the “gratitude diary”: taking some time to identify the good moments of every single day and being grateful for them is an excellent means of connecting with oneself and feeling better. Dozens of research proves this, on people of all ages: one of the most recent studies, conducted by experts at the University of Portland (USA), has shown that keeping a gratitude diary is very effective in reducing anxiety and stress in university students.
HABITS AND ATTITUDES. But the diary is useful even when everything is going well. «Be careful though, keeping one is healthy but not mandatory», underlines Delle Fave.
«There are many people who would never pick up pen and paper but who clear their minds with other activities, from painting to running: that’s fine too. Everyone can and must find their own way to reflect and give order to thoughts and emotions. Also because there is no right way, even if you decide to write: there are those who may find it profitable to write something down as soon as they wake up in the morning, perhaps transcribing a dream, and those who are able to reflect better especially in the evening before going to sleep. It must be said that women are usually the most assiduous in keeping a diary: men tend to express emotions less and therefore it is also more difficult for them to transcribe them. This difference, however, has no biological reasons, it is only the result of our culture.”
