What if a simple writing exercise could improve your physical and mental health, ease emotional pain, and provide profound self-understanding? In this insightful conversation, pioneering researcher James W. Pennebaker, author of “Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain,” reveals the transformative benefits of expressive writing.
Pennebaker’s groundbreaking studies found that writing about traumatic experiences you’ve kept secret can lead to improved health outcomes and reduced doctor visits. But why is this humble act of putting pen to paper so powerful?
You’ll discover how the language you use offers a window into your psyche, influencing everything from your personality traits to your susceptibility to depression and PTSD. Pennebaker’s linguistic analysis program can detect psychological dimensions based on subtle word usage patterns that even surprise the writers themselves.
Imagine having a tool that could alert you to emotional turmoil brewing under the surface before it manifests as anxiety, physical pain, or disease. This engaging discussion will open your eyes to the incredible insights hidden within your everyday language.
But most importantly, you’ll learn a simple, cost-free technique that serves as an accessible path to self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. Whether you’re dealing with past trauma, processing grief, or seeking greater self-awareness, expressive writing offers a profound way to gain clarity and ease emotional burdens.
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Episode Transcript:
James W. Pennebaker: [00:00:00] 22% of women and 11% of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to 17, and the people who endorsed it were more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer. High blood pressure ulcers. That started me wondering why sexual traumas were somewhat unique, in that they were the kind of trauma that people were most likely to keep secret.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:25] James Pennebaker is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of over 300 scientific articles and eight books. He has opened up groundbreaking research on expressive writing and its profound impact on everything from anxiety and depression to chronic pain, disease, inflammation, grief and wellbeing.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:00:44] But having a trauma and then keeping it secret from others, and it didn’t matter what the trauma was, exacerbated the health risks to to the person. And this made me wonder if keeping a secret so bad for you. What if we brought people in the laboratory and had them write about it or talk about it? Would that improve their physical health?
Jonathan Fields: [00:01:11] Just really excited to dive into the work that you’ve been doing. I’d love to jump in on the expressive writing side, and then eventually work our way around in the conversation to some of the the more current, really, just like examining of language and the tool. So let’s start at the beginning. If we take a step back in time, I’m so curious how you first become interested in the connection between writing and well-being.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:01:38] I was never particularly interested in writing well-being early in my career. In fact, I had bounced around in many areas and I went to graduate school because I was interested in essentially the mind body problem and how psychological factors can influence physical health, and I was actually writing a book on some of my early work on physical symptoms how we Come to Know how We feel. And I thought, you know, it would be interesting to come up with a questionnaire that could get a sense of what kind of people report physical symptoms. So I sat around with a group of undergraduates and I said, okay, we’re going to come up with a questionnaire and let’s feel free to ask people anything we want about their lives. And I’m curious to see if any of them are related to health to physical symptom reporting. And we this group just sat around and somebody was talking about what they eat or how they got along with their parents. Or have they do they have pets? And one person said, how about prior to the age of 17? Did you ever have a traumatic sexual experience? Now this study was done in we were doing this about 1980, 81. So this was this was is long before this became a common question. And, uh, we passed out the questionnaire to about 800 students, and we found that about 15% reported that they had had a traumatic sexual experience. And that one question was related to every health problem, every physical symptom that I had. And then a little bit later, I was contacted by the magazine Psychology Today. They were going to be doing an article on my work on physical symptoms, and they said, we’re thinking about having a questionnaire in the magazine. Would you be interested in in working with us? And I said, yeah. And I put that sexual trauma question on along with many others back then. This, by the way, is not a true scientific study. But we they got 24,000 responses. And these were not college students. These were a very general audience. Mean age was about 38 years old. And we found that 22% of women and 11% of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to 17, and the people who endorsed it were more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer. High blood pressure, ulcers, colds, flus, anything that you can imagine. And that that started me wondering why. And as I got more deeply into it, I realized I discovered that sexual traumas were somewhat unique in that they were the kind of trauma that people were most likely to keep secret. And then I did some other studies finding that having any kind of trauma was bad for you, and we’d known that for a long time. But having a trauma and then keeping it secret from others, and it didn’t matter what the trauma was, exacerbated the health risks to the person. And this made me wonder if keeping a secret so bad for you. What if we brought people in the laboratory and had them write about it or talk about it? Would that improve their physical health. That was really the beginning of it. You know, at that time, I’d never really thought about this whole kind of confession effect. And it was ironic because in my personal life, occasionally I had gone through difficult times, and I found that writing about it was really beneficial. But somehow I never connected that with the other research I was doing. Yeah. I mean, that’s so fascinating that as you described, we’ve known for a long time that trauma can cause all sorts of untoward things in the mind and body, but the realization that it’s the keeping secret of an experience that seems to really compound that experience. Talk to me a bit more about that. I think that’s fascinating. Initially, you know, I went through many iterations of trying to figure out why secrets were so toxic. But one of the things I discovered when I started interviewing people who had had sexual traumas was how these sexual traumas completely messed up their lives. One of the first people I talked to was a woman who, when she was 14, her actually, I guess her mother had divorced when she was very young and the mother remarried maybe when she was 12. And at first, you know, her mother was happy. She was happy. And within a year or two, the stepfather was starting to come into her room in the middle of the night and started molesting her. And she didn’t know what to do. I mean, this was she knew if she told her mother that it would break her mother’s heart and she’d never seen her mother so happy. And then she couldn’t talk to her girlfriends at school because she knew they wouldn’t understand it. So here, this event, not only was she having the event, but she was now having to have these really stilted interactions with the people she was closest to, and she would talk to me about what it was like in the morning, sitting at breakfast, and the stepfather would come down the stairs and putting on this big happy behavior and just this feeling of rage and fear going on with her and know her mother knew something was the matter when pro, but she wouldn’t say anything. So she started doing things to try to make herself more unattractive. So she started eating huge amounts to put on weight. But it turns out he was drunk and it didn’t make a bit of difference. And she ended up running away from home at about the age of 15 or so. But hers was this just horrifying story. And I’ve heard stories like this for other types of types of trauma as well. Keeping a big secret It really disrupts your life. And not only does it disrupt your social life, you change in your eating habits, your sleep patterns change, your exercise patterns change. All of these things happen. You’re much more likely to start drinking or using drugs or things like that. So it’s it’s kind of this cascading group of problems that come from this keeping this big secret.