Why Writing About Hard Things Heals — And the Small Shift That Helps
Writing about painful experiences has been shown to help mental and physical health for over thirty years. A 2025 study on grief adds something new. When people wrote about their loss for fifteen minutes a day for three days, they felt better. And those who wrote in the third person — using their own name instead of "I" — broke free of the loop of grief rumination. A small word change. A real difference.
In this article
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Why I Keep Coming Back to WritingI have been thinking about journaling for a long time. Not as a hobby. As a question. When something hard happens, I go back to the page. Most people I know do - 2
What the New Research Actually FoundWhat the New Research Actually Found The study I have been thinking about is by a team of researchers in China and the UK (Zhou et al., 2025). It came out in - 3
A Pronoun Is a Small DoorI keep returning to the difference between two kinds of thinking. There is a kind of thinking that goes deeper into the hurt. You picture the moment again. You - 4
A Practice You Can TrustWriting About Hard Things Helps This is the part the research is most clear about. Across decades of studies, on many kinds of struggle, expressive writing help
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