Journal Away Depair and Hopelessness

From the article "The Benefits of Writing" by Jordan B. Peterson and Raymond Mar at www.selfauthoring.com

James W. Pennebaker correlated journaling and writing with better health, both physically and mentally. Participants were asked to write for 15-30 minutes about a traumatic event in their life and another group was asked to write about trivial matters.  Those people who wrote about the traumatic events experienced a greater improvement in their physical health than the writers of trivial matters.

For the unemployed folks who wrote of stressful events, they were re-employed faster than those unemployed writing of mundane matters. It is also worth noting that traumatized students received higher grade-point averages the following semester than those writing about basically nothing.

It is helpful for one to form a specific plan after a traumatic event or loss in one's life. Goals need to be plainly stated and specific. The person's ability to "get on with their life" is closely associated with their eventual recovery. People who do not do so continue to live with depression and experience a sense of hopelessness and despair, wallowing in the sensation that things will never improve.

Researchers have long known that the formulation of goals and goal attainment is closely related to a person's happiness. They have now discovered that hand writing those goals in a journal is the best way to achieve those goals. The goals should be self-motivated and not goals which result from any guilt or wishful thinking or an idea of something that one "should do" and not necessarily what that person really wants to do. In other words, it should not be the parents' goals for the child.

Interesting enough, one of the studies had participants involved in writing their "perfect life" - what they would have accomplished if their life was their perfect life.  The other group in the study simply wrote about what they had planned for that day. People involved in the perfect life study scored higher three weeks later on personal happiness and life satisfaction than the group who simply wrote about that day's agenda.

Studies indicate that goal setting should have the following:

1. Goals should be specific and difficult,
2. Goal difficulty and performance is linear and positive,
3. Other factors such as feedback and being part of the decision-making does not affect performance,
4. The three motivational factors are direction, effort, and persistence with task strategy being a fourth.

Research shows that understanding the process of attaining goals and visualizing those processes creates more success than just visualizing attaining the goal without understanding how one achieved the goal. Again, goal setting is enhanced when the processes are written and not just conceived mentally.

Writing about the future and setting goals have many benefits including enhanced mental and physical health, enhanced cognitive ability, and greater task performance.
Writing helps people process information about traumatic experiences which in turn helps them deal with their emotions and actions in the future. This helps the person reduce frustration and fear from the event and gives meaning to their future. The person is able to formulate goals for the future, dispelling hopelessness and despair.