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:10] And as you described, I mean, the, the, the horrific example you just gave was in sexual trauma. But this is it’s the context is any form of meaningful trauma where then you feel for whatever reason and it may be a sense of survival, it may be keeping social harmony, whatever it may be, or some blend of that or just shame, which would be profoundly misplaced. I would imagine that it creates this effect, you know, that amplifies the already harm done by the initial trauma. I’m so curious. Also, if you can recall back when you’re having these conversations, you know, this is as you described, you know, back in the 80s, 90s, you’re earlier in your career. You’re like deepening into the research. I’m so curious, what’s it like for you, not only as a researcher, but as a human being who cares about other human beings to sit down and start to have people share these experiences? Like this.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:09:08] You know, it was such a profound effect. I was trained as a social psychologist, and I think many people are drawn to social psychology because they don’t feel as though they have great social skills much of the time. And for me, first of all, just realizing people often wanted to talk about traumas. So, for example, I had done this after discovering these adverse effects of secrets. We did our first writing study where we had people write for 15 minutes a day for four days about the most traumatic experience, ideally one that they kept secret. And we got permission from the Student Health Center to track their how often they went to the doctor for illness. So we were able to compare people who wrote about traumas versus another group that we asked to write about superficial topics. And we tracked their physical health in the months before they were in the experiment and the months afterwards. And we found that people who wrote about these traumatic experiences went to the doctor about half the rate as people in our in our controlled conditions. That first paper, when it was published got a lot of press. And all of a sudden I discovered myself at parties. People would come up to me and they said, oh, I saw your I saw your your work was talked about in the paper, you know, when I was 17. And then they started telling me these traumas, and I started hearing these more and more and more. And I must admit, from the very beginning, I became just fascinated by it. And and also I was really curious about them, how they dealt with it, how they thought about it, how they thought it affected them. And so, in a weird kind of way, I didn’t know if I was doing them a great deal of service, but they all said that I was, that it was really helpful for them to talk for me as a scientist and a researcher. To me, this was like entering a world I had never even thought about. Ironically, I’d gone to graduate school in psychology, but I was never interested in clinical psychology. So all of a sudden I became kind of an amateur clinical psychologist.
Jonathan Fields: [00:11:35] Yeah, I mean, that’s fascinating. People sort of coming up to you because they trust you. You’ve done this work. All of a sudden there’s a scientific validation for what they’ve been experiencing, and it’s almost like they want to come to you and both thank you for what you’ve done, but also unburden. And I would imagine a lot of those people are people who you really didn’t know very well. Even.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:11:53] That is true. And, you know, this has gone on. I still get emails or letters sometimes from people writing about just telling me about traumas they had had, which is now, you know, that first study was published 40 years ago, and it’s kind of ironic that, uh, it still has this impact on people.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:17] Help me bridge the gap between people speaking about the experiences that they’ve been through and have been keeping secrets. I would imagine some people, even for decades, versus writing about them. You know, I think probably a lot of people think about, okay, so there’s been a, you know, something you’re struggling with or a trauma that you’ve been through and you haven’t told anybody else about it and you feel the weight of it. You might go to maybe a trusted friend or a therapist or somebody who’s a qualified health care provider or mental health care provider, and talk about it and share. Maybe that’s the safe place where there’s an agreement of confidentiality, and you feel like you can finally share the secret. How is this different than writing about that same thing?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:13:02] You know, it’s not as straightforward as you might think. We’ve done studies where we’ve asked people to talk. Sometimes just talk into a tape recorder or talk to the wind outside and we get similar effects. So putting it into, you know, expressing it to yourself, whether it’s spoken or written, doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. And I think if you are able to talk about a traumatic experience to someone who is really listening and isn’t judging you and is supportive. Then I think talking to another person can be as good, oftentimes better, than writing. But therein is the big danger, and I think all of us have had this experience where you start to tell a trusted friend about something that’s really disturbing. And as you begin to tell it, you can see this look of horror on their face. And then, you know, you go off in this direction, in a direction that has nothing to do with what you wanted to say, but you realized that this is not going to be helpful to our relationship. This can be hurtful to the other person. It could offend them. They could. You can see that maybe it makes you look worse. So therein is a big danger of talking is so much depends on what the other person says. And in fact, going back to the sexual traumas in that those early studies, occasionally people would write about being sexually traumatized by a father or stepfather. And then they would told their mothers and their mothers, blamed them for the sexual trauma. And so, in a odd kind of way, this act of disclosure is punished so severely that it probably has a really adverse effect on the on the child for ages afterwards.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:04] Yeah, I would imagine. I wonder also if you saw almost the opposite effect sometimes happen where somebody would go to, let’s say, a dear friend and say like and just start to unburden, start to share what they’ve been holding secret. And I feel like so often there’s this natural impulse for someone you care about. So if you’re in the role of the friend, you know, for a lot of folks, there’s probably this impulse to to do probably one of or maybe both of two things. One would be to share your own version if you were actually holding something also, and say like simply as a way to say like you’re not alone, I get it, I feel your pain. And also the second thing being, well, how can I fix this? Like, here’s my friend sharing something deeply painful that’s like, is there something I can do to fix? And I wonder if those two impulses also complicated when it’s a spoken thing.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:15:56] A couple of really great questions. I think if you are telling me something truly horrible, there is some kind of natural inclination for me to share something horrible as well. That one’s kind of unknown, because it is acknowledging what you’ve been through and sometimes hearing that I’ve been through something, especially if it’s somewhat similar, can be beneficial. If it’s something completely irrelevant, maybe not, because sometimes it might just be, oh, you think you had it bad, right?
