
Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks - happy-go-lucky
http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2017/for-worriers-expressive-writing-cools-brain-on-stressful-tasks/
======
Chiba-City
We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three
categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a
personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly
compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule
and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or
requests permitted. The prose mattered and project leads were forced to read
them. It was not anything that could be rushed at the end. "Save it for later"
kept team time boxed and synchronized and gave managers features to schedule
for future version releases and sales messaging. We fired people who could not
write English right alongside their Java and PL/SQL. It worked great. 100%
project completion over 125 projects. I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD
gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks.
Software is 100% a product of communicative action. There are few excuses for
execution failure absent bonafide academic grand challenges.

~~~
bartread
"We used ( _enforced_ ) a writing method"; "project leads were _forced_ to
read them"; "We _fired_ people who could not write English right alongside"
(emphasis mine in all cases).

Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful.

"I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of
inadequate educations needing paychecks."

Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is.

You treat people like children and they will act like them. Let me reiterate:
your place of work sounds terrible.

~~~
Chiba-City
Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile
clients. Liking it is not in your job description.

~~~
dvt
> Liking it is not in your job description.

Of course it is. Culture is very important to one's job. In fact, if you don't
_like_ you're job, you're not going to _do_ a good job. Some companies make
millions off of that premise (see Bonusly).

I actually completely agree with the idea of prose being written alongside
technical requirements, but the work environment (and your tone) sound god-
awful.

And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer.

------
mikegerwitz
I enjoy literate programming in part for some of the benefits this article
describes. Even if the documentation is separate from the program, sometimes
escaping into writing for a while provides a sufficient amount of relief to
just get back into hacking. Since the matter is related to the task at hand,
it also helps me to organize my thoughts and be better prepared (and therefore
less stressed) to re-introduce myself to the problem.

I also use hand-written notes. This allows me to escape a screen entirely,
write candidly about whatever I please, and naturally reform the stress into
something workable.

------
chicago_wade
I have also found that it helps to put swear-words in the commit messages when
I'm struggeling a lot with something.

Once I get to that point I will stop working on that specific problem until
the next day, but swearing about it in the commit message helps me not think
about it anymore and also when I come back to it the next day I can see from
the commit what I was struggeling with.

Obviously only do this for repositories that you aren't sharing with anyone.

You _could_ also do it in a shared repo if you don't push the commits and you
squash them first. Personally I'm not a squash kind of person and I'd also
fear that I pushed without remembering to squash even if I really were
planning on squashing.

~~~
scroot
See: [1]

[1]
[http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/](http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/)

~~~
oolaf
This is what the world is built on

------
copperx
This study gives credence to the GTD's book claim that putting all of your
tasks in an "inbox" reduces stress, which was the only worthwhile insight I
got from it.

~~~
DenisM
Speaking of GTD - if you found the book impossible to read, consider watching
this video version: [https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-
Thin...](https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Things-
Done/170776-2.html)

~~~
asciimo
Great link! I found it very possible to read; I read it at least 2.5 times
across multiple physical and digital copies of two editions. Turning the words
into actions is the hard part for me. Surely this is the format that's going
to work :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
For me, turning the words into actions was the easy part. The hard part was
sticking to the habit of doing weekly reviews. I always fail at this after few
weeks, and if you don't do weekly reviews, suddenly the whole GTD methodology
falls apart on you and you have to start over...

~~~
terminalcommand
Same here. The only thing I apply from GTD is that if the task can be done
under 5 minutes do it.

Making todo lists and sticking to them require too much discipline. In my
professional life I keep todo lists, reminders etc. But in my personal life
I'm a lazy lazy person.

I can't seem to find a solution to this.

~~~
mattmanser
I write daily to-do lists either in the morning or the night before, on a
small post-it note sized stack of paper. Throw it away at the end of the day,
whether or not I finished everything. I try and be realistic and still usually
end up with 1 or 2 tasks not done.

It's nice crossing things off, it also never gets out of control.

Of all the things I tried in my personal life to get more things done, this is
the one that's generally worked. I still go through phases of not doing it but
it's really easy to start doing it again as the stack is always on my desk.

The other thing that works very effectively for me, much like this article
says, is occasionally when feeling overwhelmed I write down everything that's
stressing me out in a temporary text editor (an unsaved notepad++ note, which
remains between computer restarts). I include things like "I'm pissed off with
Bob because he did X" or "I'm worried about client Y not being able to pay
their bill" or "I feel like I'm not putting enough time into doing Z".

I almost immediately stop stressing about it, and generally end up closing the
unsaved note after a week or two, usually without reading it again. When I do,
most of the stuff I was worrying about turned out fine.

------
Tade0
In my former job I kept a secret "project shitlist" detailing my feelings
about the worst parts of the codebase(usually 8-year old technical debt).

Now I see that they were actually pretty tame. Here's an example:

 _Variables used before declaration because "code style"._

~~~
foota
What language is this where you can use a variable before declaring it?

~~~
ghusbands
Javascript allows it.

