Friday, April 24, 2020

Our Stories


Why Starting a Diary Might be a Good Idea Now

I launched this blog a bit over a month ago, when it struck me that psychological theories might help understand people’s experiences while the COVID-19 situation was evolving. At the early stages I wrote about risk perception, and what factors make some people more worried than others. When following government guidance on health-promoting measures was still voluntary, social norms played an important role in whether people followed the official advice. Then with the lockdowns in place many changes to our lives became mandatory, and with regular routines uprooted, people had to adjust to this new reality, with various emotions, and coping strategies becoming relevant.

It now looks like social distancing measures of some sort will remain in place for many months to come, most likely until a vaccine is developed and vast segments of the population are inoculated, which could be as late as 2022. In the last post I wrote about how we often underestimate our own capacity to bounce back from adversity because when life looks gloomy it’s hard to imagine that one day it might be different. Fortunately, we often are able to cope better than we think. Is there a way to jump start the psychological immune system, to increase your own resilience? 



Start writing a diary in which you describe your thoughts and feelings. First, it’s a great way of documenting an unprecedented time in history, so you can look back on your own personal experience later on. Second, it can have highly beneficial psychological effects. James Pennebaker has done ground-breaking work on expressive writing. In one classic study he and his colleagues asked participants to write about a traumatic and upsetting event (vs. something neutral for the control group) for 20 minutes per day, over 4 days. They found that several weeks later, those who had written about the trauma showed better immune system functioning, and fewer doctor’s visits across time. Many studies now have found similar effects, as reviewed in Pennebaker's book Opening Up.

The reason why writing is so helpful is because it prompts us to find meaning in the stories of our lives. In challenging times we have lots of different thoughts, some more helpful than others, running around in the mind, creating confusion, anxiety and worry. But when we put words on paper we are forced to bring it all together in some way, with a timeline and at least a somewhat logical argument. This doesn’t have to be the thesis statement you were taught in composition lessons, or an essay, but you do have to put your words into a sequence. At the most basic level, it takes the form of ‘X happened, then Y happened, and here is what it all means.’ It turns out that doing this on a regular basis is an effective way to get over trauma.

What exactly did the study participants write that was beneficial? One striking finding in this line of research is that they changed their use of pronouns, in particular, a reduction of the use of “I” and “me”, in favour of “we” and “us”. In addition, markers of cognitive complexity (e.g., causal words such as “because” or “therefore”) also increased, suggesting that people get better at making sense of their what happened to them, and find some meaning in it. Analyzing language content is a common research tool now. We used it in our work, and found that when people experienced emotional feelings in line with emotional thoughts, they showed better memory, which was also reflected in language of cognitive complexity.

So, writing a diary can be good in many ways. As a side note, picking up a pen and putting ideas on actual paper is probably better than typing on a computer. Research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer has shown that when it comes to note-taking during lectures, students were better at retaining information  when writing by hand, rather than on a laptop. One interpretation is that hand-writing requires putting thoughts into a more logical sequence because it is captured on a permanent medium, and therefore provides a better sense of the bigger picture. The conclusion of this work was that ‘the pen is mightier than the keyboard’, and there’s a good chance that the same is true when it comes to writing your way through whatever challenges you might be dealing with at the moment.

The Punchline:

Writing down your thoughts and feelings on a regular basis has many positive effects because it helps to make sense of difficulty, and create meaning. It’s of course also useful in producing a written record of the new world we find ourselves in, to file away for future reference. Now is a good time to start because life has probably settled down a bit for most people, and more planning is possible. If it becomes part of a regular routine it also helps provide structure to days that that blend into each other, where a new day seems just like the one before, and it’s easy to lose track of time. During a crisis, anything that creates order, however small, can go a long way.

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