A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opened moloch at stamford school of medicine. Today, we are discussing journaling for mental and physical health.

I want to emphasize that today's discussion is not a general discussion about the value of journey. Rather, IT is a discussion about a particular form of journal that the scientific p review data says is especially powerful for improving our mental and physical health. In fact, what I will describe today is a journal method that is supported by over two hundred peer reviewed studies in quality journals.

And I Frankly was not aware of this journal practice prior to researching this episode, but in researching this episode, have come to discover that this practice should easily be placed among some of the other critical so called foundational pillar practices in terms of its impact on improving mental and physical health, including things like lowering anxiety, improving sleep, improving immunity to things like cold flows, etta, as well as reducing the symptoms of autoimmune disorders such as arthritis, lupis, and also providing some relief for fibre and my alga, which is a condition of excessive pain. The particular journal method protocl that I will describe has also been shown to improve various metrics of everyday living, including improved memory, decision making and on and on and on. So much so that, again, I was very surprised that I had not heard of this particular journal method when we think that if such a powerful method existed, that everyone would know about IT.

But IT turns out that this particular journal method has been somewhat cloistered within the fields of psychology and psychology. It's not that nobody was aware of IT. In fact, I learned about IT for the first time from our associate chair of psychiatry at stanford university school of venison, my colleague, collaborator, doctor David speaker, who some of you may know has been featured as a guest on this podcast previously.

And upon hearing about IT, I decided to explore the primary research, that is, the studies that demonstrate the power of this particular journ method, and was absolutely blown away by the positive impact this particular journal method can have. What's wonderful about IT, you'll soon discovered, is that IT takes a relatively small amount of time. In fact, it's something that you could do during the course of one week or even across one month, and they never do again.

And the data say that I would still have lasting positive benefits, both for body and mind. So while it's rare to feature one particular protocol as an entire huberman lab podcast, that is indeed what I will do today. IT is important that we go into some depth about the specific protocol because there are some important details that everyone should know if they want to apply IT and make IT as effective as I can be.

And in addition to that, we will talk about some of the underlying science that's been published explaining why and how this protocol is so effective for mental and physical health. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero costs to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, so called electronic and no sugar. Now salt magnesium um in patasse are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to functions properly, all three electroliers ts need to be present in the proper ratio.

And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits, and cognitive and physical performance element contains a back to electronic light ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of patashie and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electoral lights. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase.

Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja sessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yogananda sessions, those you don't know.

Yoga eja is a process of line very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea, and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial.

Again, that's waking up that com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Okay, let's talk about this particularly transformative form of journey that initially was researched by doctor James penneBaker. James penneBaker was a professor of psychology at southern methodist university when he first started researching this form of journal and its positive impacts on the body and mind, but he has since moved to the university of texas, Austin, where he still runs a laboratory, and has continued his studies on the role of journal and other forms of language, both spoken and written, in terms of their impact on one's mental and physical health.

So the origins of the research into this particular form of journey started in the mid eighties, and IT was really in one thousand nine hundred eighty six that the first published manuscript about this form of journey was published. Now I want to be clear that prior to James panda Baker studying this form of journey, clearly others had used the former journey that i'm about to describe. However, IT was penneBaker that really started attaching measurements of the specific types of changes that occurred in people when they did this journal in a particular way, and indeed came up with the precise protocol that will talk about today.

So penneBaker in colleagues and James penneBaker in particular, really deserves credit for the discovery of this method. As you'll soon learn, penneBaker was absolutely meticulous in figuring out exactly how long the method should be Carried out, what exact forms of change occurred in the body and mind. He was careful to explore the method in the context of students as well as in the general population, in veterans and elderly, in kids and on and on.

So it's really that incredible attention to detail and that scientific rigor that makes the protocol so incredibly powerful. So that first scientific study of this particular form of journey, as I mentioned, was published one thousand nine hundred eighty six, and I provided a link to that study in the shown ote captions. But what that study essentially consisted of was inviting undergraduate students into the university laboratory one at a time.

And they were just spent fifteen to thirty minutes writing about the most difficult, even trauma tic, or possibly non traumatic, but still very difficult, experience that they can recall from their entire life. The instruction included that they should write for the entire time. That is because they were writing by hand in that particular experiment that they were to not stop moving their hand for the entire duration of the fifteen to thirty minutes.

And in addition to that, that no one besides them, the person riding, would see what was written at the beginning, middle or even after the experiment. In fact, the students were invited to tear up the paper at the end of the writing exercise if they so chose. okay.

So the first key instruction is that they take a moment to think about what is the most difficult, perhaps even traumatic, experience of their entire life. The second instruction was that they were supposed to right for fifteen to thirty minutes. And the third instruction was that they were supposed to right for the entire time, that at no point would they take a pause, unless somehow, emotionally or physically, they were unable to keep moving their hand on the paper.

In fact, they were told to not pay attention to accurate grammar, to not pay attention to reliability. They were told, in fact, that their writing could be repeat with spelling errors or grammatic errors. That didn't matter. What was most important is that they tap into a particularly negatively charged memory of their prior life experience. Now, of course, because this was an experiment Carried out in a university laboratory, there was a quiet place where the students could right undisturbed.

But since we're taking this particular protocol and we're exporting IT to the real world through this podcast, so it's important that if you decide to implement this protocol in your own life, that you Carry out the riding in a place where you will not be disturbed for that entire fifteen to thirty minute duration. It's also important that you know that even though that first one thousand nine hundred eighty six study was done having students write out these memories by hand with a pen and paper or a pencil and paper, there have been many subsequent studies that have explored whether or not the pending paper was particularly important. That turns out it's not the exact same magnitude of positive effects are observed regardless of whether or not people write out their passage of words by hand or type IT out on a word processor or any other form of writing.

Now just to make sure that everyone gets the exactly protocol that was provided in that first initial study from penneBaker and colleagues and that has been used really over and over and over again for more than two hundred peer reviewed studies that demonstrates the power of this protocol. I'm going to read to you some of the specific instructions from that first study. So the subjects were instructed to quote, write about something that you are thinking about or worrying about way too much.

Or if you're not thinking about or worrying about something way too much, perhaps you've deliberately tried to not think about this series of events or event, something that you've been dreaming about at night, perhaps in disturbing dreams, or something that you feel is affecting life in an unhealthy way, either internally or externally. So IT could be in your emotional state, your inability to calm down when you want to be calm, maybe a ruminating, maybe even compulsive thought, maybe it's leading to addictive or compulsive or habitual behaviors, or perhaps you can identify a specific trauma or set of traumas that you know are really playing ging your body in mind. The specific instructions that we're given to the subjects in those experiments are the specific instructions that i'm going to give to you now should you decide to implement this journey protocol.

And those instructions are as follows. I want you to write down your deepest emotions and thoughts as they relate to the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about IT. As you write, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents or siblings, people you have loved or loved now, or even your career or schooling.

How has this experience related to who you have now become, who you have been in the past and who you would like to become? The instructions then continued to say, many people have not had a truly traumatic experience in their lives, but everyone has had major conflicts or stressors. And you can write about the most dramatic or stressful experience you have ever had.

Okay, so those are some of the key instructions that subjects in these experiments were given before they do the exercise. And of course, they were given a few minutes to think about what they wanted to write. But once they selected what they want to write, they started writing.

There was a time are going in the background for fifteen to thirty minutes. And the reason, by the way, I keeps saying fifteen to thirty minutes, that some experiments employed a thirty minute period. Other experiments employ a twenty minute period.

Others employed a fifteen minute period. Turns out there were no major differences between the fifteen minute and the thirty minute writing blocks in terms of the positive impact that they had on mental and physical health. But for some people and their particular experience that they're writing about, fifteen minutes is simply going to be too brief a time in order to capture the entire experience.

And as many thoughts and feelings about that experience as one would perhaps put down onto paper or type out if they had a full thirty minutes. So you can allow yourself fifteen to thirty minutes and feel welcome to stop before the thirty minute period is over. Or perhaps you are going to research yourself to fifteen minutes and you are going to force yourself to get out as much as possible in that time.

I really doesn't matter or so, say the data. okay. So before I continue to detail the specifics of this writing protocol, you've probably already noticed that what i'm describing is a very different form of journal then, say, morning notes, which is a form of journal that writers often use in order to quote, clear out the clutter.

