Writing a story about your divorce could be beneficial for your heart, new study suggests

Writing a story about your divorce could help your heart’s health, new study suggests. But instead of concentrating on documenting your feelings, psychologists say that you should concentrate on retelling a story and not mull over emotions.

A new study coming from the University of Arizona showed that narrative expression could help with cardiovascular health, following a divorce. As many psychologists recommend keeping a journal, scientists were wondering what were the objective, measurable benefits, of journaling.

Researchers co-opted 109  men and women who split from their partners about three months, on average, before the start of the research. They were randomly divided into three groups. One of the group received instructions to keep a traditional journal, where they documented their most deeply held feeling about the divorce , while another group was told to take on expressive writing, that is to recount, with a beginning, a middle and and end, the story of their divorce. A third group was simply asked to write non-emotionally about their day-to-day activities.

Before beginning their writing assignment, the researchers evaluated the physical and psychological state of all participants. The men and women then were told to write for 20 minutes a day, for three consecutive days.

After the subjects begun their journaling endeavours, there were two follow-up check-ups and scientists found that about eight months later, participants who had engaged in narrative expressive writing had a lower heart rate than participants in the other two groups. They also had higher heart rate variability which reflects the body’s ability to respond to environmental stress. Both lower heart rate and higher heart rate variability are generally associated with good health. But journaling had no impact on blood pressure, researchers found.

When asked about the findings, the lead author of the research paper pointed out that the positive outcome from the expressive writing group could be linked to the fact that subjects had to create a structured story and not only to re-experience their emotions. It allowed them to make sens of what they were going through, and the narrative instructions they received actually provided the scaffolding for people to move forward, instead of going around in circles.

“To be able to create a story in a structured way — not just re-experience your emotions but make meaning out of them — allows you to process those feelings in a more physiologically adaptive way,” said Kyle Bourassa, the paper’s lead author and a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona, in a UA article.

“The explicit instructions to create a narrative may provide a scaffolding for people who are going through this tough time,” Bourassa said. “This structure can help people gain an understanding of their experience that allows them to move forward, rather than simply spinning and re-experiencing the same negative emotions over and over.”

This study came after another similar research, also conducted at the University of Arizona, proved that both styles of journaling can have a negative psychological impact, especially on divorced people that characterized themselves as “high ruminators”, spending a lot of time brooding over the circumstances of their failed relationship. But unlike this study, which dealt with the impact of expressive writing on the psychology of divorcees, the new research  focused on measurable medical indicators. So while self-reported psychological condition of a patients could get worse by journaling, objectively, the medical results paint a different picture for story-telling divorcees.

The findings of the new study were published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine.