There’s a notebook in my bedside drawer – blue and green, marbled with a hint of gold and an olive-green velvet marker ribbon. The spine is tatty and it’s slowly disintegrating from underneath, with actual pages coming loose. It’s still quite pretty, despite its obvious age, and if you hold it close enough it smells faintly of pomegranate, from the time I knocked over a Jo Malone reed diffuser and didn’t notice. It sat in an oil slick for a week.
Inside the first few pages, my handwriting is barely legible. Anyone that knows me might assume I was writing in a hurry (or after a large glass of wine), but it was actually because I was crying my eyes out on the floor of my best friend’s spare bedroom, the day after I finally left my ex.
Only twelve hours earlier, I’d walked out of the house we’d just bought.
I thought the worst part would be the actual leaving; it turns out the months that followed were pretty… up and down, let’s say. Still, I got over it eventually.
I am not going to pretend that it was the journalling that fixed me. Nothing fixes anyone in a straight line, especially after that amount of heartbreak. But I will tell you that by the time I filled that journal (and the four-other-notebooks-in-under-a-year that came afterwards) something had genuinely changed in how my brain held onto the raw, core memories of that deeply traumatic time period.
And it turns out there's a reasonable amount of actual neuroscience explaining why.
I should also tell you the slightly embarrassing part upfront, because I think it's funnier than it is impressive; I got so hooked on journalling that I eventually turned eighteen months of it into a book about dating. I self-published it. It has, at the time of writing, been read by roughly forty people, most of whom are related to me or happen to be friends who felt emotionally obligated to buy a copy because I cried on their shoulder about the whole saga at some point. My mum has read it four times. My dad is strictly banned from reading it even once. My old boss left a review calling it “unsurprisingly candid”, which I've chosen to take as a compliment. I am, in the nicest possible way, still working on the whole ‘readership beyond immediate family’ thing.
I tell you this not for sympathy, and definitely not for sales (my publishing career is, at best, generously, a hobby), but because I think it’s important to say: this was journalling taken to a genuinely excessive, slightly unhinged* degree. I am not a balanced case study. I am the control group’s worst nightmare.
*Coincidentally (or not), the name of the book, btw.
And yet. I’d tried therapy before all of this – good therapy, expensive therapy. Several women I spoke to online, a woman I drove 17 miles to see in person, and a woman I liked a lot who once made me cry simply by asking how my week was going. It helped. I’m not writing this to knock counselling; if you’re going through something and can access it, please do. But there was something that filling the blank page did for me that the ol’ fifty-minute Zoom session never quite managed, and I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time since then reading psychology papers trying to work out why.
Here’s what I found.
Your body keeps score, apparently, and it's expensive to run
The person most responsible for journalling having any scientific credibility at all is a social psychologist called James Pennebaker, who in 1986 ran an experiment that's since been repeated in some form hundreds of times. He asked one group of students to write about a genuinely traumatic experience for fifteen minutes a day, four days running. He asked another group to write about something totally neutral – their shoes, what they ate for dinner the night before, whatever. Then he tracked what happened next.
Incredibly, the group writing about the hard stuff visited the doctor significantly less in the following months. Their immune markers improved (that’s healthy cells and antibodies and stuff, to you and me). Blood pressure, too. Anecdotal data showed these participants reported feeling better. More calm, and accepting of what had occurred. And it wasn't a one-off – these results have been replicated across dozens of studies since, in different populations, with different traumas. And the pattern largely holds.
What's interesting isn't just that writing helped. It's how. Pennebaker's team went back through the actual essays and found that the people who improved most weren't the ones who wrote the most emotionally, or the most dramatically. They were the ones whose language shifted over the four days – they started using more words like because, realise, understand. In other words; these people moved from simply describing what happened to actually making sense of it.
That distinction is probably what matters more than almost anything else in this piece, so I'm going to come back to it.
Naming [the thing] turns the volume down [on the thing]
The second bit of science I think about a lot is a 2007 UCLA study led by a neuroscientist called Matthew Lieberman. He put people in an MRI scanner and showed them ‘upsetting’ images (angry faces, mostly). When people just looked at the images, their amygdala – our brain's little almond-shaped alarm system, the bit that goes off before you've consciously registered why you're panicking – lit up hard.
But when people were asked to simply label what they were feeling – to write or say a word like "angry" or "afraid" – the amygdala response dropped. Meaningfully. At the same time, a different part of the brain switched on: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is (as well as being a right mouthful) broadly involved in thinking, language, and regulating emotion. Lieberman's phrase for it (which has since become a bit of a cliché in wellness content but tbf is genuinely useful) is "name it to tame it."
I didn't know any of this while sobbing on my bestie’s bedroom floor. But I do remember, (mainly because I just re-read in my blue and green journal) writing the sentence I feel so humiliated, I feel so let down, I feel like the last ten years have made me smaller. And just by having got it out and down on the page, I remember feeling something in my chest unclench about four percent. Just a fraction. Enough to breathe properly. And not want to key his car anymore.
I now understand that fraction had a name and a mechanism and several verifiable citations.
My feelings are valid – and officially backed by science.
Here she is, the old faithful. Can anyone smell pomegranate?
Writing about yourself like she's someone else
This is the part I actually think helped me most and, until trying it, wasn’t something I’d ever thought of before.