This is a process of sitting down and writing down, and stream of consciousness, whatever is on your mind for the first five to fifteen, maybe in thirty minutes every morning, as a way to clear out your mental processes and get ready for the day, perhaps the day of other forms of writing or other activities entirely. What i'm describing is also distinctly different from so called gratitude journey. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

It's not writing about things that you're grateful foreign cesspool ily. It's writing about things that are extremely unfortunate that happened to you and that you have very charged negative emotions about. In addition, the form of journey that we're talking about today is distinctly different from the form of journey that I am many others have undertaken, perhaps not on a daily basis, but perhaps on a daily basis where you essentially are writing out the contents of your daily life is so called diary.

And I mentioned that because I think many people do journal and some do so on a consistent basis, I would put myself into that category. Although the last few years I have not been journal too much, I have literally stacks and stacks of journals dating back to the early nineties. I brought a few of them along today and no, i'm not going to read them any of you in fact, um when I was looking these last night and by the way, these are from the late so this is the summer of nineteen ninety seven so I would have been late in my undergraduate career.

This is fall of ninety six, one thousand ninety two, always done on the same composition notebook at that time and always done by hand. I'm surprised that my handwriting was as legible as IT was. It's got worse over the years. I don't know what neural process that reflects.

But in any event, in reading over these journal entries, IT was clear to me that just as I had recalled that each and every one of them was essentially an update about what was happening lately, what I was hoping for, some chAllenges, basically a diary of sorts, and these are kept in the second drawer of the second. Now, i'm just kidding at the idea for me is also that no one will ever read these besides me. IT was a quite an interesting exercise to go back and and read those.

And either were a few craned moments, but there were also a few moments where I ve found myself smiling, because in certain ways, so little has changed between the person I was then and the person I am now. Unfortunately, uh, in so many ways, certain things have changed between the person I was then and the person I am now. Now I mentioned all of that simply because I think the form of journey that i've been doing for some years, this sort of autobiographical approach to daily entries, or suda daily entries, is far and away different than the type of journaling that we're talking about for sake of improving mental and physical health during today's episode, which is not to say that gratitude journal or autobiographical daily entries, A K direct type journey is not useful.

In fact, there are all data to support that. Gratitude journal, in particular, can be very beneficial for both body and mind, everything from improving general states of happiness to reducing anxiety, improving relationships and on and on. But to get back to the protocol that we're talking about today, you probably noticed that IT is not a protocol that's likely to feel very good, at least not at first.

And indeed, that's what the research shows. And this is something that you really need to be aware of that when subjects are given this research assignment during the assignment, they are often quite district. Often times they cry, often times they find themselves holding their breath and anxiety, often times they'll finish that fifteen to thirty minute writing block, and they'll feel as if they had run a mental marathon.

And therefore, the subjects were given a period of five to fifteen minutes post writing to settle down and transition back into their day. So I highly recommend that you incorporate that into your protocol as well. So if you're going to allow yourself, say, twenty minutes to write, you want to give yourself probably ten minutes of quiet time to you, bring your composure back and reset yourselves that you can reenter daily living, because the writing that you're going to do for this particular protocol is designed to tap into very negative, if not the most negative, experiences of your life.

And so that's something to be taken seriously. And it's an entirely unreasonable expectation that you could write about something as difficult as the most difficult to experience in your life and then simply pivoted, go back into everyday life right away. So you want to design a time of day or night, perhaps when you can do this writing, and still allow yourself some time to settled down your autonomic system, return your breathing to Normal, perhaps you wash your face with some cool water, remind yourself that the rest of the day continues, that you're doing great.

In fact, you made IT through this first installment of the journal. So you're probably starting to get the impression that this form of journal that penneBaker and colleagues really researched and pioneer the evolution of is quite different than other forms of journey and in fact, is very different. I've already told you that the idea is to sit down and right for fifteen to thirty minutes, right, continuously write about something that really, to you, is one of the most, if not the most difficult experiences of your life.

In addition to that, for this form of journal to be most effective, that is to bring about the greatest positive shifts in mental and physical health, you're actually going to write about that exact same thing four times. Now the way that that was initially researched by penneBaker and others was to have the same person, of course, right about the same experience four times on four consecutive days, for fifteen to thirty minutes each. So students were people from the general population, or veterans were literally coming into the laboratory and sitting down and writing about the most difficult experience of their life that they could recall for fifteen to thirty minutes on one day, and then again on the next day, and then the next day and the next day.

So much of the data on this particular journal method reflects that four consecutive days of fifteen to thirty minute writing bouts of the most difficult experience that you can recall. However, there have been variations on this protocol such that people selected one day per week, and IT does even have to be the same day like every monday, IT could be monday of one week and then wednesay of the next week and so on, such that you write only one day per week about the most difficult experience you can recall. And then you write about that same difficult experience one week later, and then again one week later, and then again one week later, across the course of a month or any four week period for that matter.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I hear that that i'm going to need to write about the most difficult experience of my entire life, that I can recall for even fifteen minutes, let alone thirty minutes, let alone two times. And here we're talking about four times, perhaps even on four consecutive days, that actually speaks to some intensity, some demand. In fact, I find myself kind of leaning away from that experience a little bit, but as well talk about later.

That's exactly the point of this type of exercise, which is that we are harming these stories, these experiences, and in some cases, partial recollections, in another case, detailed recognition, tions of the difficult thing that happened to us, perhaps even the most difficult thing that happened to us. And those narratives exist in our nervous system. These are not necessarily traumas as we talk about before, although they can be traumas now, we hear a lot about trauma.

And these days, people call all sorts of things trauma and traumatizing, and say that they've been traumatized by this, are traumatized by that. There's actually a specific definition of trauma that was provided by doctor paul anti, who is some of you know, is a medical doctor and psychiatrist. He's been a guest on this podcast.

First to talk about trauma. He wrote an excEllent book about trauma. I provide a link to that book in the shoonoo captions, by the way.

And he and I did four episode of the human lab podcast and so called gestures specifically aimed at mental health. What IT is, how to build mental health special protocols. And doctoral county is really, truly a world expert in trauma.

He defines trauma as any experience or experiences, plural, that modify our brain and neural circuitry so that could be brain or body or both, such that we do not function as well emotionally behaviorally or cognitive ly going forward from that experience. So not everything constitutes trauma, but many things do. So applying that definition, I think it's fair to say that many, if not most, people have some form of trauma stored in their nervous system.

And other people perhaps don't have such traumas, but everyone has had stressors. In fact, I think it's fair to say that everyone has had major stressors in their life, provided that they've lived at all. That's just part of life unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, maybe makes us who we are in positive ways that we are able to transmit te those negative experiences and stressors or traumas into particular forms of learning that allow us to do Better.

Indeed, that's possible. That was paul county in that four episode series on mental health. But the particular form of journalist that we're talking about today was really designed have people focus on those difficile experiences. And then for four episodes, total, yes, total.

There's no ongoing every week or you know it's not like having to seek out sunlight every morning and getting sunlight in your eyes or trying to get the best possible night sleep at night like i'm always encouraging people to do. This is really a short term protocol, but it's one that is indeed very intense. okay?

So long those lines that deliberately journey about a particularly distressing experiences or set of experiences is likely to bring some degree of you know, sadness, anxiety, frustration, anger, perhaps other emotions as well. It's important that you know some of the data that have been collected about this journey protocol, one of the more important features of this protocol is that when people do IT, they tend to bin out into two different groups. And these two groups have been described as low expresses and high express's.

Now, low express's and high express's have nothing to do with introversion and extroversion that's actually been looked at and they have no relationship. okay? So some people who are very talkative and very extroverted, they could be a low expressed or somebody who's very introverted tensor only you share when they really have something to say, and maybe doesn't have a lot of interest in social interactions.

Or as some of you who heard the episode on relationships know, an actual introvert is somebody who really enjoy social actions. But they are very safe. They are very satisfied by less social interaction than our extroverts. And if you want to learn more about that, check out the episode did on relationships.

But in any event, when people sit down to do this exercise and when they consent to having their writing analyzed and when they undergo a number of other different tests, turns out there two different groups that segment out. The first of these low expressed or the low expressed ors tend to use less descriptive language in their writing. They tend to get less emotional during the first boat of writing, that first day of fifteen to thirty minute writing, whereas the high expresses tend to be people that use a lot of negative language to describe their negative emotions about the negative experience.