Jonathan Fields: [00:16:28] It’s like you’re co-opting the conversation. Yeah.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:16:31] That’s right, that’s right. The other one, there’s been some really interesting research in terms of how. So you had this terrible experience. Well, here’s what you can do. All the research certainly hints that getting free advice from somebody usually is not very helpful. And in fact, it’s it’s often harmful in the sense that if I start giving you advice, I am making some assumptions that are not probably not true about you. It’s not as though you haven’t thought about it. A lot of the stupid things I’m saying. But you know, you feel a little bit annoyed by the other person. So I think giving advice is a pretty terrible idea unless the person wants some advice. And sometimes you might want advice. And so sure, I’ll give you advice, but I think you know, what I learned in the years afterwards was the most beneficial thing is simply being there and conveying that you’re here to listen. You know, if there’s anything else you’d like to say, I’m all ears. And, you know, actually listening to the person. So that’s I think that can be very beneficial.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:46] Mhm.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:17:47] And one other thing that I learned early in my research career, I was asked to give a talk to a group of people who had experienced the death of a child. And there there are groups in many communities. Sometimes the groups have different names. But and I went and I listened and I heard these horrible stories, and I was so deeply disturbed by the stories. And I had young children at the time. And I got up to talk about my research. And I started off by saying, I know exactly how you all feel.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:23] Oof!
James W. Pennebaker: [00:18:25] That was a mistake. Never, ever say that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:18:29] That was a mistake you make once.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:18:32] Yes. And you know the people there. They were wonderful. A guy a few minutes later got up and he said, I want you to know that saying that. We hear that a lot. You have no idea how we feel. You cannot begin to imagine. Don’t tell us that you know how we feel, because you just don’t. And I was and of course, I was saying, you’re right. I have no idea. So another helpful, uh, social tip.
Jonathan Fields: [00:19:02] Yeah. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You use the word confession or confession a little bit earlier in our conversation, and it’s, you know, I think a lot of people will picture that in a religious context where you go to confession or there’s a weekly confession, and there’s some sort of veil where it’s there’s a veil of anonymity there. And also it’s really just about listening and acknowledging that is sort of like the solitary purpose. But the word confession itself in this context is troublesome to me because there’s an implication in there that there’s something wrong that you’ve done in that context, rather than this is something that I have experienced.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:19:48] It’s such an interesting question. I’ve been fascinated how often people who have been victims of really horrible things, sexual abuse or physical abuse or whatever, they feel guilty. They feel that in some ways they were at fault, even though objectively, most of the time they weren’t. So in an odd kind of way, confession for them may be an apt term, but you’re right. Confession does imply some degree of blame.
Jonathan Fields: [00:20:24] Yeah, and I guess what you’re describing also is that person’s subjective experience may be the feeling of blame and shame, even if, like from the outside looking in, it’s just it’s so clearly not. So you kind of take people as they come. It’s so interesting. You shared just very briefly that you developed this protocol, expressive writing protocol, and that it was for days, about 15, 20 minutes. I’d love to walk through that in a bit more detail, if that’s okay with you.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:20:51] So I want to make it clear up front. I’ll give you the first methods that we use. But over the last 40 years, there have now been thousands of studies done with expressive writing. There’s not one true way here at the beginning. I want you just to to appreciate that this method can be adapted to to your or anyone’s specifications. There’s not a right or a wrong way. The very first study that I did, uh, I did this with Sandra Beall, one of who was a graduate student of mine. And, um, I didn’t know, you know, I was just pulling this out off the top of my head. And I thought, you know, it seems like it’d be good to have them to write several times, and it needed to be writing as opposed to talking, because I didn’t know who would they talk to? What kind of feedback would you get? I restricted in terms of, at the time, students who were taking introductory psychology got to get five hours of experimental credit over the course of of the semester so I could do a study where I could give people five hours of credit so I could have them write once a day for four days, and then they could fill out questionnaires for another hour. That was the deep reason I did it. And the other issue was I wanted to do this quickly because one of the dangers is you do a study where you bring one person in for four times, and then the next person comes in next week. That study would take forever. So I had developed an assembly line approach to research where what I needed was a large number of rooms where I could run lots of people at the close to the same time.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:22:42] So we were able to find some space where they were classrooms, essentially classes and labs where we would got almost 50 people and they were signed up one every ten minutes. They come in, they would talk to me or to to Sandy, and who would tell them what would happen, how they would be, what they would be writing about. And then somebody else would take them to a room where they would be by themselves to write for 15 minutes and there would be something on the door. So we knew how long when they went in, and then 15 minutes later, somebody would come by, knock on the door. They fill out a questionnaire and then leave, and then they’d come the next day. So that was the method. The reason we had them write 15 minutes was because these were classrooms, and we could only get the classrooms from 530 until 930. You know, you do all the arithmetic. So that’s that was the logic. There was no deep feeling. There was no theory, there was nothing. And that study worked. And the next study, we did the same kind of thing where we had them write 20 minutes. And then then we started to do other variations. The next study, I think we had them write three times and we got the same effects. And then there were some other studies where they wrote five times, and we tried all these things and it all seemed to work.