People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes. We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.
James W. Pennebaker
Related Writing about joyful experiences for just three days can improve people's moods and decrease the... SHERYL SANDBERG I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most... JAMES PENNEBAKER People who Care about their Health, Share about their Health. TED RUBIN [Prayer heals. So say thousands of Americans who use prayer to improve their health. According to a ... ANNE MCCAFFREY We must screen for and treat psychological distress because it can translate into better physical he... JOSHUA THORPE I was one of those people who put too much emphasis on work and career and material possessions, and... TONY SHALHOUB It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinkin... MALCOLM GLADWELL People get caught up in the idea that health is just what you look like and what you eat, but your h... CATE CAMPBELL When I started writing 'Sex and the City,' I was writing about women I knew in New York who were in ... CANDACE BUSHNELL There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and deman... DIANE ARBUS I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biograph... DAVID MARANISS In writing about Harold and Maureen with their terrible unspoken secret, and all those people that H... RACHEL JOYCE I'm up here in Cleveland tonight and there are a lot of folks who are concerned about it. Twenty... ROB PORTMAN We don't really know whether the rates of problems have increased or not because so few studies have... JANE MCLEOD Secret to writing a bestseller: You write. You stop dreaming of writing. You stop talking about writ... JONATHAN GUNSON People talk about physical fitness, but mental health is equally important. I see people suffering, ... DEEPIKA PADUKONE Stress has become more commonplace and accepted in our everyday lives. Many studies show the negativ... SONIA J. LUPIEN When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthro... STANLEY A. FREED One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were in... LINDA M. WILLIAMS When you write about animals, of course, you are really writing about the people who love and live w... JON KATZ [A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told th... TRACY HICKMAN We know a great deal more about the causes of physical disease than we do about the causes of physic... M. SCOTT PECK Several researchers demonstrate the ways people fail to label trauma as such or underreport traumati... JENNIFER J. FREYD Some years ago, I read an article about two people in the arts (alas, I can’t remember who they we... TERRI WINDLING Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric. Cam... ZELL MILLER At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Ja... CYNTHIA KADOHATA If you had asked me, in the days of me dreaming about what would happen in the future, who I would w... BEN PLATT I have met too many people who are looking for work, worrying about their mortgage, uncertain about ... BRAD SCHNEIDER Most of what I hear is that they're just busy. It's not in the front of their minds, and they just f... KELLY MARTIN I know something about Mr. Khrushchev. ...Mr. Khrushchev himself, it is said, told the story about t... JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY Women who drank more than two to three cups of coffee a day were at about one-third the risk of suic... ICHIRO KAWACHI In the nineties, everybody wants to talk about their rights and privileges. Twenty-five years ago, p... LOU HOLTZ Only after the last tree has been cut down,only after the last river has been poisoned,only after th... THE CREE PEOPLE Professional help for those suffering with their mental health is now only a key stroke away, thanks... LUCIANO DEVOTO Most of the people who make decisions about global health are in the U.S. and Western Europe. There,... VIKRAM PATEL Jesus refers to the poor over and over again. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us ... TONY CAMPOLO If Christianity was only about finding a group of people to live life with who shared openly their s... HUGH HALTER & MATT SMAY I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people ... ETGAR KERET Congratulations, to the people which made gotham series, still need some more and extra work! DEYTH BANGER There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do a... JON RONSON It's not just professional athletes and soldiers who are at risk from traumatic brain injury. Mo... ANNE WOJCICKI But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people an... TERRY PRATCHETT These statements about torture, about alleged misuse of power and things like that, insulted the Fil... FERDINAND MARCOS The upper management team had informed me that an employee that worked for me was a poor performer a... STEVEN MAGEE At thirty-five, having spent over twenty years running varied businesses for my family, I decided to... ASHWIN SANGHI One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.... ISABEL ALLENDE In principle, we could be testing people, but it is premature to do that at the moment. There were n... ANDREW STEPTOE You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly peo... MALCOLM GLADWELL Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he wo... RICHARD C. ARMITAGE I think a lot of the people who write about me think that if they had to write fewer interviews then... JAY MCINERNEY Education needs to be a national priority, particularly getting class sizes down and hiring more tea... BOB GRAHAM Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around ... RABINDRANATH TAGORE In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life pre... ATUL GAWANDE For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who ... ROBERT GOTTLIEB There are fewer people living in tents, more people with access to quality health care, more kids wh... CHERYL MILLS I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I... DAVID FRIEDMAN Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care mor... MARGARET THATCHER If some of the people who write about mojo came with me for a week, they