So that means more negative descriptive words were used at higher frequency. These people, when they have their physiology measured, also tend to have higher amounts of distress and upset in the first debt of writing that first fifteen to thirty minute episode. So we've got two different groups.

The lower expresses in the high expresses, the low express's on day one are sharing a bit less. They're expressing less on paper of their particular emotions that they can recall from that traumatic or very distressing event, and overall, based on physiological measures as well. So cortisol increases as well as skin conducting changes in heart rate and blood pressure, the lord pressures are effectively relatively more calm, less distressed as they write about this very stressful event in their lives.

Relative to the high expressed, or who have higher blood pressure, higher heart rate, they tend to be the ones that cry more, or hold their breath more, or sob more. The higher levels of court is all during that first round of writing. Now for the protocol to be effective IT doesn't matter if you're in the low expressed or high expressway group.

Here's what's interesting. I just mentioned that on day one, the lower express's are less distressed physiologically and psychologically as they write about this. For them, very distressful event, whereas high expressed ors are much more distress, significantly more so, in fact, when these are measured in laboratory studies on both mental and physical dimensions of stress. Now that's on day one.

But then what's observed is an opposite pattern of progression, such that the low expresses become more and more distressed as the writing exercise continues from day two, three and four, whether the high expressed, or these people that use a lot of language to communicate their distress and are experiencing a lot of physiological and emotional distress as they're writing on day one. The amount of distress from day one to two to three to four actually goes down more dramatically. So you can expect that you fall into one or the other group.

This was truly a binary distribution where people build out into one or the other based on a number of different measurements. But here's the good news IT. Turns out IT doesn't matter whether not you're a low expressed or or high expressway, you want to use the form of writing that most natural for you and that for you communicates what that negative experience was like and how IT is affected you and perhaps how it's affected others as well.

The important thing to know is that both groups, both the low expressed and the high, expresses benefit from this anny protocol, such that three weeks later and even three months later and even years later, both groups are experiencing far less distress and baseline levels of stress then they did prior to embarking on the journey protocol at the very beginning. Now the reason I mentioned these two groups the law expresses in the high expresses is that is a non trivial detail of this writing protocol, because some people are very familiar with communicating their emotions, both in writing and perhaps in speech as well. And this actually has been looked at.

There's a wonderful study also buy panda Baker and colleagues. And I should mention that even though he studied this journey protocol for a good number of years, his laboratory has evolved now to studying all sorts of things related to how the particular language usage patterns that people use in everyday speech, as well as in their writing, how that reflects their their underlying psychological tone and emotions. But also, and I find this so interesting, how the particular words that we use in writing, in speech, actually shaped in a causeway, our emotional state, or take a little bit about out that later.

But the important thing to focus on now is the results of this study entitled natural emotion, vocabulary ies as windows on distress and well being. And this, again, as a study that was done by pana Baker and colleagues i've linked to in the shown of captions and IT, essentially examines people's natural language usage patterns. Now, what do I mean by natural? And why is that important? Well, there been many, many studies of people's vocabulary and assessing whether not people have more knowledge of negative words to describe negative emotions or positive emotions.

These studies are varying in their form, but generally consist of having people circle words they recognize, or maybe writing out the definitions to. And IT turns out that people that have more extensive knowledge of words that describe negative emotions themselves tend to have a lower effect or negative emotional state, as compared to people who have more extensive knowledge of vocabulary words that pertain to positive emotions. So a crude example of what I just described is somebody that has fairly limited knowledge of words that described positive emotional state.

So perhaps they regnie the word happy, they recover ze the word estates, they recognize the word joyful. But they have a fairly limited word set that pertains to positive emotions, whereby comparison is always relative within the same person, right? By comparison, the person knows four times more words that pertained to a negative emotional state.

okay? In general, those people tend to be more depressive, tend to you have higher levels of anxiety and so forth, as compared to somebody where the reverse pattern is to where they have knowledge of farm. More words that pertained to positive emotional states as compared to negative emotional states.

Now, on the face of IT, that result probably seems straight forward, right? People that have a lot of words to describe happiness are more happy. If you will have a lot of words to sadness and negative emotions are more sad. But I didn't necessarily have to be that way. And IT turns out that it's not always that way.

What do you mean by that? Well, the particular study that i've been describing here, this natural emotion vocabulary ies as windows on distress and well being, is an important paper, because IT explored not the words that people have knowledge of, but the word patterns that people tend to use in their natural speech, either spoken or written. And what penneBaker and others showed is that people that tend to use a lot of negative words tend to have more negative emotional states, whereas people that naturally tend to use words that describe positive emotional states have more positive emotions.

In this related to both mental and physical metrics of negative emotions and positive emotions. So this is a significant result because what IT says is that our knowledge of vocabulary words is well interesting and perhaps important for other things is not nearly as important as which particular words we use on a frequent basis. And so where, as before I said, okay, if you are going to embark on this protocol of four riding sessions, fifteen to thirty minutes each, that you should not monitoring in your writing that you wanted, sit down, start writing and just don't stop.

You don't want to pay attention to grammar or spelling or anything else. And then after the fourth writing session, you don't look at what you written for at least a week, but then a week or more later, you go back and you read what you ve written, paying careful attention to the number of words that you use that reflect a negative emotional or effect. As IT sometimes called state in the first versus the second versus the third versus the fourth journal entry.

Now this might seem a little bit a detailed and reductionist for protocol that we would discuss on this podcast here. We're really talking about you doing your own data analysis of self. But if you think about IT a practice like this, both can be very quick and highly informative. So for instance, you can go back and simply circle all the words that at first blush to you appear to reflect a negative state and put a square around all the words that, just by your read, seem to reflect a positive state, and then compare them across those four journal entries. And of course, you can opt to not do any of this.

But what people find that is what was discovered in the research literature, is that, on average, the patterns of language use from the first to the fourth entry shift dramatically, such that by the fourth century, people, even though they're still writing about the same negative experience, are writing about that experience in a very different way. Not only are they naturally using fewer negative words to describe their recollection and experience of that negative event, but the number of positive words is also increasing. Now, this is important because when penneBaker and colleagues gave the instruction to people to do this protocol, they encourage them to think about three things before they ever start writing.

The first is, of course, to write about facts about that difficult experience. I think that sort of obvious that when people are going to recall diff ult experience, they're likely to write down facts about that experience. The second thing that they want to remind them to include where emotions that they felt at the time of the experience, as well as emotions that they happen to feel now about that experience.

And third, that people are include writing about any and all links that come to mind about the negative experience and things that may be happening today or plans for the future, people from the past, present or future, really any link, no matter how distant IT might seem or how random IT might seem to include that in the riding. okay. So just to repeat, the three things that they were instructed to include before they ever set their pens to paper or started typing out their negative experience, first facts about the hard experience.

So whatever they can recall that happened in that hard experience, or perhaps that that was something that didn't happen, and that was why I was a hard experience. But facts related to that hard experience, facts of the hard experience. Second, that they include writing about emotions felt at the time of the experience, as well as emotions felt now while writing about that prior experience.

And third, to include any writing about any links that spring to mind about the negative experience and anything that's happening now or perhaps happen in the past or things that you have planned for the future. Now that third category of links between the experience and other things, maybe direct and obvious, maybe these are real. Aha, a moments we go, oh, my realized now that, you know, what's been happening for the last six months is a direct mirror of what happened in that earlier traumatic or very stressful episode.

Or perhaps the links are more OPEC. Maybe the link is, you know, I don't know why, but I keep thinking about this one experience that I had and I keep talking about this one person and I don't know how they're linked, that's fine. Put those down on paper.

You could even draw diagram. But I should mention IT is important that you try to the best of your ability to write things out in complete sentences. Again, they don't have to be perfect grammar, or even pu du perfect grammar.

The spelling can be off. Your hand running can be a mess, although if your handwriting truly a mess, might be hard to read later. By the way, folks, my older sister always teases me that my handwriting is frozen in the third grade.

Actually would like to show her my journal entries. My and writing was actually quite a bit Better than IT is now, which ily speaks to, uh, some degree of cognitive decline for me. But in any case, the point is that the third category of establishing links between the prior negative experience and whatever else is an important component of the writing protocol.

So whatever IT takes to IT include those links they are worth including. Now I want to reemphasize that even though I pointed to the positive health benefits of using more positive words in one's writing your speech, as opposed to negative words, which tend to be associated with worse health outcomes, both in terms of physical and mental health, IT is important and is central to this writing protocol. If you're going to get the positive consequences of IT that you're not monitoring the words that you're using too closely, you're not trying to write this so someone else can see IT.