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:24:06] And over the last years there have been studies where people have them write only for three minutes, or writing for three minutes, or 5 or 10 minutes. Once and then we have them leave and come back ten minutes later and write again for ten minutes, and leave and come back and write again for ten minutes. And that seemed to work as well. So there’s not one true way. And some people somewhat sometimes ask, well, what about typing versus writing? That doesn’t seem to make much difference. What about if I write with my dominant hand versus my non-dominant hand, my right hand versus left hand? You know, that seems to work as well. So it’s been this is the thing that’s been so interesting is almost any method that forces people to stop and have time to reflect on something that really is bothering them, and putting it into words seems to have these beneficial effects. People tend to sleep better. We and other labs have measured all sorts of biological markers and changes in resting heart rate or muscle tension or immune function, or God knows what. If people are interested in looking at at expressive writing for almost any kind of issue, go to Google Scholar and enter expressive writing. And what are you interested in? So you say chronic pain. There are probably 20 studies on that headache. Dozens of what? I don’t even know anymore. Have lost track of the of the research. But, uh, you know, panic attacks or fear or learning or almost anything. And you’ll see that there have been some interesting studies done on it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:25:58] And I want to dip into those a bit more. But, um, I’d love to get a little more granular on protocol two here, and with the understanding that there’s a lot of flexibility here and that there’s, you know, your mileage may vary and you can probably try a whole bunch of variations of this. But let me maybe ask you some very specific questions. Curious, have you found that the setting makes a difference when somebody sits down to do this?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:26:21] Not strong setting effects. However, most of the settings that my lab and other labs have done have been where we’re trying to make it at least somewhat comfortable. And ideally, you don’t want to be distracted, you don’t want to have loud noise going on. And what I would recommend for people doing this on their own is just set aside 3 or 4 days, 10 or 15 minutes each day, and a place that you won’t be distracted. You know, ideally a place that you feel very comfortable and not threatened at all, and use that as a place to write. And the general instructions I give to people is, you know, what you write about depends on you. And what I would ask you is what is bothering you right now. Are there certain things that are weighing on you? You find that you are thinking about too much. You wake up in the middle of night thinking about it. Those are the kind of topics that I think writing can be very beneficial. Ideally, something that you found it hard to talk to other people about and for those kind of situations to start off just writing. And the only rule I have is to write continuously. Don’t worry about sentence structure spelling. This writing is for you and you alone. Another thing I often tell people is sometimes you’ll start writing because you think you’ve got a particular issue that’s bothering you, and after 2 or 3 minutes, you start to get really bored and you start writing about something else.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:27:58] Great. Your your brain is probably telling. You write about something else. You can write about the same thing all 3 or 4 days, or you can write about something different each day. That’s entirely up to you. And there’s no one right way to write. Some people will do poetry. Other people will make lists. Other people will will just generally write. And I urge people to to ask themselves, you know, if you’re writing about a recent conflict between you and your boss or you and your spouse or you and a child in your writing, really try to tie this to other experiences that might be like this. Have you had other experiences, say, in your childhood, your relationship with your parents? Your relationship with this particular person? How is this related to who you’ve been in the past, or maybe who you’d like to be in the future, or who you are now? Or have there been other kinds of traumas in your life, or upheavals in your life that you have felt in similar ways? What do you think the connections might be? In other words, give yourself permission to go in any direction that you would like and you are the judge of whether or not this is working.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:29:14] I urge people to write 3 or 4 times initially, and if after three times your writing doesn’t seem to be doing anything for you, then it’s not doing something for you. Go do something else. You know, go jogging. Go talk to friends. Consider talking to a therapist. I find myself so I don’t write very often myself. I don’t consider this journaling. I find journaling for me pretty horrifying, you know, to me. I don’t want to write every day. And, you know, I’m usually right about stuff that is that is not going well in my life. And usually life goes, is, goes well. But, you know, 3 or 4 times a year, sometimes more, sometimes less. I wake up in the middle of the night or be tossing and turning, and I know something’s bugging me. And I’ll get up in the middle of the night and I’ll just sit down and write. And I might write for ten minutes, or I might write for an hour. And usually I go right back to bed and fall. Fall asleep. In other words, I almost viewed this method as a method to clean your mind.
