A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health

Writing about something very stressful or traumatic for 15 to 30 minutes 4 times, either on consecutive days or separated out by a week between each of those 4 writing sessions, can produce long-lasting positive effects on mental and physical health.

[Paul Conti] defines trauma as any experience or experiences, plural, that modify our brain and neural circuitry—so it could be brain or body or both—such that we do not function as well emotionally, behaviorally, or cognitively going forward from that experience.

Extremely stressful and traumatic experiences, because they induce a relative reduction in the activity in the prefrontal cortex, divorce our mind from creating a coherent structural narrative about what happened during those particular episodes, and in doing so, create a sort of confusion about responsibility.

When people accurately and truthfully report an experience, even if that experience is a stressful and traumatic one, the repeated activation of the prefrontal cortex... creates a more coherent framework and understanding of the stressful thing that happened.

Write about something that you are thinking about or worrying about way too much or.... something that you've been dreaming about at night, perhaps in disturbing dreams, or something that you feel is affecting your life in an unhealthy way, either internally or externally.

I want you to write down your deepest emotions and thoughts as they relate to the most upsetting experience in your life ... How has this experience related to who you have now become, who you have been in the past, and who you would like to become.

People that tend to use a lot of negative words tend to have more negative emotional states; whereas people that naturally tend to use words that describe positive emotional states have more positive emotions.

These states of heightened levels of emotionality are the trigger for neuroplasticity and that the actual rewiring of neural connections happens in sleep and states such as non-sleep deep rest.

People that have more extensive knowledge of words that describe negative emotions themselves tend to have a lower affect or negative emotional state as compared to people who have more extensive knowledge of vocabulary words that pertain to positive emotions.