You're not trying to write the great american novel. You're not writing eulogy. You're not writing your autobiography. You're really writing this for you. I can't emphasize that enough. You're doing this writing protocol so that you can work through something that is stressful or traumatic, that resides in your nervous system and that is not serving you well.

Indeed, next we're going to talk about what happens when these narratives of our prior negative experiences are not worked through, that they have not been put either to speech or to pen to paper or typed out. And perhaps more importantly, we're going to talk about the incredibly positive benefits, both at the level of neural changes, so called neural plasticity, which is the literal rewiring of neural connections, as well as psychological benefits, reducing anxiety, improved mood, improved sleep and improved immune function that are the consequence of doing this. For doubt of fifteen to thirty minute writing protocol, i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens.

Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens, and the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health.

Our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Green are optimal and vital for microbiology alth. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptation vitamin minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and IT tastes great.

If you you like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com, slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's athletic Greenstock comm slash humans to get the five travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two. okay.

So let's talk a little bit about the positive mental, and in particular physical changes that occur in people that do this writing exercise actually mentioned that most of the studies and again, more than two hundred quality per reviewed studies of this protocol have been Carried out and are still ongoing, not just in penny acer laboratory, but in many, many other laboratories as well, reveal that the positive physical shifts that occur in people that complete this for belt of writing in the way I described is both significant and long lasting. Now of course, this is not the case that these four episodes of writing can completely cure major forms of depression or postal matic stress disorder, although they have been shown to benefit, that is, to reduce depressive symptoms and to reduce the systems of postman's express disorder considerably. But they shouldn't be considered complete therapeutics for those conditions.

However, they have been shown to significantly improve many other health metrics and alluded to some of these at the beginning of today's episode. There half for in since been in studies of this type of journal protocol for people that have been suffering from chronic anxiety and insomnia. And indeed, they experience significant relief as well. People who suffered from author itis, people who are going through cancer treatment, people who have lupus, which is an ottawa mune disorder, report significantly improve symptoms, not necessarily cured from those conditions, but significantly improved system as a consequence of doing this writing protocol.

In addition, and earlier I mentioned this, I realized I mention again, people suffer from fibro biog a which is a chronic pain condition that is or can be very dibbled ating shown significant improvement in symptom ology that is reduced chronic pain after they do this for belts of writing in the way that I described. And again, the relief from pain seems to be ongoing, again, not a total cure of their symptoms. I don't want to provide false hope, peer or over, blow the the positive impact of this particular writing protocol, but none of less statistically significant shifts that were pervasive over time.

In addition, people suffer from ibs or year to mobile syndrome have achieved some significant degree of relief of their symptoms relative to people who also have rita balls, sydney, but who do not do the exactly protocol that we're talking about today. Of course, in all of these studies, we're not talking about people that simply do this riding protocol as compared to people that don't do the riding protocol. PenneBaker and others, of course, are excEllent scientists.

And so they provide adequate control conditions. The control conditions, in most cases, where to have people also do fifteen to thirty minutes of riding, but to do journal in the more conventional manner of autobiographical report of what they're been up to lately or what they plan to do, in fact, very much like my journal entries from college and in the earth subsequent to that. So it's important understand that what we're talking about today is a journal protocol, which seems somewhat conventional, but the exact protocol is highly unusual as we've been talking about throughout today's episode.

And in addition, all of the data that we're discussing in terms of positive mental and physical effects, our data that were established a relative that is are statistically significant as compared to a control group that also wrote for an equivalent amount of time, tended to write out an equivalent number of words on average. And yet we're writing about something quite different than the people that we're in the so called experimental group. So it's important to keep in mind that we're not simply talking about phenomenology here.

We're talking about scientific studies where very specific measurements of the experimental group, that is, the group that did this particular form of writing about something very distressing or even traumatic, four times fifteen to thirty minutes per time, relative to a control group that did nearly the equivalent form of mechanical processes of writing, but that the specific emotional content related to that writing. Was the major variable that differed. In fact, that is one particular strength of the protocol we're describing today that if you think about IT would be very hard to do in a study, say, of physical exercise where you have people perhaps run on a tread mill, getting their heart rate up to eighty five percent of their maximum heart rate for thirty minutes, five days a week.

You would expect that that group, compared to a group that did nothing, would experience significantly greater shifts in positive health metrics s like lowered blood pressure. Certainly during the exercise about, during the exercise about, you can bet that their blood pressure and heart rate won't weighing up, but that, of course, afterwards they up to that exercise by having a resting heart rate that was lower than any group that did nothing or that walked on a trend mill, is actually very hard to think about a control group that would provide real equivalent of time spent and effort spent. But that would differ only on one variable, which would be hearts rate.

You could probably come up with something, but that would be very difficult to do in the studies that we're talking about during today's episode. Essentially, everything was the same, right? They're still writing. They're still sitting.

They are still doing that for the same amount of time is simply that the content of the writing is different at the level of the emotional tone of the subject that they're writing about, which I find both exciting and personally quite motivating to do this sort of protocol that i've described today, because that leads to such dramatic shifts in health across a huge range of dimensions, both in people suffering from certain conditions, in people who are not suffered from certain conditions. And then the question becomes, why? What is actually happening at a physiological level that can explain all these incredible psychological and physical positive shifts that occur? okay.

So as with any protocol that shown in many, many studies, again here, more than two hundred p reviewed studies have positive effects on mental health or physical health. Can imagine that there is going to be a conStellation of positive effects that occur that can explain, say, the improvement in atomic conditions or the improvement in anxiety, that is, a reduction in anxiety or the improvement in sleep patterns is not going to be just one thing. However, there are some general categories of physiological changes that have been observed in people that do the particular protocol we're talking about today that I think can explain a great number of the mental and physical shifts that occur.

Now one of the more important studies in this area that's been published, and here again, this is a paper by James penneBaker. But I don't want to give the impression that he's the only person or the only laboratory that looked at this particular writing protocol. Many others have as well, and all provide links to some of those in the shoot captions.

But this particular study about to describe explored how the disclosure of traumas were the writing out of very stressful experiences, an impact immune function at the level of specific cell types of our immune system that are chAllenged in a way that myrick the sort of chAllenge we would experience if we were to be exposed to a bacteria or virus. Now, without getting into a detail lecture about imminent logy, and by the way, I didn't entire episode of the human and podcast about immune function in the brain some years ago. And you can find that by going to his room lab out com, just put immune system into the search function, IT will take you to that episode and any time stamps of other episodes, right? Touch on the immune system or protocols related to immune brain function.

In the meantime, this particular study is very interesting and worth highlighting because what they did was to essentially have people do the exact same protocol that we've been describing throughout today's episode, but they also included blood draws from the subjects in those experiments, and they collected that blood from subjects both before and after the writing episodes. In fact, they took the blood of fifteen weeks prior to the study and again six weeks into the study. okay.

Now keep in mind that people were completing the writing exercise over the course of at a maximum four weeks, but they were still monitor these subjects in terms of their psychological and physical health after the final writing exercise. That was a key components of essentially all of the studies of this particular protocol. They assess people before they did the writing assignment.

They assess people during the writing assignment, and they assess people often long after the writing assignment was completed, even years after the writing assignment was completed. So in this particular experiment, they are drawing blood fifteen weeks before and six weeks into the study. Six weeks into the study is, after all of the writing, that is, four bouts of writing have been completed, they also divided subjects in the study into people that were so called high disclosures.

So these are people that revealed a lot about their particular traumatic or stressful episode in their riding and people that were low disclosures. They also included a control group, and the control group was essentially as described before. IT consisted of people that also we're doing journal for the equivalent amount of time as people that we're in the experimental group but that we're not writing about a traumatic or stressful experience.

Now the basic takeaway of the study is as follows. They take the blood. They are able to isolate from the blood. Something got tea emphasize, tea emphasize, are an essential component of your immune system. These are cells that many people describe as White blood cells.

They are manufactured in the bone marrow, which I still find amazing, right? We think of bone is just these, like, you know, hard components of our body and our skeleton that allow us to be upright and to be rigid and to move about, and, you know, jelly like. But indeed, in the center of the bone is marrow.