Jonathan Fields: [00:30:23] Are there 1 or 2 or a few sort of opening prompts that you think are you seen be effective with people to. Because I would imagine people, you know, probably like like I’m feeling this, I’m remembering this. There’s something I haven’t it’s been on my mind. I haven’t told anybody else. But like, what’s my opening move here? Like, how do I actually start the process of pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:30:48] Yeah, I can tell you the way that I do it, which is I’ll sit down and I’ll say I’ve been, you know, it’s it’s 3:00 in the morning. I’ve been thinking about this person I’m dealing with at work. He’s been driving me nuts and I don’t know why. This bugs me so much. What is this about me? Yes, it’s him, but it’s also. Why am I reacting the way I am? This reminds me a lot of dealing with so-and-so in the past for me. And again, everybody is different. And I’ve seen thousands of these expressive writing essays. You know, they people approach them in all these different ways. And I should also say, as somebody who’s seen these essays often, I’ll look at these essays and I think, ah, this isn’t this doesn’t seem that upsetting, but I wonder what’s going on with this person. And then a few months later, I’ll get a there’ll be a follow up and people will, uh, will ask them about their writing. And that person who I thought their writing didn’t seem to be very helpful was saying that was, you know, writing that was so important. You know, it made me realize that I’d been doing this and in this, in this person’s writing, you didn’t see its significance. But as this person is explaining it several months later, you see, oh, okay. That could see how this could have a very deep personal effect.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:09] I wonder if part of that is also, I’m sure you’ve thought about this. You know that those first couple of days of writing, maybe not the complete cycle of processing, but maybe that’s the opening of some bigger, tiny Pandora’s box, and maybe you just let it all out and you get to close the box, and it’s empty after that. But maybe you write for 3 or 4 days and then the box stays kind of open, but now you have access to something that was still stolen away for who knows how long, and your brain just continues to chew on it. And maybe over a period of weeks or months or years even like that, there’s an evolving unfolding that happens. And happens. So this was more of an inciting incident. Does that land with you?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:32:56] Oh it does. And as you’re speaking, I can think of instances where that’s been true. True of me, where I’m kind of writing in this direction and I bring up this one issue that really isn’t that pertinent. And then maybe the next morning I’m walking along and it’s kind of like, oh my gosh, that issue has really been something that’s bothering me as well. Or maybe that was driving what was going on. What’s so interesting for me is this what writing does is it almost forces you to be your own therapist. And I’ve always been interested in the idea of therapy, and I’ve dipped my toe into it briefly, and I’d still like to to actually go into therapy at some point. But in a funny way, I feel writing is doing so much of that for me and that it, you know, I am dealing with these personal issues in the way I deal with the way that that I naturally deal with things, which is standing back and looking at them from all these different perspectives and asking, why in the world have I been doing this? This doesn’t make sense. And it’s it’s kind of a problem solving approach, but it’s also very, you know, exploring very deep issues in my life.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:25] Yeah. It also brings up a fascinating question for me, which is the distinction between any benefit on the other side of whether it’s expressive writing or therapy or any other sort of intervention. How much of the benefit comes from the release valve factor versus the resolution? You know, how much of the resolution is simply not carrying the weight of it anymore.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:34:51] You’re raising a question that I think is so central to to psychotherapy itself. Early on, when I was first doing these studies, a lot of people would say, yeah, this is great because you get to blow off steam. And I had a couple of people in these early studies. I would ask them, what effect did the writing have? And there would be 2 or 3 people. I remember saying, you know, it helped me to just blow off steam and get this out. And the metaphor is, is essentially like the, the, you know, you have all of this steam inside the pot and then you let it go and then everything’s relaxed afterwards. I never found that somebody who used that metaphor actually benefited from writing. And there’s been a lot of studies over the last 50 years looking at this idea of catharsis. And by the way, it’s really not catharsis. It’s really venting. All the work says that venting is not very therapeutically beneficial. And often it’s actually the opposite. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that one of the most powerful things about expressive writing is providing insight. Getting an understanding of what’s going on so that often the issues that we are obsessed with, or worried about, or keep ruminating about are issues that we haven’t come to understand. There’s a debate about this within psychology. Many people view the problem of its emotion regulation. You need to regulate your emotions. You know, if you’re getting angry at your spouse, you’re not regulating your emotions. That’s not the way I think about it. I think it’s regulating or understanding why you are feeling and behaving the way you are. That why is it that you you view your your spouse as a threat or that they’re doing something wrong? It’s not that I need to regulate my emotions. I need to regulate my understanding of what’s going on. And once I understand it, there’s no need for regulation.
Jonathan Fields: [00:37:06] Now that lands emotional regulation has become an increasingly hot topic, which is kind of fascinating. And I’m always curious what is underneath, what’s driving the need to feel like an emotion needs to be regulated. Not not that we throw that out entirely, but I think there are there are other ways to sort of like, um, step into that.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:37:26] That’s right. So it’s regulating thoughts as opposed to the emotions. So to me, the the emotions are the, you know, they’re the exhaust of the car. And uh, rather than, uh, worrying about the exhaust, the issue is, is why are you pushing the accelerator down to so heavily? What’s going on here now?
Jonathan Fields: [00:37:50] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Are there things not to write about? I know part of what you’ve shared is, you know, people are just, you know, if you’re sort of asking yourself, well, what’s bothering me today? Like, what am I spinning about? What’s on my mind? You know, someone might might hear that and think, well, it’s just this dopey thing like, this isn’t trauma capital T or little T trauma. How do we decide what’s worth focusing on? What’s worth choosing as a topic for the writing for this moment?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:38:20] So if you sit down and you start writing about something that you feel that you’re not getting any traction on, stop writing about it. Write about something else. Or one of the things I do. Occasionally I do workshops, and at the beginning I start off with what I call the flip out rule, and that is, in this room I see everybody seems to be pretty normal. Nobody here is flipping out. Now, if you start writing and you feel like you’re going to be flipping out, stop writing. It’s real easy. Or change topics. If you’re starting to flip out about a particular topic, you’re not ready to write about that topic. Certainly not. Not in this workshop. But the issue is you are responsible for yourself. You need to figure out what is working and what’s not. You need to be a scientist. You need to figure out what is working for you right now and what isn’t. And so that’s been another interesting approach. I think many therapists really take on the role of, I’m going to help you get through this. And if you start having problems, I’m here to help you. And my approach is this is not my problem. Here’s a tool and I want you to use it, but use it responsibly and figure out what’s what’s going on. Why are you ruminating about this? Why are you being haunted by this, this topic.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:53] You mentioned now a couple of times that, you know, um, people will sometimes do this in a group setting that over the years you’ve read thousands of people’s writings around this. So of course, I’m assuming that permission was given before. So they knew that they what they were writing would be seen by you or by somebody, you know, on your team. What’s your take on on sharing, you know, somebody sitting down, let’s say there’s something really that’s on my mind. I haven’t been telling anyone. I, I feel the weight of of holding it myself. And I pour it out onto paper for four days and, and and I do feel a lot better, but what’s on paper scares me a little bit. Also, and I don’t necessarily want, even though I feel I’ve unburdened, it’s no longer weighing me down, I don’t necessarily want anyone else to see that. What’s your guidance on sharing?
