Why journaling helps: where our three lines come from

When you open DayBloq for the first time, one screen says Why journaling helps and shows three cards: Write it down, free your mind, Track it, reach it and Name a feeling, see it clearly. Under them is a small line, Where these ideas come from, and a link to this page. We make the app, so read the rest knowing that. This page is here so you can check us.

One thing first, said plainly: nobody has run a controlled trial of dot-grid journaling itself, on paper or in an app, and nobody has tested DayBloq. What the research does test is the small acts a journal is made of - writing a plan down, keeping a record of progress, putting a feeling into a word. The three lines in the app are about those acts, and each one below says how strong the evidence is and where it stops.

1. Write it down, free your mind

Where it shows up in DayBloq: the to-do lists on a Note or Weekly page.

What the study did: E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister ran five experiments on unfinished goals. People were reminded of a goal they had not finished, then given unrelated work: reading a passage, solving word puzzles.

What it found: an unfinished goal kept pulling at attention. It came to mind more easily, it produced more wandering thoughts during the reading, and it made people worse at the next task. When people were asked to write a specific plan for the goal - not to do any of it, just to plan it - those effects went away.

Why it fits: working memory holds only about four things at once (Cowan, 2001), and moving something out of your head onto paper or a screen is what researchers call cognitive offloading (Risko and Gilbert, 2016). A list is the oldest kind.

Where it stops: these were short lab studies, mostly with students. They measured attention and task performance, not how calm anyone felt, and the plans were specific ones. A list of vague worries is not what was tested.

2. Track it, reach it

Where it shows up in DayBloq: Habit pages, Year and Month in Pixels, Water, Reading and the other trackers.

What the study did: Benjamin Harkin and colleagues pooled 138 experiments with 19,951 people in total. In each one, some people were prompted to monitor their progress toward a goal and some were not.

What it found: monitoring progress helped people reach their goals, with an average effect size of d = 0.40, which is a moderate effect in psychology. It helped more when the progress was physically recorded - written down, logged - or reported to someone else, rather than just kept in mind.

Where it stops: this is the strongest evidence on the page, because it combines many experiments. But many of them were about goals such as diet or exercise, not about journals, and tracking only helps when there is a goal behind it. Coloring a square is a record; what you do with the record is still up to you.

3. Name a feeling, see it clearly

Where it shows up in DayBloq: Mood pages and Rate My Day, where you pick a word or a color for how the day felt.

What the study did: Matthew Lieberman and colleagues scanned people’s brains with fMRI while they looked at pictures of emotional faces. Sometimes they chose a word for the emotion in the face; sometimes they did something else with the same picture, such as matching it by gender.

What it found: choosing a word for the feeling lowered the response of the amygdala, a part of the brain that reacts strongly to emotional images, and raised activity in a part of the prefrontal cortex linked to regulating emotion. The authors call this affect labeling.

Where it stops: this was measured in a scanner, over seconds, with pictures of other people’s faces. It shows that naming a feeling does something measurable in the moment. It does not show that tapping a mood in an app changes how you feel over weeks, and we do not claim it does.

Where this started

We began with an Inc.com piece by Jessica Stillman from July 2017, which summarises a longer article by Nicola Davis in The Observer, on theguardian.com, a month earlier. Davis interviewed E. J. Masicampo, Daniel Levitin, James Pennebaker, Joanne Frattaroli and Annette Stanton. We followed each point in it back to a peer-reviewed paper, and added research for the points that had none.

Two things from that trail are worth knowing. First, the researchers in the Guardian piece said themselves that this kind of journal had not been studied as such, and Pennebaker was careful not to stretch findings on expressive writing into claims about journaling in general. Second, a small correction: Inc attributes a line about doodling and letting the mind wander to Masicampo, but in the Guardian article it is Levitin who says it.

Also worth reading

Research we read while writing the app’s lines and did not put on the cards, either because it fits another screen better or because it is weaker than the claim would need.

What this page is not

DayBloq is a journal, not a treatment, and nothing here is medical advice. If things are hard right now, a doctor or a counsellor will help more than any journal can.

If a source here says something different from what we wrote, or you know of better research, tell us and we will fix the page. You can also read how the mood tracker works or what a Year in Pixels is.