Everyone must have experienced stress, be it mild to severe. Often stress interferes with our daily activities and lives.
That's what makes us have to get rid of the stress. But how is the best car to get rid of stress?
A recent study exploring how the effects of stress affect the focus and production performance of cortisol, a stress hormone released by the body.
The researchers observed how expressive writing (telling stressors) had an effect on the effect. In other words, this study shows the writing of a journal (diary) can improve one's mental health.
"We have been taught for years that focused on positive things can bring success," said Bryne DiMenichi.
"Our results show that critical thinking about past failures can actually lead to better outcomes," added the doctoral candidate in psychology at Rutgers University-Newark.
According to DiMenichi, this is probably because thinking about what is wrong in failure is the key to achieving success when a person faces a new challenge.
To obtain these findings, DiMenichi and his colleagues recruited 100 participants aged an average of 24 years. The participants were then divided into two groups.
The first group was asked to write about the plot of a movie they just watched. While the two groups were asked to write about the difficult times in their lives that ended in failure.
The researchers also looked at the participants' corsitol levels. This is done to understand the level of stress experienced by the participants.
For information, cortisol levels of participants at the beginning of the study showed similar rates.
However, after completing each assignment and re-tested using a common procedure called Social Experiment Stress Test the cortisol levels of the two groups differed. The second group had lower cortisol levels than the first group.
What is even more surprising is that the writings about failure do not affect stress levels.
"Instead, we found that, in terms of preparation for stress, writing about past failures did not necessarily re-create them as early as they were but were replaced with better physiological preparations for new stress factors, and then their performance got better at under pressure, "DiMenichi said.
Unfortunately, these findings can not be directly applied to the real world. That's because many other factors exist in stressful situations.
Even so, researchers hope to get a better picture of how writing can help improve a person's performance. For that, they plan to re-examine how writing down past failures affects the actual brain processes in
performing new tasks.
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