James W. Pennebaker: [00:40:43] My guidance is this writing is for you and you alone. And I often will tell people, I want you to approach this, that you’ll do this writing and that you’ll destroy what you’ve written afterwards. Whether you destroy it or not is up to you, and you need to be very aware that what you’ve written could be very damaging if somebody close to you found it. He could hurt their feelings. He could hurt your reputation, and you have to be aware of that. So I think there’s another issue about this as well. And that is is it beneficial for you to go back and reread what you’ve written first started doing this. I had a graduate student, and her approach was she had written for a long time, and she would write, and then the next day she’d go back and get what she had, and then she would start to revise it. And she felt this was really powerful for her. As I told her, I couldn’t imagine doing that. That sounded horrible. I would never do that in a million years. But I know it’s beneficial for her, and I think this is a good example of how we’re all wired a little bit differently. Over the course of my life, I’ve, you know, I’ve gone back and read some of my expressive writings over the, over the years, and I’ll start reading some of these early essays, and I get depressed so quickly. You know, the reality is, I’m a pretty upbeat person, and I write when I’m when when I’m struggling with something. And for me, I want to get over that. You know, struggling is great, but it’s a lot better to not have to struggle and going back and seeing these earlier periods. Yes. Intellectually, it’s kind of interesting, you know, that I was dealing with this issue back when I was in my 40s and this in my 50s. But hey, I feel like I resolved those and I don’t want to necessarily go back and and revisit them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:42] Yeah. So we’re not going to be expecting a deep, intense memoir from you anytime soon. No. Reviewing all the journals from expressive writing over the years.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:42:53] And now let me tell you how I was so screwed up about this.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:58] Um, I want to revisit also, you mentioned early in our conversation just a series of different benefits. And certainly, you know, like you kicked off a lot of this early research, but as you shared, there have been so many labs, so many studies, so many investigators now that have done their versions of research looking at different outcomes. One of the ones I’m deeply fascinated by is the research between expressive writing and its impact on physical pain. Talk to me about this a bit.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:43:26] So I’ve not actually done any of that research myself. Chronic pain is one of the biggest problems facing the the American health and world health. You know, everything from back pain or injury or other kinds of chronic pain. One of the interesting things about chronic pain is because we know so little about it. Very often, physicians can’t really identify what the underlying cause is. When that happens, the person with the pain, not only are they suffering with the pain, but they’re dealing with the humiliation that their friends and neighbors and family members are all essentially saying, well, you’re just all in this guy’s head. Some of the work on chronic pain is showing that expressive writing is particularly well suited, and it’s important for everyone to understand. I’m not saying that pain or anything else is just in your head. There is something absolutely there. But expressive writing is a method that has been shown to be really effective in reducing it. And I think, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why this is true. One is, is that I think what happens when a person’s experiencing chronic pain, that information from the site of the pain is being processed in the body and in the brain. And when you’re experiencing this pain, it’s harder for you to concentrate on other issues. And generally when a person is under stress and they have chronic pain, their pain gets worse. And one of the things the expressive writing does is it helps to reduce the noise and input from the stressor itself. And I don’t begin to understand the pathways or the mechanisms that drives this. But there’s a wonderful group of physicians who have been doing these studies on chronic pain. One guy is a guy by the name of David Hanscom. H a n s c o m b who has published on this, and he’s a pain physician, and he’s been somebody who’s been doing some just remarkable work showing the benefits of expressive writing as a method to get through a lot of pain experiences.