would drop dead on their fe... WILLIAM HAGUE We thought about people who pushed the physical side of their life to their limits. DAVID LIPMAN The cost of health care is going up much faster than people's wages. Families are paying about (on a... DREW ALTMAN Pets are an emotional issue, and retailers have a level of communication with the key people who wil... BOB VETERE I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published an... ANN PATCHETT I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the per... THOMAS MALLON Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who ar... JOHN HOLT For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who wer... KARL OVE KNAUSGåRD In Korea, there are many people who keep their family dogs in their garden, neglecting their physica... YOON KERR I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than ha... DAVE EGGERS I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually c... JON STEWART I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually c... JON STEWART Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don... ABBAS KIAROSTAMI Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first tim... ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you ... RICHARD RUSSO An accumulating body of evidence suggests that this translates into health benefits for those who co... DR. DAVID L. KATZ I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people... ARTHUR C. CLARKE A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ... MAUREEN JOHNSON We try to use food to educate our diners about Afghanistan, about our culture. My goal is to create ... BORHANUDDIN HAFFAS There are people in the factory who want to do a bit more and so it's about harnessing their enthusi... DAMIAN HUGHES The census numbers tell us what we've known for years -- that soaring health care inflation is makin... BILL VAUGHAN People complain about cold weather during winter, about hot weather during summer and about rain in ... SUBODH GUPTA We're encouraging people to hang in there. In Missouri, the flu season doesn't peak until January or... BRIAN QUINN There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from t... KATE WINSLET We know that as we start to measure health effects, that people who are stressed at work cost compan... LINDA ROSENSTOCK I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious p... GREG GRAFFIN One noteworthy study suggests that people who suppress negative emotions tend to leak those emotions... SUSAN CAIN In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for ... BOOKER T. WASHINGTON This Obamacare program has Obama's name on it. He lied to people for three years about this prog... RUSH LIMBAUGH Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business e... H. L. MENCKEN Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie... ANNA C. SALTER Sisterhood was about shared experiences, trust, knowing you had people who would be there for you an... MICHELLE MADOW I asked myself what Palestinians would do if Israel disappeared -- if everything not only went back ... MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF It's a gold medal for all the people of Israel, ... We think about the people who were t... GAL FRIDMAN The other day I went to a tourist information booth and asked, 'Tell me about some of the people who... STEVEN WRIGHT I have been writing music for about three and a half years and was always encouraged by other people... JANET MILLER Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things,... ELLEN ULLMAN We ought to follow through on an idea that was first proposed by President Clinton to allow people o... JOHN EDWARDS I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core ... DONALD BERWICK I'm just concerned about those students who won't go to Mental Health, ... What will they do? JOANNE LEWIS We are very complex. There is more than just physical aspect to our health. (Healing) is also emotio... LORIE DECARVALHO People who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurel... DEAN ORNISH
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MATTHEWS Drop a pebble in the water: just a splash, and it is gone; But there's half-a-hundred ripples c... JAMES W. FOLEY The outcome, the fourth in an issue of five boys born into a staunch Baptist home, meant that from t... JAMES W. BLACK But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the... JAMES W. ROBERTSON These poor girls are just bad impersonators. They look cheap, really. There’s nothing special abou... JAMES W. BODDEN They are all cheap copies and every one of them is forgotten. JAMES W. BODDEN Apart from two periods of intense study, of music between the ages of 12 and 14 and of mathematics b... JAMES W. BLACK In the past, we have had a strategy, but our agencies didn't stick to it. But they did make good com... JAMES W. HARRALSON Hopefully you get what you pay for, because you always pay for what you get. JAMES W. LOVE JR. He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-ni... W. WIRT Poetry is the language of feeling. W. WINTER What I focus on in life is what I get. And if I concentrate on how bad I am or how wrong I am or how... W. MITCHELL Before my accidents, there were ten thousands things I could do. I could spend the rest of my life d... W. MITCHELL Clemency is one of the brightest diamonds in the crown of majesty. W. SECKER Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers. The deep rivers pay a larger tribute to the ... W. SECKER Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. W. FUSSELMAN Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more com... W. GLADDEN For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become... BILL W. There are more references in the Koran than
