MOMENT | The neuroscience behind journaling with Dr Tara Swart

0:03Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's Motherkind moment. This is your place on a Monday for the calm connection and maybe even a shift in perspective before the week ahead. This week's moment is with the wonderful Dr. Tara Swart. Dr. Tara is a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, coach and best-selling author of the brilliant book, The Source. In this short clip, we talk about the power of journaling. And if you know me, you know that I love journaling. It is one of those foundational tools that I use day in, day out to keep myself on an even keel. So I hope this short clip inspires you to grab your pen and get those swirling thoughts down on the page.

0:46It will make a massive difference. Trust me. Here it is. What's the neuroscience behind journaling? Why is it so effective? I know there's some incredible studies coming out at the moment around journaling and treatment for PTSD and all sorts. Why is just putting pen to paper and writing our thoughts down so powerful? There's a correlation between stressful emotions or stressful events like from PTSD, which is more imagery than word thoughts, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And they're absolutely correlated. So if you have high cortisol levels, like we all would during a global pandemic, then you will have symptoms of stress, even if you're not that aware of them.

1:32And that's another thing that journaling is good for things like tracking insomnia or anxiety or muscle twitching or whatever stress looks like for you. And so there's two ways to deal with that. And one is that you can physically sweat cortisol out of your body by doing aerobic exercise, and that will lower the levels of cortisol and that will lower the symptoms of stress, or you can speak out loud, which is why coaching and therapy are so good for all of those things. Or you can write out what's going on for you emotionally. If you just think about it in your mind and it goes round and round, that actually elevates cortisol levels.

2:09But if you get it out of the brain body system, either by physical exertion or speaking or writing, and that's why actually I haven't tried this myself, but journaling by doing an audio recording or even of video journaling. I think video journaling works very good for PTSD because it's more visual. So it's like you're meeting a visual trauma with a visual therapy, as it were. But for most of us, just writing it down. And again, I believe that writing it with a pen rather than typing it, although I know some people do type and it's obviously better than nothing, but it feels like there's something to do with that tactile stimulation, you know, reading the written word.

2:46If you say it out loud, then articulating speech and your own voice going in through your ear and you hearing it just multiplies that message to your brain that you're recognizing these emotions, you're raising your awareness, you're expelling them from your brain body system. I mean, it's so good, but I'd love to hear more about this research that's coming out about journaling. Oh yeah, I read it the other day. I can't remember what journal or where it was that for people with PTSD, and I can't remember the specific what it was they'd given them some daily journaling practice and they'd reduced their symptoms by 40 which was more effective than talking therapy wow that's really interesting I think what I love about journaling is as I said I think all of your work is really about empowerment and I find there is so much that we can do and journaling is free and it doesn't need to take hours I just do it five minutes every night sometimes I just dump my thoughts down and I can literally feel the stress reducing because I think when my thoughts are all up in my head, A is very little I can actually do about my thinking with my thinking.

3:54Yeah, exactly. I find that really challenging. Yeah. I'm just getting things out that are worrying me. And the other thing, it'd be good to hear your views on this. I always see things in my journaling that are insightful or I didn't realize or I make connections or I typically will have an aha moment every night, just five minutes, I'd be like, ah, that's what that is. And I know that had I tried to think that through, I wouldn't have got there. That is so amazing because I actually think that speaks to your whole concept of empowerment because see how much smarter you are than you thought you were until you read it written down.

4:33We're each an amazing guide for ourselves, but we don't see that because we don't articulate it in a way that's recorded that we can kind of prove like no one can think their way out of their thinking you know like you said it has to be approached from a different angle and getting it out and then seeing it back it's stunning it's really insightful god i love what you just said i love what you just said mutual appreciation i loved you said we are all such powerful guides because i think you and i we sit in the well-being world and the empowerment world and it's incredible how much is out there but also I think this is why I love your work because you remind us that we have the ability within ourselves and you talk about that brilliantly and it'd be good to hear your thoughts on this that actually as a society we've devalued that intuition that power that we have within ourselves to become our highest happiest most joyful selves and we tend to outsource our power to society to our parents to our thinking which is fundamentally flawed because we're wired for negativity can you talk to this idea of how evolutionary that happened and what we can do to counter it so many thoughts coming into my head that I want to cover but I think that's an important thing to do to set the scene for people of why we don't listen to our intuition and why we're geared towards negativity.

6:03So basically when we lived in caves, before we had articulated speech, the brain was more like the brain of a very higher primate, like a bonobo or a chimpanzee, where the limbic system, which is the emotional intuitive system of the brain, which is about the size of your clenched fist. So imagine that inside your skull, you know, the spinal cord, the brainstem, which is where your spinal cord bulges just next to your ears. And then the limbic system deep in the center of the brain. In cave times, we had a very thin layer of the cortex over that, which is the planning, predicting the future, pattern recognition, articulated speech, complex problem solving.

6:42So we didn't have those abilities like we do now. In fact, we were no more special than any other animal roaming around on the savannah. Then what happened, and we don't really know which way around this happened, but basically we discovered how to make fire and then we could cook meat and digest protein much more easily than we ever had before when we only ate raw or vegetarian so either there was some kind of evolution and the cortex grew and that's how we you know started to use tools and make fire or that ingestion of protein allowed the guts to shrink because we didn't need such a long gut to digest our food and the cortex to massively grow until the cortex was as thick as the limbic system.

7:26And so that's what it looks like now in our brains. There's a limbic system, the size of your fist, and then there's the rest of it is filled up with the cortex. So going from a sliver, like a bonobo, to the massive frontal cortex all over that we have now, massively accelerated us to become the most successful animal on the planet because we could try to predict the future. Of course, you can't predict the future, so it wasn't always correct, but that means you could plan and then you could speak to your tribe. So it was much easier to communicate than when we gesticulate. And so once you have that shortcut of speech, why would you bother trying to decipher body language?

8:03Why would you listen to those micro muscular changes on people's faces or that feeling you get in your stomach that's based on the hormonal interaction between people or the little hairs on your arm or the back of your neck standing on end? work. That's just too much hard work. If I tell you something, Zoe, you might as well take it at face value because it's going to be too much for you to try to look at every single micro expression in my face, look at my body language. If we were together in person, think about how you feel just by being in my presence. It's just easier to listen to what I say and say, okay, you know, I believe that unless I did something to prove to you that I couldn't be trusted.

8:40That's easier. And so that's what we do. And it's also easier to listen to the logic that is the loudest voice in our head and not delve deeper. You know, and I love that quote, there is a voice that doesn't have words, listen. And I think that's one of the chapter quotes in my book. You can't remember everything that's happened in your whole life. But, you know, what people call cell memory or muscle memory is actually that what you need to live your life and do your work on a day to day basis is in the outer cortex. your habits and behavior patterns are deeper in the limbic system maybe in the brainstem and then your wisdom and intuition which is all the life lessons you've picked up but you don't consciously remember what for and that's why journaling is so important because you lose the consciousness of what you've learned but it's still embedded and it basically is embedded mostly in your gut neurons and that's why it's called gut instinct www.ejoysmrchen.org