~~~
yulker
Does it actually allow it? I thought the declaration is just hoisted to the
top of the scope?

~~~
faizshah
I just recently read about this in the You Don't Know JS series of books:

"We can be tempted to look at var a = 2; as one statement, but the JavaScript
Engine does not see it that way. It sees var a and a = 2 as two separate
statements, the first one a compiler-phase task, and the second one an
execution-phase task.

What this leads to is that all declarations in a scope, regardless of where
they appear, are processed first before the code itself is executed. You can
visualize this as declarations (variables and functions) being "moved" to the
top of their respective scopes, which we call "hoisting".

Declarations themselves are hoisted, but assignments, even assignments of
function expressions, are not hoisted.

Be careful about duplicate declarations, especially mixed between normal var
declarations and function declarations -- peril awaits if you do!"

[https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-
JS/blob/master/scope...](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-
JS/blob/master/scope%20%26%20closures/ch4.md)

------
atdt
Study:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstra...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstract)

The sample for the experiment is N = 40

------
fsiefken
That's why keeping a journal or diary can be helpful as well.
[http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-
redu...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-reduce-83950)
Or alternatively, the Ignatian daily examen:
[http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-
exam...](http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen)

------
nine_k
"If you can't explain what you're doing to a 6-year old, you don't know it
yourself" (ascribed to several famous physicists).

This is pretty true, and thus the exercise of explaining things in plain prose
is very useful to make you polish your understanding, and find any problems in
it. When hand-waving is not acceptable, problems in understanding become very
visible.

Even if nobody reads this, it's very useful if node honestly. Having other
people to read it just keeps you from slacking off.

------
ordu
Is it writing did the trick, or any verbalization will do? Maybe all you need
is to spend 8 minutes on thinking about task?

~~~
fsiefken
There are cognitive benefits to talking to an imaginary person.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-
living/benefits-o...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-
living/benefits-of-talking-to-yourself-self-talk.html?mcubz=0)
[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-
to...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-to-
yourself.html)

~~~
userbinator
Sometimes it doesn't have to be a person, or even alive:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)

------
AndriiKH
I absolutely agree with the article. I personally keep a daily journal and it
helps me a great deal - relieve stress and everything. Kinda cool for
productivity as well. You just vizualize things when you write and then have
not so many problems actually doing them.

------
randomdrake
I enjoy expressively writing to cool off sometimes, so I was interested in
checking out the study itself.

The link to the actual study from 2017/09/08 can be found here:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815)

"The effect of expressive writing on the error-related negativity among
individuals with chronic worry."

> The error-related negativity (ERN), an ERP elicited immediately after
> errors, is enlarged among individuals with anxiety. The relationship between
> anxiety and enlarged ERN has spurred interest in understanding potential
> therapeutic benefits of decreasing its amplitude within anxious individuals.
> The current study used a tailored intervention-expressive writing-in an
> attempt to reduce the ERN among a sample of individuals with chronic worry.
> Consistent with hypotheses, the ERN was reduced in the expressive writing
> group compared to an unrelated writing control group. Findings provide
> experimental support that the ERN can be reduced among anxious individuals
> with tailored interventions. Expressive writing may serve to "offload"
> worries from working memory, therefore relieving the distracting effects of
> worry on cognition as reflected in a decreased ERN.

The study is not shy about what conclusions should and shouldn't be drawn from
it. There is large "Limitations and future directions" section. Here are some
excerpts:

> Although the current study sheds light on the utility of expressive writing
> in reducing the ERN among worriers, there are limitations that should be
> addressed in future studies.

> First, the samples size (N540) was rather small for a between-subjects
> investigation, and, unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the
> exception in comparable cognitive neuroscience studies (Holmes & Pizzagalli,
> 2010; Klawohn et al., 2016; Olvet & Hajcak, 2012)

> Second, we examined the ERN only after participants engaged in the writing
> and were therefore unable to assess how these processes changed from before
> to after writing.

> Third, we did not include a low-worry control condition. The purpose of the
> present study, however, was to provide a very specific test of the effects
> of expressive writing on the ERN in individuals with chronic levels of
> worry. Indeed, we meant to build upon the prior study that tested the effect
> of attention bias modification on the ERN (Nelson et al., 2015) by examining
> high-anxious individuals instead of college students sampled without regard
> for anxiety symptoms.

> Fourth, because we utilized a student sample, it would be useful to examine
> the effects of expressive writing on the ERN in clinical samples in future
> studies. However, as we detailed in Method, the individuals in our sample
> reported worry symptoms that were comparable to previous studies of patients
> with GAD, and by using a well-validated measure in the PSWQ, it is likely
> that many of our participants had GAD. Moreover, college students are not
> immune to psychopathology.

------
fuzzfactor
Seems to work for me, hurricane or not.