Somewhere around notebook three, after my favourite witchy friend had done a course on inner child healing, I tried a little experiment. I stopped writing "I". And started writing about "her" – this girl going through this thing, this specific breakup, this specific betrayal. She sat in her seat on the plane next to him and didn't know what to do with her hands. It felt a bit strange at first, a bit performative. But it also, very quickly, gave me something therapy hadn't quite given me: I could see the whole shape of what was happening to ‘her’, instead of being fully submerged as ‘me’ (who was, quite frankly, drowning inside all the feels). Does that make sense?
This isn't a coincidence, and it isn't just a writing trick. A psychologist called Ethan Kross, who runs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, has spent much of his career studying exactly this… What he calls "self-distancing”.
His research, laid out in his book Chatter, has repeatedly found that when people process a difficult experience using their own name or "she/he" instead of "I", something measurable shifts. They ruminate less. They reason more clearly about their own situation; often as clearly as they'd reason about a friend's. Some of his work even shows the effect happening automatically, without extra mental effort, which is the part I find most reassuring, because "just try harder to have some perspective" has never once worked on me in real time. Just ask my parents, friends, colleagues, or (ex) personal trainer.
Writing a book, in hindsight, was the most extreme version of this available to a person. You cannot write a hundred pages about "her" without eventually understanding her better than you understood yourself in the moment. By the time I'd finished a full draft, I didn't feel like I was still inside the story. I felt like I'd read it from someone else’s perspective. That's the closest I can get to explaining what "better than therapy" actually meant for me. Not more effective, necessarily, but differently effective. Therapy helped me talk about what happened. Writing about it – or journaling, to the extreme – let me remove myself enough so I could see it from afar.
The part where I have to be honest about the risk
Here's where I owe you the caveat, because a "backed by science" piece that only tells you the flattering bits isn't actually backed by science, it's backed by ✨vibes✨ wearing a lab coat.
Not all journalling is created equal, and for some people in some instances, it has been seen to actually make things… worse? A 2013 study out of the University of Arizona followed recently divorced or separated adults who were asked to write about their split in different ways – some were told to explore their deepest emotions with no structure, others were asked to tell the story as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end (and there was a control group that just logged their day).
Eight months later, the researchers found that for people who were already prone to going over and over things in their heads, the unstructured "just let it all out" group were actually predicted worse outcomes. More rumination, not less. Spiral city, basically.
Separate research out of Northwestern, led by Grace Larson, found something that squares with this: structured reflection – writing that moves toward some kind of clarity about who you are now, not just what happened to you – was linked to ‘better self-concept recovery’ after a breakup. Unstructured spiralling wasn't the same thing as processing. It just felt like it, from the inside, anyway.
I recognise that warning in my own early notebooks. Those first few weeks of mine were not healing. They were rage, scrawled across the page, rambling, then occasionally getting specific about certain things he said, didn’t say, or didn’t do in 2015 (namely, the dishwasher).
That's allowed. You're allowed a spiral era. But I don't think it was doing me much good on its own. What actually improved things was when the writing started shaping itself into something with a beginning, a middle, and eventually, slowly, an end. Not because I forced a neat conclusion. Because somewhere in notebook four, there genuinely started to be one.
A few useful prompts if you’re an ‘unstructured spiraler’ like me
These are designed to keep writing moving toward meaning, rather than circling the drain – useful whatever it is you're actually working through:
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What can I genuinely learn from this?
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What would I tell a friend going through the exact same thing?
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How has this made me stronger, or just more tired… and can I tell the difference yet?
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What's one thing I understand now that I didn't a few months ago?
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If I'm still thinking about this in a year, what do I hope I'll say about how I handled it?
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What's one small, concrete thing I can do next (not fix, just do)?
You probably don't need all six. And you definitely don't need to do them in order. The point isn't the prompt. It's that a specific question gets you writing sentences with a shape and direction, instead of rehearsing the same three feelings for the eleventh time.
What I'd actually say, if you asked
I'm not going to tell you journalling will mend a broken heart, because I don't think anything mends a broken heart – or a liver, or a spleen, or any other organ for that matter – on a schedule. I'm also deeply suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
What I will say instead is simpler than that, and I think more honest: writing it all down gave my brain somewhere to put it that wasn't just around and around in my own head at 2am. It gave the feeling a name, which turned the volume down a fraction. And eventually, it let me step far enough back to see the whole landscape I'd been standing inside – which is a different, calmer-but-more-aware kind of relief than the numbness you're hoping for when you start.
I still have that first notebook. It’s falling apart now, and I probably should have thrown it away years ago. I haven’t. It contains some of the worst days of my life, but I can read those pages now without being pulled straight back into them. They’re memories, rather than in-the-now emergencies. I can see the person who wrote them clearly, and I have an enormous amount of compassion for her. Getting all that drama, all those thoughts, out onto the page did me a world of good, at the time. The notebook has held onto it all remarkably well. I’m just glad I don’t have to anymore.
Further reading, for the sceptics (there is a lot):
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Pennebaker, J. W. — Opening Up by Writing It Down (Guilford Press)
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Lieberman, M. D. et al. — "Putting Feelings Into Words," Psychological Science, 2007
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Kross, E. — Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It (Vermilion, 2021)
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Larson, G. M. & Sbarra, D. A. — Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2015
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Sbarra, D. A. et al. — Clinical Psychological Science, 2013
Unhinged is available to buy on Amazon.
— Canada Berryman, Now & Here contributor
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