Journaling after a divorce can be good for heart health, but bad for emotions
As a compulsive writer with journals stretching back to age 13, I’ve always been interested in research on how writing helps people cope.
There’s a lot of research on how journaling can help you feel better psychologically after a difficult event. But a set of studies, including one published today in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, present some contradictory findings. Taken together, they suggest that (if you do it right) journaling can improve heart health after a divorce — but it might still make you feel worse.
A few years ago, researchers invested whether journaling made people feel better psychologically after separation. Those results suggested that any kind of expressive journaling can make people feel worse if they’re the…