How Keeping A “pain Diary” Can Improve Your Overall Feelings Of Happiness

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 also lead us to happiness, experts say.

“One of the exercises I ask my students to do and complete in the course of my happiness classes is to understand what their pain means,” said social scientist Arthur C. Brooks during the Atlantic Festival in September.

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

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Brooks encourages people to grab a notebook and use it to record the lessons they’ve learned from painful experiences that led to positive outcomes.

Here’s how to use a pain diary to learn from your own challenges in life.

How to Use a “Pain Journal” for Happiness and Gratitude

These are the steps you should follow for each pain diary entry:

Plan on three lines per entry

Fill in the first line by briefly describing the painful experience you went through and how it made you feel. Ex. “I lost my job and am worried about my future.”

Leave the two lines below the first line blank.

After a month, come back and write down what you learned from the painful experience on the second line.

Six months later, on the third line, write about one good thing that happened in your life as a result of that experience.

You can take a look at the ways you learned, grew, and benefited.
Arthur C. Brooks
Social scientist and Harvard professor

“Inevitably, you write things down there and after a while you start to look forward to writing in your pain journal,” Brooks said during the two-hour panel.

“Because you can take a look at the ways you learned, grew and benefited.”

And research generally supports journaling for improving mental health.

According to wellness guru Deepak Chopra and Kabir Sehgal, writing for just 15 minutes a day is associated with greater clarity of your thoughts and feelings, better problem-solving skills, and even helping you overcome traumatic experiences.

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

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