Jonathan Fields: [00:45:42] Yeah. I mean, it’s so powerful. Some of the other research that I know, and as you shared, you know, for anyone who’s actually curious about this specific research, literally, if you go to Google Scholar, type in expressive writing, whatever symptom or thing that you’re struggling with, there’s probably papers on this. You know, things ranging from mental health, anxiety, depression, illness, disease, grief. You know, when you think about this, one of the things that that, um, that I love about this modality also is its accessibility. You know, like, there are so many things that are connected to pain that we’ve endured and that we are bearing all alone, and that when we when we can unburden, it’s it’s stunning how many systems in our body it affects and how many symptoms it affects. But, you know, oftentimes we feel like if we’re feeling this thing, we’ve got to go to somebody, we’ve got to pay something. We’ve got to. And for some people that’s fine. Like they’re completely good with that. They have the resources and the support and the network for plenty of other people. They’re not. So I love the accessibility of this practice because it just opens up and says nobody’s excluded from the benefit here.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:46:50] This has been one of the things that I’ve really loved about it is here’s a technique where I am not saying there’s one true way, you know, and people will call and say, I’d like to get certified in expressive writing and I’ll say, okay, you’re certified. And that’s what’s so interesting is the person who you, the writer, is the one who is certifying yourself that these methods work. They’re very simple. And you just need to, uh, figure out what works best for you. But you’re right. The cost of this is a pen and paper, or one of the methods that I developed many years ago is finger writing. My wife and I were in Europe, and we were staying in a small hotel somewhere in the. And at night, you know, I started tossing and turning about something and I thought, I need to get up and write about this. But I didn’t want to turn on the light because it would make wake my wife up. So I just sat in the dark and I just started writing with my finger. And as I was doing this, I was thinking, whoa, this works really well. And I’ve done some informal studies with with groups, and doing this writing just with your finger in the air is a is it can be beneficial. So it’s even cheaper. You don’t have to spend money on that hand write.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:13] That’s fantastic. I do want to dip into something else as well, which is sort of like building on this earlier research and that’s, you know, beyond expressive writing, you’ve developed this linguistic inquiry and word count or like kind of like a tool that analyzes language to uncover insights and emotions and behaviors and personalities. Take me into this a bit. This is fascinating to me.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:48:38] Early in my career, I came up with this expressive writing work, and one of the things that reviewers kept asking and I kept asking and other researchers kept asking is, why does writing work? And they’re all, you know, everybody and their dog had a theory. I had a great theory. And none of those theories have panned out particularly well. But one of the things that I started to think about was, well, maybe if I just looked at how people were writing, I could get some kind of insight into its benefits. And I didn’t know how to go about analyzing the writing. So I started off by just dealing with a group of students who were training to be clinical psychologists and had them read these essays, and to evaluate each essay on a number of different dimensions. One was to what degree is this person getting some kind of insight? To what degree is this person exhibiting searching for causes and reasons for their behavior? So what did this degree is this person expressing their emotions? Et cetera. Et cetera. I had maybe a dozen students doing this, and I turned out to be a total disaster because the judges, the students couldn’t agree on the dimensions. And they it also, they got depressed reading these really traumatic stories. And so here is a method that was really slow. It was not reliable. And it made the reviewers, the readers depressed. That is not a.
Jonathan Fields: [00:50:15] It’s not exactly checking the boxes if you want to check that.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:50:18] Right? Exactly. And so I thought surely there’d be a computer program. Now, this was in the late 80s and early 1990s. And I started to, you know, I had in college I had taken a course on computer programming. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I had a good sense of how a computer program could be developed to analyze text. And as it happened, one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, had her undergraduate degree, had been in computer science. And so I sat down with her and said, you know, I think we could write a computer program that could analyze texts. And the idea of it was a method that’s just called word counting. It sounds really stupid. But for example, let’s say if I wanted to get a sense of if a person is angry. Well, one thing you could do is just calculate the percentage of words in a text that were angry. Related anger related words would be I would think it would be a rough estimate of the degree to which that person is angry. All you had to do is to come up with a list of words that suggested anger. What we did was to start to create all these dictionaries. So we had an anger dictionary and the dictionary and a happiness and love. And then we had another one for causal words and no words like because cause and effect and others for insight, words like understand, realize and then and this by the way, this took forever. The computer program was pretty easy, but coming up with a word list was difficult.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:51:51] And once we got into these word lists, we started to do also throw away just common things like let’s do first person singular pronouns I, me, and my and first person plural pronouns we, us and our. One of the ironies here is I have never been interested in linguistics. I’ve never been interested in language. I still have post-traumatic stress disorder from diagramming sentences in high school. So it was kind of funny that I got was getting into parts of speech and things like that. In any case, we developed this computer program that would go through and we would enter a text and it would have to be digital and it would go through analyze it and come up and they will say, well, this percentage of words were anger words. This percentage of words were happy words, this percentage, etcetera, etcetera. And it turned out to be a really interesting program. And we found that that expressive writing, there were certain kind of fingerprints of beneficial writing. So, for example, the more that people use positive emotion words when they’re writing about a trauma, the more likely they were to benefit from the writing. And part of it is, even if they said they were not happy, their use of the happy word Suggested that they were still thinking along this dimension of happiness. The effects were were modest and negative emotion, words that, you know, a moderate number of negative emotion words were associated with benefits. Writing too much, you know, really getting too deeply into negative emotions was not helpful.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:53:29] And not using negative emotions was not helpful. But what we found in those early studies was it was these cognitive dimensions that were much more powerful. These were like insight words understand, realize, know meaning causal words because cause effect. And what was interesting was the pattern of these, these cognitive words that if people increased in their use of these cognitive words over the course of writing, they were more likely to benefit, almost as though over time they’re going from not really having a coherent story to trying to come up with a story. And those were the people who benefited. These early studies I was really fascinated by it. But then I was also interested in, you know, you could use this method, this this computer program. And the computer program is like, which is which we pronounce Luke. And I know it doesn’t seem like it should be pronounced that way, but it’s my program. So it’s Luke, the Luke program. We first came out with it in 1992, and it’s on its maybe fifth or sixth edition now. So it still exists, but much more sophisticated. At the time, the internet was just starting to become popular, and for those above a certain age, they’ll remember that day that in the mail they got a disc in the mail from America Online, AOL, and you could put this into your computer and then get a phone modem that would call in to who knows where.