A study by Stefanie Spera, Eric Buhrfeind, and James Pennebaker had a group of laid-off professionals write to themselves about their feelings for five consecutive days for twenty minutes each day.10 These people found new jobs at a much higher rate than the people in the non-writing control group. After eight months, 68.4 percent of them found jobs, versus 27.3 percent from the control group.
Usually, if an intervention can make a difference of a few percentage points, you can publish a paper. But here, we are not talking about 3 percentage points. We are talking about more than 40 percentage points! And all it took was one hundred minutes of intervention. Oh, wow.
Quoting an article that appeared on March 2, 2009, on the Very Short List (VSL): Science website:11 Twenty years ago, University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker concluded that students who wrote about their most meaningful personal experiences for 15 minutes a day several days in a row felt better, had healthier blood work, and got higher grades in school.
But a new study from the University of Missouri shows that a few minutes of writing will also suffice. Researchers asked 49 college students to take two minutes on two consecutive days and write about something they found to be emotionally significant. The participants registered immediate improvements in mood and performed better on standardized measures of physiological well-being. An extended inward look isn’t necessary, the study concludes; merely “broaching the topic on one day and briefly exploring it the next” is enough to put things in perspective. Four minutes can make a measurable difference.
One fun way of having a daily journaling practice is to write a different prompt on each piece of paper, put them all in a fishbowl (a dry one, I recommend), then pick out one or two at random each day. Here are some suggested prompts:
•What I am feeling now is . . .
•I am aware that . . .
•What motivates me is . . .
•I am inspired by . . .
•Today, I aspire to . . .
•What hurts me is . . .
•I wish . . .
•Others are . . .
•I made a happy mistake. . .
•Love is . . .
Tan, Chade-Meng. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) (p. 141). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.