Dear diary, you make me sick

Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

The study, carried out with David Sheffield of Staffordshire University, was presented on Wednesday at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh.

Cathartic process

The pair studied 94 regular diarists and compared their health with that of 41 non-diarists. The subjects, all students at Staffordshire University, answered questions about their diary-keeping habits, and filled in a standard health questionnaire.

“We decided to test the idea that writing is cathartic,” says Duncan. She claims that her study is the first to investigate subjects who write of their own free will. In most other studies, volunteers are actually asked to write about traumatic experiences in a systematic way.

The researchers asked the diarists recruited to say how often they made entries and for how long they had kept diaries. They were also asked if they had written about anything traumatic.

Statistically, the diarists scored much worse on health measures than the non-diarists. And worst affected of all were those who had written about trauma. “They were most susceptible to headaches and the like,” says Duncan.

Autor: Andy Coghlan
Fuente: new

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