Journaling Has The Power To Heal You: Here's The Science Behind It

Various studies have been conducted over the past decades proving the massive healing power that resides in journaling. Expressive writing has emerged as a potent instrument for healing trauma, building resilience, and increasing self-awareness. As per Harvard Business Review, writing fundamentally helps in reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, improves our sleep and performance, brings greater focus and clarity, and even heals from trauma.

To further measure the impact of journaling on the brain, researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) revealed how labeling emotions through writing can lead to a decreased response in the amygdala; our brain’s alarm center responsible for detecting threats and activating our fight or flight response, by reducing its activity significantly, leading to a regulated nervous system, allowing our bodies to operate in a state of calmness.

While the study of the damaging effects of trauma has gained popularity in research, and scientifically proved how it disrupts our neurobiology and alters neurological pathways in the brain, there has been major evidence on how these symptoms are in fact reversible, through the constant act of releasing our emotions through writing.

Why is journaling essential for growth?

Bestselling author Stephen R. Covey beautifully described the effectiveness of journaling in his multi-million national bestseller, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. Writing good letters – communicating on the deeper level of thoughts, feelings, and ideas rather than on the shallow, superficial level of events – also affects our ability to think clearly, to reason accurately, and to be understood effectively.”

Not only does journaling help us become more effective and organized, but it is also a major contributor to helping us navigate the dark times in our lives and dissolve the residues of the past caused by traumatic events.

Hence it is through the constant act of writing that we will be able to tap into our own power by liberating stored energy from our bodies resulting from trauma, and witness great healing in our lives.

With the release of stored energy comes clarity, and with clarity comes a deepened connection with ourselves and our purpose, paving our path toward growth and success.

The science behind stored energy

Translating what you feel on paper is one of the most transformative experiences you can do for yourself, because you’re basically liberating energy.

Everything that you experience, be it trauma, intense emotions, or thoughts, has a charge, and is stored in your body in the form of energy. And what does stored energy do? It makes our bodies stuck in the past, making us relive the same memories all over again. And when an outside stimulus triggers an unresolved past, our brain’s alarm system gets activated, putting our body into the ultimate survival mode: the fight-or-flight. By definition, the fight or flight response is the body’s natural physiological reaction to stressful, frightening, or dangerous events. It is activated by the perception of threat, quickly igniting the sympathetic nervous system and releasing hormones, preparing the body to face a threat or run to safety*.*

What does stored energy look like?

To understand what stored energy looks like, we will first need to understand what causes this energy to get stored in the first place.

We have long been a species that is wired for survival in the face of danger, ever since our inception. The human brain is by default programmed to constantly scan its environment in order to assess our level of safety and alert us to any signs of trouble. For instance, the fight-or-flight response helped early humans respond to threats in order to avoid injury or death. When the brain successfully detects danger, it puts our bodies in a state of survival: our brain’s alarm system gets activated, releasing stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that drive up blood pressure, increasing our oxygen intake and heart rate, activating the primitive fight-or-flight response. As soon as the threat is over, and once the body returns to its normal state, the brain keeps record of the event by taking a snapshot of the experience, forming a memory, for the sole purpose of remembering the event and alerting us should it ever potentially occur again in the future. Therefore, the memory of an event can become neurologically branded in the brain and imprinted in our neural circuitry, storing the energy within the body. It also keeps record of the coping mechanisms we have used that aided us in getting away from the danger so that we automatically tap into them for the future. This process is what makes our past become a part of our biology, and this is what creates dysregulation within our nervous systems. It is also the reason why our brains create memories—to be able to recall past dangers and become well-equipped in the future should they ever happen again. This is also how coping mechanisms are formed.

Yet if unhealthy, our coping mechanisms prevent the release of stored energy by holding it captive within our bodies, preventing our healing and further reinforcing denial, which then manifests as sadness, depression, anxiety, despair, hatred, anger, resentment, fear, feelings of stuckness, loneliness, grief, guilt and hopelessness, (the list goes on), along with the recalibration of our brain’s alarm systems, causing us to become hypervigilant at the slightest trigger and react as if we are being chased by a predator.

While we all want to move beyond our past, it is in fact unrealistic to expect ourselves to move on with our lives while we are insisting this denial on our bodies and pretend that it is not there. And the reason is simple: the part of our brain that is devoted to our survival is not very good at denial.

Our brains are not programmed to know the difference between a regular trigger and an event happening in real life. What our brains are capable of is to remember, connect, and act. In other words, the body emits the same reaction whether a soldier went to war, or had a mere flashback of it. And it is by keeping this energy captive that we are emitting a relentless amount of stressors which are so detrimental to our health, yet have become second nature because we became addicted to the same chemicals that are making us sick.

Now imagine how exhausting it would be for a person to be in this constant state of survival, compromising the enjoyment of their day-to-day lives at the slightest remembrance of a traumatic event.

This is the case for the majority of trauma survivors, whose brains have been wired to continuously release stress hormones to keep themselves safe from a danger that is not necessarily there. Most of us are unaware of this change in our physiology of course, because it is all happening at a subconscious level. And because most of us are unconscious of these internal changes happening in our neurobiology, whenever we experience discomfort or get triggered, we feel confused and overwhelmed, concluding there’s something wrong with ourselves, that we’re damaged to the core and beyond redemption, so we hold on to our coping mechanisms to get rid of those emotions or indulge in emotional suppression. Both strategies do not solve the core issue.

Why is it necessary to release this energy?

Any stored energy resulting from trauma becomes neurologically anchored into our minds and bodies, which prevents our ability to heal, grow, and move forward. Stuck energy anchors our brain and body to the past, triggering a constant production of the same chemistry as if the events were happening in real-time, leading us to attract the same problems and find ourselves stuck in a never-ending cycle. As we are continuously replaying the events in our memory bank, our body is emotionally experiencing the same events as if they were occurring in the present moment, causing us to attract similar circumstances that reaffirm our inner state. When the stress is chronic, the body utilizes all its energy to deal with the threat it perceives from the outer environment, regardless of whether the danger is real or not. Again, our brain does not know the difference between reality and our thoughts. Our energy then becomes so sucked up due to the constant release of stressors that there is pretty much no energy left for us to create a better life for ourselves.

Trauma is known to put a stop and a start to our lives. It feels like an interruption of time, creating a before and after. If not processed and released, we become fixated on what happened to us, because the aftermath is still neurologically crafted into our brain tissue. And because we have been so used to the constant release of stress hormones, we become addicted to this mental state that becomes an integral part of who we are, making change and growth very challenging.

Nonetheless, no matter the intensity of the traumatic event, our bodies possess tremendous power, far beyond our ability to comprehend, in healing themselves. Our resilience and ability to restore our health and move on from what happened to us goes beyond any other species. As per ancient wisdom, putting our feelings into words truly does help us heal. Through the constant practice of putting our emotions on paper, we will healthily release this energy from our bodies, and manifest our healing.

What this journal aims to help you achieve is to liberate this captivated energy — the same energy that is making you self-sabotage, sell yourself short, and meet your needs in unhealthy ways, leaving you questioning why you are still unhappy or feeling stuck.

Your task is simple: to look within, and release what is standing in the way, for you to blossom.