Dear Diary, can you hold this for me?

Great! I’ve just read a paper in the Science magazine last Friday that illustrates very nicely my point: managing our emotions and thoughts (the ‘control’ I was talking about in my last post) can really improve our emotional well-being. It is so simple that I wonder everyday why psychology is not taught in primary schools! 

We are in Chicago, and a team of researchers observes 9^th grade students just before and after passing important exams. As you can expect, many are very anxious before passing their exams. Cold sweat, stomach clutch, and “OMG I’ll screw it up again I can feel it”.  For the researchers, it’s a great example of anxiety, and provides a large number of people in the very same situation the same day: ideal opportunity to study anxiety in well controlled conditions! And it's not only about students: What they will find will be of relevance for other disorders, anxiety disorders but also depression.

So how to lower anxiety and worries? They ask students to write down their worries about the coming exam, and this is done just a few minutes before the exam starts. Nothing more. These students are compared to other students who are given another writing task without emotional implications, and another set of students who aren't given any specific task at all.

The results are very clear and replicated in several experiments. Students who wrote their worries before the exam ended up less anxious and performed better (or less worse) than the other groups. This worked especially well for students who were particularly anxious. The worse the issue, the better the remedie worked.  

It certainly doesn't mean that we should on purpose think about our worries: when we evoke our worries on purpose, we don't feel better at all and we start to ruminate. This is what happens during depression for example. But putting our specific concerns regarding a situation is very different. It helps to realize for ourselves that these negative thoughts are not so big, not so terrifying, and that they may sometimes be even irrational. 

When moving in a new place, there are many good reasons to feel anxious: new place, new people, and perhaps worries about our safety, our future, our children, our marriage, our family back home, our finances, our visas, our taxes, our next move…!

Writing down systematically our fears and worries, in a diary for example, will help. It is not equivalent to procrastination; some other studies even suggest that it decrease the amount of rumination in depressed people. It help to get control over our confusions and diffuse fears.

Several mechanisms can explain this: it might be that once the worries are on paper, they aren't permanently turning in our memory (like when you make a shopping list on paper, you don't have to think about it anymore and can focus your attention on something else). It's also one way to consider our feelings with more distance, more critically, from a safer place. By the way, learning to observe our own thoughts from a distance (an emotional distance) is also something trained during relaxation or mediation. So there are other ways to manage your feelings in a gentle way… but we'll leave this topic for later, it's getting late J!

Good night!

References: Science 14 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6014 pp. 211-213