And the marrow itself is performing the most important physiological role, many roles, in fact, one of which is to create these t emphasize, or White blood cells. They actually are born of the bone marrow, but then they mature in a structure called the film's the famous as is organ that sits essentially behind your sternum. And it's there that the cells that originate from the bone marrow or matured into what are effectively White blood cells, which are essentially cells that go out and combat infections, bacteria infections, viral infections, even fungal infections.

Now they combat infection, not alone, but in collaboration with other immune cell types that you can learn about, again, in that episode I did, about the immunity stem and the nervous system. If you choose to go listen to IT, and even if you don't, here's what you need to know about this study. In this study, what they found is that when they took the blood from these subjects, isolated those tea, emphasize and then chAllenge those t limper sites with something that myself, ics and infection, and they did that with something con connellan a.

Con canavan a is what's considered a midi gen. It's something that activates t emphasize and IT activates what are called natural killer cells. Now that's a lot of detail for sake with this episode.

Basically, what the con cancel and a is doing is its mimmo king and infection. But in this particular study, this is all being done on t emphasize that have been collected. They're put into a dish, and then they're exposed to different concentrations going from low to medium to high of that con canaveral, a mimmo king, a low grade, moderate or severe infection.

And what they observed in this study is remarkable. Mean, to me, this just still blows my mind. People that did this four belt of writing protocol experienced greater degree of t emphatic activation from the concanen van midgin chAllenge, which mimic infection.

Then did people who wrote about something that wasn't stressful or traumatic. Now that itself is pretty striking. If you think about that. I mean, we're time about the writing exercise that generates an emotional state versus a writing exercise that does not produce as negative or intense and emotional state.

And we're talking about a significant effect on the immune system of the mobilization of immune ells in response to an immune chAllenge. In addition to that, however, they observed that high disclosures, that is, people that really poured themselves into this writing protocol, experience a greater degree of immune activation. That is a fighting off response to this mitt gen on canavan, a vended people that were loads closers.

So this really speaks to the fact that the intensity, the emotional state during the writing exercise is having a significant impact on the immune system at the level of something as basic and yet as powerful as how much deployment of a mune sense there is to an infection. Now, the field of so called psycho neural immo logy has been around for more than thirty years. In fact, if you don't apply standard definitions to that field, it's been around for thousands of years.

But really, it's only in the last ten years or so that scientists and physicians, at least standard scientists and physicians, have started to really adopt the understanding and really apply to their studies and their clinical practice. This firm idea that the body and mind are linked in this way that emotions can really shape our physical responses, and that physical responses also can shape, of course, our mental responses. Now i'm not trying to be disparate ging at all of traditional science or medicine is just that until recently, these fields have existed more less as silos, people that studied bodily organs versus people that the brain, people that study emotions and psychology versus people that studied the immune system.

And there has been some crossover, but buying large has been very silos. Now I mentioned this because if you look into the history of why James pen, a Baker, and colleagues started expLoring this particular pattern of journal, IT actually relates his own personal experience. And I don't want to spend too much time on this, but it's worth mentioning that penneBaker is actually spoken about and written about, and by the way, an excEllent book that i've linked to in the shown note captions, where he talks about his experience in suffering pretty severe from asma as a child, and that that asma was seasonal and yet at some point later in his life, because he had certain relatives of visiting him in his new home location, that his asma would come and go as a consequence of interacting with certain members of his family, independent of season.

And basically, what he deduced from his own personal experience is that there must be some link between our emotions, either negative or positive, and our immune system or other physical elements, or thriving in the physical sense. Now, he certainly wasn't the first one that come up with that hypotheses, but indeed, he was one of the first to really start expLoring a protocol within the laboratory, an experimental protocol that could really tap into high degrees of emotionality, in this case, negative emotions. And the consequence of that on physical health outcomes.

And this study that I mentioned is but one of those examples. And in that way is truly a pioneer and thinking about psycho neu immunology, but touching IT not in the direction that most people do, which is, for instance, there have been lots of studies where people have said okay and people that are strongly stressed, which includes, of course, psychological stress. What are the effects on the nervous system in the immune system is set a.

And as you could imagine, in general, people who are more stressed over long, long periods of time had worse physical outcomes. And people who are less stress had Better physical outcomes. But the protocol that we're talking about today is quite a bit different.

So if you step back and think about to look counter intuitive, what penneBaker essentially did was to have people deliberately induced a negative experience and yet they're seeing positive physical health outcomes or in this case, positive effects on immune system function. So that leads to the question of what's really happening during and after these four episodes of writing. And that's where things get especially interesting as IT relates to the nervous system and to neural plasticity, or the nervous system's ability to require itself in response to experience.

So that's what we're going to talk about next. okay. So what's happening at a mechanistic level that allows people who do these four bells ts of writing about something traumatic or stressful to achieve these long lasting positive shifts in mental and physical health? Now there could be any number of different changes occurring at the level of the mind or body.

But what we're talking about here is trying to find the pivotal one, or sometimes referred to as the lynchpin mechanism, that when one taps into that mechanism, IT weeks out into all these different systems of the brain and body and provides all of these different positive benefits. Now, in researching this episode, I thought long and hard about this and came up with a short list of ideas. And as is always the case, people have worked in this area on this particular protocol, and protocol similar to IT in the field of psychology and news science, have also generated their own short list.

And those shortlists converge at the level of one particular mechanism that is worth describing. And that one particular mechanism is anchored around the concept of neural plasticity, that is, our nervous systems ability to change in response to experience. And if you've heard me talk about a neural plasticity before neuroplasticity in childhood occurs through rather passive experience of any sorts of events.

In fact, one of the hallMarks of childhood is that just the mere exposure to an experience reshapes the brain, not necessarily permanently, but often in a way that is very long lasting. Now that's a future childhood, because if you think about what the nervous system is really designed to do for us, it's of course, what allows us to move our limbs is what allows us to have a heart rate that goes in the background without us having to think about IT so called automatic functions. It's what keeps us as breathing without us having to think about IT and on and on.

But one of the main functions of the nervous system is to be a predictive machine to make good guesses about what's to come next. In one of the ways to make really good guesses about what's to come next is to take a certain period of life that we call childhood superimpose on that period of life, that childhood, what we call a critical period or sensitive period, during which our experiences create a sort of map within us that allow us to predict, okay, well, if this persons in the room later, well, then that's likely to happen north. Those people are in the room.

Any number of different, different things could happen. But of one particular category of experience opposed to another, that's really what your nervous system does. IT becomes a prediction machine.

And IT becomes a prediction machine by drawing strong on correlations between emotional states, your physical surroundings, your perception of who's there, what's there, what happened just prior to something, and how IT made you feel later. So when we talk about recounting a stressful or traumatic event, if you recall, there were three components to IT. IT involved facts about that experience.

So literally, who was there? What happened? As to the best of our recollection, if you recall, the second thing is also about recounting how that experience made you feel at the time and how IT makes you feel now. And then if you recall, the third thing that's critical to include, it's about any links or associations between what happened and really anything at all. So if you think about IT, all three of those things in that list are really about tapping into your neural map, or your schema, as IT sometimes called, or your internal representation, both conscious and unconscious, of what happened during that stressful or traumatic event.

Now a hallmark feature of traumas, as well as a hallmark feature of addictions, as well as a hallmark feature of compulsive behaviors or negative habitual behaviors and negative habitual states like chronic stress, anxiety, the sorts of things that trigger insomnia, the sorts of state of body that trigger immune compromise and give us auto, immune or other types of immune system chAllenges, are that a certain component of our nervous system, and our brain in particular, are less engaged than they Normally would be in the healthy condition. Now I want to be clear in any one of these conditions that there are not urda about syndrome. It's fiber, biogas or its chronic anxiety or depression.

There are many, many different brain centers and networks, that is, stations within the nervous system of the brain and body that are involved. I really want emphasized at this. There's no one location of the brain, for instance, for fear or anxiety. It's always a network phenomenon. The relative activation of different brain centers at different times and so on.

But with respect of thinking about traumas and for experiences, we have to ask ourselves, what is IT about the emotional states and all the mapping, the representation around those emotional experiences that would somehow impact our immune system, like our famous of all things, or our bone marrow? Or conversely, what would IT be about a stressful experience that would impact our heart rate, that would somehow then also change our brain? So the mechanism that seems to be a sort of smoking gun of sorts, that is, the mechanism that really does seem to be at least one of those linchpin mechanisms, is that when we experience very stressful or traumatic experiences, our prefrontal cortex, the neural real state that just behind our forehead, which has several different subdivisions, in fact, is reduced in its overall levels of activity and other areas of the brain that sometimes are referred to as olympic areas of the brain.