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:55:07] Ah. And all of a sudden, you were connected to the world. And there were these chat groups that were starting to exist. So you could be in a chat group about England. And so all of a sudden you could go into that and you’d be talking to people in England. And I mean, this this was incredible. Well, for me, I was because I was interested in words that allowed me to start downloading texts. And every night after the kids were in bed, I’d go up and I’d start to go to a different type of group. You know, sometimes it would be sports, sometimes it would be dating, other times it would be, you know, other topics. Some groups were mostly women, some were mostly men, etc. and I just downloaded them every night. And then the next morning I’d go and analyze the text, and all of a sudden I started to see, wow, people differ in the way they use language and in ways that are very different than I think most of us would would ever guess. So for example, men and women use language completely differently, but it’s not in terms of what they’re saying, it’s how they are saying it. And initially I just thought that I there was clearly a big problem in my computer program. So for example, the first thing I looked at was the most common word in conversation. And the most common word in conversation in English is the word I. And who uses I more men or women? Well, you know, it was obvious that men did.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:56:39] Except it turns out that that never was true. It was. Women always use I words more, and that made no sense to me. But it held up and it didn’t matter what the context was. And so I started. And then what about we words? We, us. And now everybody knows women use we words more. Except they didn’t. It turns out that men and women use we words at about the same rate. Or how about cognitive words? Because cause, effect, etc. and I just assumed, of course men used those words more. No, women consistently use those words more. Okay. Emotion words. Everybody knows women have to use emotion words more. No, there was no difference. How about social words? References to other people. Friend, pal, he she, they, etc.. Well, obviously women. And that’s the only one I got, right? Women do in fact talk about other people more. And as I dug into this, I first of all realized that all these words I was looking at were essentially parts of speech, pronouns, prepositions, articles, etc., and that the brain and processes these words differently. And then they do content words. And these words were really powerful markers of not just sex differences, but personality intentions to behave. Depression proneness almost everything. And they worked in ways that make sense now that I understand them. But back then they didn’t. So I words are used more by people who are self-focused. When you use the word I, you’re very briefly paying attention to your internal state.
James W. Pennebaker: [00:58:29] So for example, people who are physically sick or in pain use I words more than when they’re not in pain, or people who are standing in front of an audience where they are self-conscious. They use I words more. Or there are all of these different ways you can get people to be more self-focused, have them write an essay about what they did yesterday, but have them write this in front of a mirror versus not in front of a mirror. They use more words if they’re in front of the mirror. And women are more self-reflective than men. And that’s something that all of us, I think, would agree with. And self-reflection is a marker of I words. You know, we think of I words as being associated with narcissism, self importance. But in fact that’s not the case. So all of these dimensions have really important meaning. And all of a sudden it allowed us to do these studies to show that we could tell if people were lying or telling the truth, not with great accuracy, but better than humans can do. Or that we could identify people who were prone to depression or PTSD, or people who were in a depressive episode. Or we could also start to find out differences between how people think, or the degree to which they naturally are analytic in the way that they think. And so it can tell us all about people and how they connect with others, but also how they work through problems.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:02] It’s so fascinating. This work, I would imagine. Now, I don’t know if you’re involved in it at all, but with, um, I sort of like exploding onto the scene over the last number of years. That and I’ve seen some of what it can do in terms of analyzing not only language, but actually vocal intonation, you know, and energy. And it can pick up all these different things simply by, in the blink of an eye, um, and respond to you. I mean, how fascinating would it be as this work extends, you know, if you literally could have something, an app on your phone or just something on your computer that could become a leading indicator?
James W. Pennebaker: [01:00:40] We’re there. This AI world is so exciting. The big differences between AI and these large language models and in the loop program with AI. Ai is Unbelievable in its ability to predict. So it does an amazing job at predicting what a person will do or say. All of these features, they can. The problem is we don’t know why. So it predicts, but we don’t understand why. And something like a dumb word count program. It doesn’t predict as nearly as well as I, but we know we at least know what the dimensions are that are driving the effects. So at least at this interim period, the two methods together really make a very nice package. And the AI work is moving so quickly, it’s very likely that in somewhere between five years and five minutes it’ll be completely, completely irrelevant.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:45] It’s kind of mind boggling, but it is amazing to see, like work that you’ve started and built on for years and how it’s being picked up, but very differently. And like you said, you know, there’s a difference between an analytical model where you actually understand why it’s telling you what it’s telling you, and a black box where you’re like, wow, this is incredibly accurate and valuable, but I don’t get where it’s coming from. And those worlds absolutely are going to merge. You know, like, as you said, five minutes to five years, who knows exactly when, but it’s coming. It’s I mean, it’s kind of a fascinating time to be.
James W. Pennebaker: [01:02:17] And it’s very interesting for people in psychology because we’ve all grown up with models. We build all these models to explain perceptions and thoughts and so forth. And now all of a sudden AI is saying, who cares about the models? I’ll show you exactly. You know, I’ll predict with almost perfect certainty. And it really does question what role psychologists will be having in the future.
Jonathan Fields: [01:02:49] And psychologists and a lot of others, but it’s going to be amazing to kind of be a part of that whole adventure. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.
James W. Pennebaker: [01:03:05] To me to live a good life is one of discovery and curiosity and closeness with with other people, and especially those family and those that, uh, are close to us. And also a nice day outside with a, uh, a stable climate.
Jonathan Fields: [01:03:35] Well, being in Colorado right now, we don’t have that. But, uh, I think you’re probably talking more broadly about the world, but thank you so much.
James W. Pennebaker: [01:03:42] You bet.
Jonathan Fields: [01:03:44] If you love this episode, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Nicole Sachs about her approach to journaling for chronic pain. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by Executive Producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even. Then invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.