A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health
Date: 2023-11-20 | Duration: 01:38:21
Transcript
0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford 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 journaling; rather, it is a discussion about a particular form of journaling that the scientific
0:30 peer-reviewed data says is especially powerful for improving our mental and physical health. In fact, what I will describe today is a journaling method that is supported by over 200 peer-reviewed studies in quality journals. I frankly was not aware of this journaling practice prior to researching this episode, but in researching this episode, I have come to discover that this practice should easily be placed among some of the other critical so-called foundational pillar practices
1:00 in terms of its impact on improving mental and physical health, including things like lowering anxiety, improving sleep, improving immunity to things like colds, flu, etc., as well as reducing the symptoms of autoimmune disorders such as arthritis and lupus, and also providing some relief for fibromyalgia, which is a condition of excessive pain. The particular journaling method and protocol that I will describe has also been shown to improve various metrics
1:30 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 journaling method. One would think that if such a powerful method existed, everyone would know about it, but it turns out that this particular journaling method has been somewhat cloistered within the fields of psychology and psychiatry. 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
2:00 Medicine, my colleague and collaborator Dr. David Spiegel, who, as some of you may know, has been featured as a guest on this podcast previously. Upon hearing about it, I decided to explore the primary research—that is, the studies that demonstrate the power of this particular journaling method—and was absolutely blown away by the positive impact this particular journaling method can have. What’s wonderful about it, you’ll soon discover, 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
2:30 across one month and then never do again, and the data say that it 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 it can be. In addition to that, we’ll talk about some of the underlying science that’s been published
3:00 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 and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-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 LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don’t. That means plenty of electrolytes—
3:30 sodium, magnesium, and potassium—and no sugar. The electrolytes are absolutely essential for the functioning of every cell in your body, and your neurons, your nerve cells, rely on sodium, magnesium, and potassium in order to communicate with one another electrically and chemically. LMNT contains the optimal ratio of electrolytes for the functioning of neurons and the other cells of your body. Every morning, I drink a packet of LMNT dissolved in about 32 ounces of water. I do that just for general hydration and to make sure that I have adequate electrolytes for any activities that day. I’ll often also have an LMNT
4:00 packet or even two packets in 32 to 60 ounces of water if I’m exercising very hard and certainly if I’m sweating a lot in order to make sure that I replace those electrolytes. If you’d like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that’s drinklmnt.com/huberman. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I’ve spoken many times before on this podcast about the
4:30 fact that getting a great night’s sleep really is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night’s sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct, and that’s because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. In order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. With Eight Sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It has a number of other features like
5:00 tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow-wave sleep that you get—things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night’s sleep for you. I’ve been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly, I wake up far less often in the middle of the night, and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an Eight Sleep mattress cover. If you’d like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman. Now through November 30th, as a special holiday discount, Eight Sleep is
5:30 offering $500 off their bundles with a Pod cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that’s eightsleep.com/huberman. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, Yoga Nidra sessions, and NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) protocols. I started using the Waking Up app a few years ago because, even though I’ve been doing regular meditation since my teens and I
6:00 started doing Yoga Nidra 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 brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the Waking Up app a try and I, too, found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate, and indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of
6:30 meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the Waking Up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don’t know, Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It’s very different than most meditations, and there’s excellent scientific data to show that Yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical
7:00 energy even with just a short 10-minute session. If you’d like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to wakingup.com/huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that’s wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay, let’s talk about this particularly transformative form of journaling that initially was researched by Dr. James Pennebaker. James Pennebaker was a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University when he first started researching this form of journaling and its positive impacts on
7:30 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 journaling 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 journaling started in the mid-80s, and it was really in 1986 that the first published manuscript about this form of journaling was published. Now I want to be clear that prior to James Pennebaker studying this form of journaling, clearly
8:00 others had used the form of journaling 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 journaling in a particular way and indeed came up with the precise protocol that we’ll talk about today. So Pennebaker and colleagues, and James Pennebaker in particular, really deserve credit for the discovery of this method. As you’ll soon learn, Pennebaker was absolutely meticulous in figuring out exactly how long the method
8:30 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, in 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 journaling, as I mentioned, was published in 1986, and I provided a link to that study in the
9:00 show note captions. But what that study essentially consisted of was inviting undergraduate students into the university laboratory one at a time, and they were to spend 15 to 30 minutes writing about the most difficult, even traumatic 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,
9:30 that they were to not stop moving their hand for the entire duration of the 15 to 30 minutes. In addition to that, no one besides them, the person writing, 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
10:00 they were supposed to write for 15 to 30 minutes, and the third instruction was that they were supposed to write 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 readability. They were told, in fact, that their writing could be replete with spelling errors or grammatical errors; that didn’t matter. What was most important is that they tap into a particularly negatively charged memory of
10:30 their prior life experience. Now, of course, because this was an experiment carried out in a university laboratory, there was a quiet