Although we were to be more accurate than that, the modern neuroscience really refers to these as sub cortical structure. They aren't necessarily olympic structures persue, although they can include component to olympic system. So they can include things like the hypothalamus, dense collection of neons that resides over the roof, your mouth that's involved in things like aggression or temperature regulation, sleep wake cycles and so on, as well as structures that perhaps you have heard more about, such as middle, which is involved in threat detection, but other structures as well, all of which are sub cortical.

Now, those sub cortical structures can be compared in a fairly general, but still accurate way to the prefrontal cortex, which is involving contextual planning involved in assessing outcomes. If I do a, what will happen? If I do b, what will happen? The prefrontal cortex is also associated with our self concept of our identity, who we are, what we are about, what we value, what motivates our decisions to do or to not do things.

So I don't want to create any false impressions that the prefrontal cortex is somehow a more evolved structure than the sub cortical and limbic c structures. But in some sense, IT is it's involved in more, more sophisticated functions, or at least functions that involve us really thinking and being able to place a coherent narrative of what happened in the past, what's happening now and what's likely to happen in the future if conditions A, B or c happen to a rise. okay.

So that's a very brief top level control lesson in prefrontal cortical function and comparing IT a bit to some sub cortical olympics structure functions. Now there have been no imaging studies, in particular studies by the liberal amatory at university of california angles, but newer imaging studies in other laboratory as well, that have established that when people recount very stressful or traumatic events, the prefrontal cortex level of activity is reduced as compared to win, people recall less stressful or less traumatic events. In addition to that, those sub cortical structures ramp up their activity when people recall traumatic events, at least at first.

Okay, this is very important. What i'm about to tell you is that the repeated visiting of stressful and traumatic event in a structured way, or even in a suo structured way, as is the case when people first start journal about that stressful or traumatic event on day one, when IT tends to be a pretty unstructured narrative that's actually been shown in the literature. And then over the course of that second and third and forth, writing about people not only shift the sort of language that they used to describe their feelings in that event, as we talked about earlier, but the degree to which there's a more coherent narrative placed on the structure of that writing increases with each subsequent bout of writing.

And this is very important because what we're really talking about here is people going deeper into the recollection of the experience not remaining at such a superficial level. And two things are happening even though they're going deeper into this very distressing event, they're perhaps even experiencing heighten levels of distress, right? If you were called back to earlier in the episode, when I talk about people who tend to be on the low disclosure, end of things are not very reverbed.

They don't tend to use a lot of emotional words. And early on, they're not sharing too much about this experience and over time and increases, whereas other group decreased the level of emotionality with each subsequent writing bet. But in each case, the coherence of the narrative, that is, the degree to which the narrative takes on a story like structure, increases from the first to the fourth writing about.

And this is very important because what we're really talking about here is increasing the amount of truth telling the honesty around the experience. And when we say honesty, i'm not talking about any prior debate or ongoing debate about what happened during those experiences. Remember when people do this protocol, you're recalling what happened.

What were the facts in your mind? What were the facts? What happen? What didn't happen, perhaps as relevant to, but what happened? Second, how did I make you feel that something that you are uniquely qualified to answer, actually, because only you can really know how you feel.

Sometimes that takes some effort to think into how you feel to really get a clear sense of how you felt and how you feel. But only you can report that actually, no one can dispute that those are your feelings and that's part of what you're writing about. And then of course, there's the third component of what are the connections between different experiences that are coming to mind.

And there again, that is your unique factual report of what's going on inside your head around that event. okay. So what we're talking about here is an exercise in writing that, yes, is distressing, but that we know based on neural imaging data over time, is increasing the baseline levels of activity in certain key areas of the preference tal cortex and that we know is associated with improvements in the symptom ology around trauma and other stressful events.

Now it's extremely important to highlight this truth telling component and the that your truth about these experiences is indeed your truth, and it's such a key component of the writing exercise. So what we're looking at here as a situation where the event or events that happened actually happened, there's no changing that. But you're narrative about those events is vitally important in terms of how you experience either ongoing distress from or relief from those events.

And in sort of a counter intuitive way, reporting those events in a way that initially is very stressful or that can be stressful in any number of those different four writing belt over time provides relief from that stress. So why do I say counter intuitive? Well, you could say, okay.

Well then, does distress itself cause changes in the prefrontal cortex that are positive? No, in fact, the opposite history, we know that being under conditions of interests or stress or trauma reduces activity that prevent to cortex. And here we're saying recalling that trauma stress in ways that are highly emotional and negative is actually increasing ongoing activity in the prefrontal tal cortex.

And indeed, yes, that is the case. So how could that be during development? Neuroplasticity a passive process? Whatever we are exposed to changes our brain in a way that allows us to more reliably predict the future, right? That's one of the key functions of the brain.

But as an adult, meaning from age twenty five onward, and really that's not a strict cut off, could be like teens maybe nineteen all the way up to, say age one hundred and twenty, which we think is perhaps the maximum lifespan that humans could possibly reach. We don't know. Most people don't reach hundred and twenty, but let's say from nineteen all the way up to one hundred and twenty, we know that neuroplasticity is created when the nervous system goes into states that are a typical as compared to our Normal waking states.

And one of the key triggers for neural plasticity when we have high levels of the social cata com means dopamine, epinephrine, or nor epinephrine, our brain and body. That creates a state change that we call automation ic nervous system shift, where we have elevated heart rate, more distress, high degrees of emotionality IT is highly uncomfortable often. And yet that signals to the neural tissue, hey, sometimes is happening here.

And we need to require, we need to change. And the actual rewire ing occurs during deeper sleep and state, such as non sleep, deeper pressed or anytime we're in a deeper relaxation state. Some of you have heard me talk about a neural plans to see before, but the key elements ts, to remember for today's discussion is that these states of high levels of emotionality are the trigger for neural plasticity and that the actual reward ring of neural connections happens in sleep and states such as non sleep depressed.

So we were to be completely logical. We would sit back at this point and say, okay, here's a protocol in which we deliberately make ourselves stressed out again about a very stressful or traumatic event. And yet, even though that stressful or traumatic event at first created problems for a mental and physical health by revisiting IT and trigger ing that stressful experience again four times in a lot of detail, somehow it's giving me relief from that experience is creating positive mental and physical ships.

I mean, how could that be? How would IT be that the negative experience, on the one hand, creates problems, and then on the other hand, recreating that negative experience relieves those very same problems? There's something completely illogical about that framework, right? Well, here's where things get really interesting.

There have been two separate collections of work in the psychology and neuroscience literature in the last ten years, which have focused mainly on two concepts. The first concept is that extremely stressful and traumatic experiences, because they induced a relative reduction in the activity in the prefrontal tal cortex. Divorce are mine from creating a coherent structural narrative about what happened during those particular episodes, and in doing so, create a of confusion about responsibility.

Now there's a whole discussion to be had about this, and we will have that discussion in a future episode of the podcast about how trauma is actually mapped within the brain and body. There are a lot of theories about this, right? Sometimes we hear that that it's all mapped within the body.

Sometimes we hear it's all mapped within the brain. Turns out, as is almost always the case, it's both. But there does seem to be both neuroscience based and psychology, both clinical and research.

Psychology based evidence for the idea that when people experience very stressful and traumatic events, that the representation of those events is somewhat fractured in the sense that people, by not talking about them, by not creating a coherent narrative around them, start to form false correlations between the kind of stress that they create in our body and mind when we think about them, and a confusion about what happened, a confusion about why we feel terrible when maybe we weren't the perpetrator, or create a sort of lack of coherence between our bodily stayed and what we're thinking, especially because we're not the perpetrator, right? And we're talking about traumas and stressful things that happened to us, maybe we participants in that by virtue of our circumstances. But when we talk about ramas, what we're really talking about, our things that we would have never elected to do otherwise.

okay. So I don't want to be too abstract about this. But again, within the neuroscience and psychology understanding of trauma stress, IT seems that there is a lack of coherence about the narrative. There's also a mismatch between the bodily state and thoughts about that experience.

