How keeping a “pain diary” can improve your overall happiness

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We hear a lot about how gratitude journals can help promote gratitude and improve overall well-being, but changing the daily practice of journaling can lead us to happiness too, experts say.

“One of the exercises I ask my students to do, and which they happily do during my classes, is to understand what their pain means,” the sociologist said. Arthur C. Brooks during Atlantic Festival in September.

“I ask them to keep a pain diary,” said Brooks, who is also a professor who studies happiness at Harvard University.

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Brooks encourages people to get a notebook and use it to track the lessons they learned from traumatic experiences that led to positive outcomes.

Here’s how to use a pain journal to learn from the challenges you face in life.

These are the steps you should take for each pain journal entry:

Set aside three lines for each entry
Fill in the first line with a brief description of the traumatic experience you had and how you felt. the previous. “I lost my job, and I’m worried about my future.”
Leave the two lines below the first line blank.
Come back in a month and write in the second line what you learned as a result of the painful experience.
Six months later, write in the third line about something good that happened in your life as a result of that experience.

You can look back at the ways you’ve learned, grown, and benefited.

Arthur C. Brooks

Sociologist and professor at Harvard University

“Inevitably, you end up writing things down in those spaces, and after a while, you start looking forward to writing in your pain journal,” Brooks said during the two-hour session.

“Because you’ll look back at the ways you’ve learned, grown, and benefited.”

Research generally supports journaling for improving mental health.

Journaling for at least 15 minutes a day has been linked to increased clarity in your thoughts and feelings, improved problem-solving skills, and even support moving on from traumatic experiences, according to health expert Deepak Chopra and Kabir Sehgal, a new health scientist. York Times bestselling author.

Expressing your feelings about a traumatic experience on paper can also lead to acceptance. “Research has consistently linked a habitual tendency to accept one’s mental experiences with greater mental health,” according to a 2018 study. Stady Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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