Reflecting on Past Failures by Writing About Them Can Help Us Stay Calm When Facing New Stress.
When facing failure at work or in life, not everyone can easily overcome its psychological shadow. In fact, there is a simple method that not everyone knows: writing down the stress or failures you have experienced.
Failure is the mother of success, but experiencing it is far from pleasant. A new study in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience not only explains this connection but also adds an interesting twist, showing that looking back on past failures by writing about them can help us remain calm in the face of new stresses. The research team discovered this interesting finding in the laboratory.
Researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University brought a group of people into a laboratory and had them spend 10 minutes writing about a time they had made a mistake or failed at something, or about an unrelated topic—a film they had recently watched.
The team believed that writing about past failures would reduce a person’s stress in a current negative situation, while writing about a random topic would not have the same effect.
To stress the participants, the team put them through a well-known ‘Social Stress’ test, in which they had only a few minutes to prepare a 5-minute speech to deliver before the researchers. If that was not enough, participants had to count backward from 2063 to 13. Finally, they took a simple attention and reaction test.
As the team predicted, people who wrote about past failures did not show the typical stress response (measured by the stress hormone cortisol) to the stress test, compared with those who wrote about film clips. They also performed better on attention tests, made fewer mistakes, and generally achieved higher scores.
Study author Brynne Dimenichi said: ‘We found that writing itself was not directly associated with reduced bodily stress. Instead, our results suggest that when people face a stressful situation later, having previously written about past failure makes their body's stress response resemble that of someone who is not stressed.’
Why this connection exists is the next question, but we can understand that we ourselves have become calmer, especially when facing new difficulties. Writing about these negative past events can help us process them.
Or perhaps reflecting on past stresses makes new challenges seem insignificant. In the team’s paper, the authors suggest that “writing about failures may make new troubles seem less stressful.”
Other studies have found benefits to writing about negative events or emotions, both for treatment and performance. DiMenichi also said people may want to try this method and see whether it works in different stressful situations. ‘This study is for anyone who wants to apply this method in education, sports, or even treatment, with clear evidence of its effectiveness.’
Collected.
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