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-Julia W-. JULIA W VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use Unix. W. DAVIDSON You'll never find another like me because im the original. RACHEL W You might as well be nice to everyone, because in the end if something happens to someone your mean/... RACHEL W I remember on that occasion, Roz invited a group of friends to gather around a festive table for a m... W. HULL Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more c... W. GLADDEN Relationships are like glass. Sometimes its better to leave them broken instead of hurting yourself ... ASHLEY W Marriage is a mutual admiration society where one person is always right, the other is the husband. W. GRANT If we were to follow the format of Edith's memorial service, we would be here until next Wednesday, W. HULL Bear in mind three essential qualities in all games of intellect:– Never to show selfishness or to... W. PATTERSON Cheap things aren't good, and good things aren't cheap. MARK W. Every morning began with Roz getting her mother up, dressed and in a wheelchair, then going off to t... W. HULL When you come right down to it, the ground you stand on is the ground you stand
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AUDEN Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake. W. C. FIELDS Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream. W. C. FIELDS The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned. W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM It was the rainbow gave thee birth, and left thee all her lovely hues. W. H. DAVIES If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. W. EDWARDS DEMING Quality is pride of workmanship. W. EDWARDS DEMING It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. EDWARDS DEMING America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot w... GEORGE W. BUSH When the congregation becomes the norm by which sermons are measured, a minister has put a mortgage ... RALPH W. SOCKMAN When the dictators and the opportunists are gone, the cross will still stand before us and something... RALPH W. 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FIELDS There are only two real ways to get ahead today - sell liquor or drink it. W. C. FIELDS Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butle... W. C. FIELDS If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn f... W. C. FIELDS I was in love with a beautiful blonde once. She drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm ... W. C. FIELDS Never try to impress a woman, because if you do she'll expect you to keep up the standard for th... W. C. FIELDS A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. W. C. FIELDS No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it's only a question of degree. W. C. FIELDS The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. W. C. FIELDS It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to. W. C. FIELDS If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull. W. C. FIELDS Writing is the supreme solace. W. 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KINSELLA Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that n... W. P. KINSELLA Read, read, read, read and then read some more. W. P. KINSELLA I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard ... W. P. KINSELLA Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If y... W. P. KINSELLA If I have a choice between looking something up and making it up, I'll make it up every time. W. P. KINSELLA I have no interest in non-fiction. I don't read it and don't watch it and don't write it... W. P. KINSELLA I don't believe in the afterlife. W. P. KINSELLA The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like bird... W. P. KINSELLA Find something that thrills you, and when you finish reading it for enjoyment, read it again line by... W. P. KINSELLA The Bureau doesn't have any secret files. W. MARK FELT I haven't leaked anything to anybody. They are wrong! W. MARK FELT I have to do this my way. W. MARK FELT I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat. W. MARK FELT I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or anyone else! W. MARK FELT The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much. W. H. MURRAY All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. W. H. MURRAY Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. W. H. MURRAY It was a proof of Welsh good nature: so long as I had a friend that knew and could introduce me, the... W. H. DAVIES I had now been in the United States of America something like five years, working here and there as ... W. H. DAVIES Summer boarders often left clothes behind, and of what use were they to the landladies, for no rag-a... W. H. DAVIES I had made up my mind to find a woman to share my life: one who would leave London altogether and go... W. H. DAVIES I dislike society because conversation exhausts my brain more than silent thought - again, I cannot ... W. H. DAVIES However careful a tramp may be to avoid places where there is abundant work, he cannot always succee... W. H. DAVIES My impression of Americans from the beginning is of the best, and I have never since had cause to al... W. H. DAVIES It has always been a wonder to me where my conversational power has gone: at the present time, I can... W. H. DAVIES I like to see a good scientific bout by men who know the use of their hands but would rather walk tw... W. H. DAVIES Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well fr... W. H. DAVIES But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near. W. H. DAVIES Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink. W. H. DAVIES How the snow falls in the north! Flake on flake falling incessantly, until the small dingles are alm... W. H. DAVIES Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him w... W. H. DAVIES What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare? W. H. DAVIES I like to give pennies to children, but unfortunately, a man cannot do these things if he lives in a... W. H. DAVIES As long as I love Beauty I am young. W. H. DAVIES May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri... W. H. AUDEN All that we are not stares back at what we are. W. H. AUDEN A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ... W. H. AUDEN To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why? W. H. AUDEN You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at. W. H. AUDEN In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him ... W. H. AUDEN