The type of writing that can help you control stress.
Writing about past failures reduces the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol, research finds.
It is the first study to find that thinking critically and writing about past failures can reduce stress and improve people’s performance on a new task.
People are often advised to ‘stay positive’ and not think too much about their failures — but this research suggests the advice is misplaced.
Ms Brynne DiMenichi, the study’s lead author, said:
“We didn’t find that writing itself had a direct relationship on the body’s stress responses.
Instead, our results suggest that, in a future stressful situation, having previously written about a past failure causes the body’s stress response to look more similar to someone who isn’t exposed to stress at all.”
For the study, some people wrote about past failures and others about a topic not related to themselves.
It was only those that wrote about past failures that saw the benefits when they were given another difficult task to complete.
People who wrote about past failures made more careful choices and performed better.
Ms DiMenichi said:
“Together, these findings indicate that writing and thinking critically about a past failure can prepare an individual both physiologically and cognitively for new challenges.”
The study’s results could help people use their failures to promote future successes, Ms DiMenichi said:
“It provides anyone who wants to utilize this technique in an educational, sports, or even therapeutic setting with clear-cut evidence of expressive writing’s effectiveness.
However, it is difficult to compare laboratory measures of cognitive performance to performance on say, the Olympic track.
Future research can examine the effect of writing manipulation on actual athletic performance.”
The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (DiMenichi et al., 2018).
