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Ever written down your thoughts about a tough experience or situation you’ve been through and found it to be cathartic? That’s the focus of this article about expressive writing. In it, the author shares some surprising study results about people that go through negative experiences and write about their feelings afterward. The results indicated that it didn’t just make people feel better, it actually made them perform better:

“Both groups wrote for five days, 20 minutes per day, describing the emotional challenges of searching for a new job, relationship problems, financial stressors, the immediate experience of being fired, losing their coworkers and feeling rejected.

Three months later, in the control groups, less than 5% of the engineers were reemployed. In the expressive writing group, more than 26% of the engineers were reemployed.”

Adam Grant, the author of the article, continues to go into some really specific detail in similar studies, and in every situation they learned more about how people feel and perform better after writing about their stressful events. We all occasionally feel stressed out by traumatic events in life or in the workplace. Maybe keeping a journal like Richard Branson isn’t such a bad idea after all.

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