I tried Pennebaker's expressive writing protocol for two weeks

The protocol is from a paper James Pennebaker published in 1986. The instruction is simple. Write for fifteen to twenty minutes a day, four days in a row, about something difficult you haven't fully processed. Don't worry about grammar. Don't worry about who reads it. DMost importantly, don't share it with anyone.

The original study found that people who did this had measurably fewer doctor visits in the months after. Later studies compounded those findings. Better immune function, less rumination, faster recovery from breakups. Forty years of replication. It's one of the more reliable findings in psychology. It all sounded too good to be true.

I had been carrying around something for about three years. I won't say what. The point is that it was unresolved in the way that things seem to stay unresolved. Not active pain, just... always there. The kind of thing you forget about for a week and then remember in the middle of brushing your teeth and try not to cry.

So I did it. Four days, twenty minutes each, longhand in a notebook. Then, I added ten more days because I wanted to see what would happen if I kept going past the protocol.

Day one was annoying. Twenty minutes is a long time to write about one thing without stopping. I kept hitting moments where I wanted to just be done, put the pen down, but didn't, because I'd told myself I would do the full twenty. By minute fifteen on day 1, I was just writing nonesense.

Day two was easier and worse. The first ten minutes were fine. I kind of cheated... would you call it cheating? I went into it with a plan: hit something I hadn't hit before. I more felt like an idiot trying to make myself cry over nothing, but I kept writing.

Day three I wanted to skip. I made an extra cup of coffee while I deliberated. Then I sat down and did it because I'd told myself I would. It's four days - it is not supposed to become as existential as it suddenly felt. Still, there's something about having committed to doing the thing that made me do the thing.

Day four felt like nothing. I wrote for twenty minutes and put the notebook down and went on with my day. Boom. Done.

The next ten days were a slow grade. Day five through day eight, the writing got shorter. I'd say what I needed to say in ten minutes instead of twenty. By day ten I was writing two paragraphs and stopping. By day fourteen I'd skipped two days without noticing.

Here's what I noticed at the end.

The thing that fueled the plan in the first place was still there, but it was different now. The way I think about it now is that it existed, but I tried not to think about it. Ignoring it, which turned it into an entire room in my house I just never went in. This was like spring cleaning. I didn't even write about it most of the time. Once, maybe twice. Most of the time just a brain dump of recency - things that were fresh.

What I didn't expect. The thing didn't go away. The research talks about reduced rumination, and I'd taken that to mean the thoughts stop coming. They didn't. They come about as often as they ever did. Now though, they just arrive without the weight. As if I can just pick up a pen and get to it.

What also didn't work. The don't share it with anyone part. I write - but it kind of has a purpose. Social media, text messages. They go somewhere. The whole time I was writing, I had this low-grade frustration that the words were going nowhere. Could have burned the paper. I think I underestimated how much of catharsis is in the destination, not the expression of writing. Just it having somewhere to do creates a permanance. A permanence that I actually wanted to exist - even if I didn't want anyone reading this. I was still writing it like someone might. So for it to never see the light of day. I don't know. 15 days later, I still don't know what to do with that.

Pennebaker's protocol works. The numbers are real. But it works in spite of the no-audience rule, not because of it. At least for me. The journal was a holding place, not a release valve. There is this thing I started using around the same time. Spurred me to think 'why not Pennebaker'. Deth-x. Not to start. To start, I wanted to show that a glorified diary isn't really useful. That I can put notes in my phone if I wanted to. Save them there. But that was the experiment - could Deth-x give me something more. And I think that my answer was... maybe? An app that you write in like a journal - but... without the... Nothing.

Deth-x has a feature that you write anything you want. And it goes to no one right now. But, the entire thing is that these words go somewhere, without pressure. This means that the effort I put into writing for 20 minutes was not wasted. Likely the words I put into Deth-x won't go anywhere either - but it felt like they could - because they can. If something happened to me, the last thing I wrote in Deth-x would be made public. Just that feeling gave me more motivation to keep writing than the 2 weeks of journaling for 15 minutes.

I'm not recommending anything. The protocol is in the literature if you want to try it. The original 1986 paper is "Confronting a traumatic event: toward an understanding of inhibition and disease." It's online. It's twenty pages. It will not be the most readable thing you've ever read. But the instruction at the heart of it, write for twenty minutes about something hard, four days in a row, don't show anyone, is one of the most-tested writing exercises in psychology. I'm keeping the practice. Just not the no-audience part.