And there seems to be a confusion about who or what was responsible for inducing that negative state in a way that in some sense causes people to set aside that narrative and trying push IT away and not think about IT. Because IT is confusing, IT can often even be discommoding late for those that have suffered from very stressful events and trauma. I think some of this will resonate with you.

Now a separate literature that's largely nested just within the science community, although it's starting to wake out into the psychology community as well, is the idea that when people tell the truth, and in particular, when people tell the truth with a very coherent, structured narrative, the levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex increase, but not just temporarily, that is that there's neural plasticity of these preferences, critical structures, which are both involved in generating coherent narratives, but are also involved in this is super important, that are also involved in regulating the activity of those sub cortical structures, like the hypothenuse and limbic structures. In other words, that when we can increase our understanding of an event, when we can understand why certain motions arose, what our role in IT really was, what others roles in that particular event were. Well then by increasing the activity of the prefrontal cortex, it's Better both in that moment and going forward to regulate the activity of these other subcritical structures.

And I think one of the more impressive experiments within that whole field of linking preferences activity to truth telling is an experiment that was publish a few years ago in the prisoners, the national academy of sciences, entitled increasing honesty in humans with non invasive brain stimulation. Now this is a very artificial scenario where people come into the laboratory and they have people do what is essentially a die rolling game. The role dies.

okay? So the roling dies. And then after they roll the dice, only they can see the score that they get with those dice.

And then a number is presented on a screen, and they have to report whether or not the die role that they did matches or does not match the number that's presented on the screen. And if IT doesn't match, then they get a monetary award. And the monetary award is not huge, but it's not insignificant either.

For each die role where they matched the number that's presented on the screen, they get the equivalent of. And because this experiment was done in switzerland, nine swiss Franks, which at the time of the study corresponded roughly to nine dollars, and today corresponds to roughly ten dollars. So they do this repeatedly.

And so in some sense, these subjects in these experiments are in a place to make not an enormous amount of money, but again, not an insignificant amount either. Now here's the key component of the study, the statistics of the dice that they roll and the statistics of die roling and the numbers that they are presented, make sure that there can only be a correct match, on average, fifty percent of the time. okay?

And in this experiment, the subjects are asked to report entirely on the honor system what they got when they roll the dice. And what one finds in this study and other studies that have been done subsequent to IT, is that when you take everyday people, so you take men and women, you take a broader range. You're not selecting for sociopath s.

You're not selecting for people in one given professional or another. Pick your favorite profession. If you were to assume anyone given profession has less honest people than others.

They collect people from all sorts of walks of life. And people report getting the same number that is presented to them. That is a match about sixty eight percent of the time, which means they're not faithfully reporting what happened.

Now newer imaging studies show that when people lie, certain areas of the frontal cortex increase in their activity. Although the major effect, when one looks nearly, is a reduction in the prefrontal tal cortex, in particular sub compartment of the prefrontal cortex, that will talk about in a moment. And this particular study, entitled increasing on esty and humans with non invasive brain stimulation, as the name suggests, used non invasive in stimulation.

So this is a transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a really nicer, convenient tool, because you don't have to drill down through the skull. You can simply put, this tool is a little coil. You put IT over a particular part of the brain on the outside of the kull, indeed, on the outside of the hair.

And you can either inhibit or stimulate particular brain areas using this transcranial stimulation. I've actually had this done, not in this particular experiment, but I had IT done when I was a graduate student some years ago. And IT was placed over my motor cortex, and I was instructed to tap my fingers in a particular sequence.

And then they inhibit neural activity in a particular brain area. And I was unable to tap. In that same sequence, and they could even shut down my ability to tap.

That was terrifying, Frankly, although I don't want to discourse anyone from participating in any of these experiments, should you choose. And yes, of course, your motor abilities come back immediately afterwards. That's why they can run these experiments. Now, in this experiment, what they did is they stimulated or inhibited activity in particular areas, the prefrontal to cortex.

And what they discovered was, I think, and many others, by the way, also agree, a remarkable result, which is that when they stimulated over a particular region of the preferences cortex, people's honest report of what happened when they roll die relatives to the number they were presented increased. okay? So they went from reporting that they had matched the number on the screen, and therefore, one money, sixty eight percent of the time.

That number was reduced down to what? Down to fifty percent of the time. In other words, this stimulation of the prefrontal cortex took dishonest people, even though they were, should we say, mildly dishonest or dishonest only in certain conditions.

We we're getting into judgment calls, and I don't want to do that and made them truly honest. They faithfully represented reality. When a particular area, the preferences cortex in that area, by the way, is the doors iller al prefrontal cortex, was activated, they became truly honest.

They faithfully represented what happened in the die ruling game. Now the conditions in this experiment are far away different from the journal protocol that we've talked about up until now. However, there been subsequent studies that have shown that, indeed, when people tell the truth to the best of their ability, they are absolutely trying to faithfully report what happened in the given experience of theirs. Active in the prefrontal cortex goes up, and IT persists afterwards. There is indeed neuroplasticity of the preference to cortex.

So the hypothesis that seems to be the most likely, and indeed has the greatest weight of evidence for IT is that when people accurately and truthful ly reporting experience, even if that experience is a stressful and traumatic one, the repeated activation of the proof frontal cortex that occurs during that truth telling, even though the true telling is about a highly negative experience, has the net effect over time of leading to more activity in the preference tal cortex. And that has a sort of runaway positive effect in the sense that IT creates a more coherent framework and understanding of the stressful thing that happened, right? So all that discommode bulah in that lack of coherent story that then leads to lack of coherence in terms of one's automatic function.

So underlying stress and confusion about whose responsible that does seem to be resolved, or at least partially resolved. And the preference of cortex, of course, doesn't harbor one area just for faithful, accurate reporting of traumas and stressful events. That very same area that dorsolateral preferred to cortex is responsible for faithful ful reporting of all sorts of other things. And there are now more and more study's showing that truth telling, fateful, accurate representation of what we at least experienced in our past and our experiencing presently is good for us, both in the short term, in the long term.

And this, I believe, and other researchers, both neuroscientist and psychologist and psychology, that i've talked to about this result, or an agreement that when one sees all these positive shifts in the immune system function, like, how could I be that the cells produced by the bone marrow in the cinemas are somehow Better able to deal with an infection when one has recounted a traumatic or stressful event? right? First of all, it's counter intuit.

Second of all, why would that be? I mean, how are the body and brain linked in that way? Well, they're linked through the thing that we call the nervous system.

And the key component of the nervous system in this context is that when the precision cortex can organize its understanding of wire, automatic new system was so active, well, then the automatic nervous system, IT seems, becomes less likely to be active when it's not supposed to. okay. That could at least partially explain the reductions in anxiety, the improvements in sleep, the reductions in insomnia.

And because the nervous system in the immune system are in direct communication, this often isn't discussed. But not only does the immunity stem impact the brain, but the brain has networks, literally, neural circuits, that innovate structures like the spring, like the famous, that communicate with the bone marrow. right? This is, is in science fiction. This is really the case. In fact, there was an article that just came out in the journal nature this month and i'll provide a link to in the shown o captions, which is finally starting to acknowledge that, yes, while these fields of immunology and brain science since echoes gy have existed as disperate silos up until now, it's also clear that the nervous system is the connection between all these different components of brain and body. And so, well, that might seem counter intuitive, that a writing protocol of the sort that we've been talking about today could posible ly impact the immune system, or that a writing protocol of the sort of we are talking about today, good, positive ly impact things like bibo biogas symptoms.

Well, IT makes perfect sense, really, when we start to think about the preference tal cortex as this highly flexible seed of our cognition, about our self representation, ideas about who we are and about win certain elements within our brain body to be activated and when they ought not to be activated, because so much of the negative symptom, ology of stressful events and traumas, is about of disarray and discover ability. Latest activation of wakefulness in the middle sleep I getting woke him up in the middle and not being able to go back to sleep, or elevated heart rate, panic, tax anxiety and on and on. I talk to about some of this in the human and lab podcast episode they did about stress and how to master stress with particular protocols.

IT also came up in the discussion with dr. R. R. Paul and in the episode about trauma in the series on mental health. So what we're pulling together, here's a mechanistic understanding of why something like writing for fifteen to thirty minutes about a stressful ler traumatic episode would or even could induce all these positive shifts in mental and physical health. And while we don't have a complete understanding about the underlying mechanisms, the activation and the neural plasticity of the profondo cortex seems to be one of the most logical and the most likely that sits at the center of at least the top list of the most important mechanisms.

I want to be clear that, yes, indeed, i'm saying that when you write about about your truth, about the fact, the events of an experience and your emotions as they relate to that experience and the connections that you draw between any number of different things around that experience, the truth telling is the stimulus and that the emotion that the companies that truth telling is what allows for neuroplasticity to occur and that indeed true th telling and heighten levels of emotion. Even if their negative emotions really do seem to have a positive rehabilitation effect, they're not necessary going to cure every element. I certainly don't want to give that impression, nor am I saying that people can still benefit from therapy, talk therapy or other forms of therapy like prescription drug therapy.

And are those certainly have their place? You should talk to an next psychiatrist, psychologist, medical doctor, of course. And in fact, the data on the sort of journal that we talk about today indicate that people's progression through talk therapy, drug therapies that set up for depression in ptsd is accelerated significantly.

So when they do this type of journal, so the sort of journal we're talking about today and other therapies are not mutually exclusive. And yet the journal protocol that penneBaker and colleagues came up with, I think, is spectacular because IT has a number of important features, and some of those are perhaps obvious to you already. First of all, it's completely zero cost.

I mean, costs a bit of time, but not even that much time. IT has an emotional cost. We should acknowledged that it's intense, right? And the more intense IT seems, the more effective. And third is something that really can be done either in the course of four days or a cross an entire months or has some degree of flexibility to IT. I would even say a great degree of flexibility to IT.

And last, but certainly not least, it's been shown over and over again, I mean, more than two hundred per reviewed studies, not just from penny gar, but from others as well, to have married positive effects on the body and the mind in ways that are not just short term, but that are pervasive, not just over months, but indeed over years. So I don't know about you, but when I first learned about this literature, I was, well, initially a little bit sceptical, because that's just my nature, only way. How could journaling have such a huge impact? I think i've been journaling for years.

I know other people that journal on a regular basis, and i've never heard of this particular impact. And I certainly haven't heard or seen the data. But when I started looking at the data, I thought, oh my goodness, like how come I haven't heard about this? And I don't really have an answer for that.

Although I will say that penneBaker and others, I think we were very early in their merging of mining body states, although the initial studies weren't really focused on mining body of the emphasis on immune system and brain and neuroscience, that actually came later. So I think one of the reasons we haven't heard about this particular former journal is that, Frankly, it's nested within the academic literature. I haven't heard much about IT being incorporated into clinical practices, although I am sure IT is incorporated into clinical practices.

And Frankly, whatever the reason, i'm just grateful to my colleague, doctor David speel, who again is our associates of psychic stanford. He's a medical doctor of incredibly highly esteemed worldwide for his work on on neuroplasticity and helping people with stress and anxiety and all sorts of other chAllenges for informed me about IT. So much so that I decided that next month i'm going to do one about of writing for each week.

Within that month, i've opted to not do the four consecutive days of writing. To me, just personally, that seems a bit too intense. It's not the time commitment, it's the emotional commitment of placing myself into close proximity of some really chAllenging, stressful, maybe even traumatic memories day after day after day for four days.

Personally, I don't want to do that. Other people might opt to do that in the succession and do the the four days in a row. What the literary tells us again is that IT doesn't really matter um as long as you do the four boult of writing sometime within a month period doesn't matter if they all are back to back days are you spread them out by a week or so.

Just to recap the other components of the protocol, you're going to write about the same event for all for writing episodes. Those writing episodes can be anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes. But not less. Throughout each writing episode, you're going to continuously write, right? Unless you need to stop to catch your breath or wipe your eyes dry of tears, you're going to keep writing.

IT is not necessary to pay attention to grammar or spelling, but some degree of coherence, maybe not perfect complete sentences, but some degree of coherence is probably useful, especially if you decide you to go back and analyze what you wrote later, which again is an option. You don't have to do that. But if you do want to do that, you're going to go back and circle the negative words, that is, the words that you perceived to be negative, and you're going to square the words that are positive.

And if you like, you can also reread them and see whether or not, as was observed in the studies that we described, there was an increase in the amount of coherent about the topic or the event that you wrote about. Keep in mind that for each of the four bouts of writing, you want to include both facts about the events, facts about how you felt and or feel about those events now, and third, any associations whatsoever that happened to come to mind about those events, emotional states, people in your life, anything past, present or future. That third category of things to include is really open to you for anything you want to include.

The only requirement for you to be included is that it's true for you. Keep in mind also that this riding protocol is for you. This is not necessarily to be shared. Now there isn't a rule that says that you cannot share with anybody.

Although I do want to introduce the important covet that if you are going to share IT with someone, that person should be a dedicated health care, ideally mental health care professional, because there are data that suggest that when we write about traumatic and stressful events, while IT can be very beneficial for IT can actually be traumatic or chAllenging for people that we read IT to. Now there's huge variation around that statement. Certainly, many of you probably know friends or family members or other trusted ones that you can talk to that would be able to hear about your stressful or traumatic experience and not be traumatized by IT.

However, IT does seem that the listener can experience trauma and negative symptoms, which is chAllenges, sleeping, distressed at sea, by hearing about very stressful events that have occurred to others. Okay, this is third hand trauma, or observational trauma, sometimes called. So if we were to adhere to the protocol as IT was used in the various studies that form the basis for what we're talking about today, we would say that you are writing about something that is for your eyes only.

In fact, you are welcome to tear up or delete the document afterwards. And certainly, you would want to store IT in a safe place. So that is not going to fall into hands of somebody that you wouldn't want seeing the contents of that writing.

The other thing to keep mind is that while it's been demonstrated over and over again that over time, these belts of writing lead to improvements in mental and physical health, as we talked about earlier, IT is very Normal. And in fact, quite likely that one will feel pretty activated in the negative sense. That one will feel somewhat low, depressed, angry, sad immediately after finishing one of these belts of writing, especially if you fall into the high express or category.

So it's important that, as we mentioned earlier, that you have a buffer of time after which you complete the writing before moving into your other days events. I also just personally won't recommend that you do this writing exercise just prior to trying to go to sleep at night if the experience is especially stressful, traumatic. And by definition, the writing exercise focuses on stressed and traumatic events.

So keep that mind as well. And then as a final point, but certainly a significant one is to keep in mind that if this writing protocol is creating a new significant enough amounts of stress, either psychological or physical, that you simply don't want to do IT or that it's impeding other areas of life, by all means, just stop. okay?

There was very little, if any, data within the papers that I read that indicated that people had to be removed from the study for this reason. But keep in mind that we're talking about purposefully delving into stressful or traumatic experiences and writing about them in some detail. So IT stands to reason that some people might not be able to tolerate that.

And I want to strongly request that before anyone embark on this writing protocol, that you ask yourself whether not you are indeed prepared to deal with the emotional state that might accompany faithful, accurate recollection of what happened, what you felt in any links or experiences, a full four times across the protocol. I also see no reason why you couldn't do this protocol for something that wasn't the most stressful or traumatic event in your life, but rather take your first pass at this protocol with something that was very stressful, maybe even traumatic, but perhaps not the most traumatic event as a way of sampling, whether not is for you. In fact, I planned to do that in reviewing the literature and preparing for today's episode.

I wrote down two things, possibly three, that I would want to write about. And then I raided them one through three, one being the most stressful, perhaps even traumatic, the other being less stressful in the third, the least stressful of the three, and decided to go with writing about the second in that list. That is the moderately stressed I K traumatic event um as a way to first weady into this protocol but I will add here to the protocol i'm going to write about the same thing four times as opposed to switching from one event to the next midway through the protocol.

So I am going to add here to the protocol. I'll certainly be happy to get back to you and let you know how IT goes. I invite you, if you like, to embrace this protocol to try IT.

We provided links to the literature that supports this protocol. Again, it's very rare, perhaps the first time that i've ever done an entire podcast episode about a single protocol to formulate entire podcast around the protocol. But Frankly, I don't look at this protocol from penneBaker in college as just a protocol.

I look at IT as an entire body of literature that includes a center of massive data that all seems to point in the same direction, which is that writing about something very stressful, traumatic, for fifteen to thirty minutes four times, either on consecutive days or separated out by a week between each of those four writing sessions, can produce long lasting positive effects on mental and physical health. And to me, that's a protocol that is simply too valuable to overlook and simply too valuable to not share with you. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel.

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