Are there any studies that quantify the benefits of journaling?

Factual Questions
1

Many people get a sense of satisfaction and gain personal insight from keeping a journal, but I’m wondering if there are any studies that correlate keeping a journal with mental health or physical health?

In particular, I’m wondering if there are any studies that talk about the benefits of audio journaling (recording your spoken words instead of writing things out).

Thanks.

2

For physical health, I doubt a study’s been done. Usually folks won’t do a study unless there’s some specific hypothesis they want to study, and that usually requires a proposed mechanism. It’s not clear how journal writing could affect you physically except in the incidental “you’re usually sitting while you do it” lack-of-exercise, or maybe the minor exercise from writing itself.

Mentally? Don’t know.

I’ve heard numerous writers comment that journal-keeping is detrimental to professional health, in the sense that if you’re spending that much time writing, it should be for an audience – writing for yourself (especally things that aren’t likely to be read) doesn’t train the same skills. But that’s profession-specific and anecdotal, anyway.

3

Thanks,

I did find this website which says

That sounds a little “out there”, and I was wondering if there’s something more specific - perhaps a particular scientific study that I can reference. The reason I’m asking is that I am offering a personal audio journaling service at http://www.LifeOnRecord.com and if there is some scientific study that I can mention, I’d like to. If there isn’t though, or if the comments that are out there don’t hold water, I want to stay mum on the topic.

The challenge is that there’s some stuff written about “Journaling has a proven benefit of reducing stress” but I don’t know what that proof is, and I don’t know if it would apply to audio journals.

4

Please tell me I’m not the only person who, at first glance, thought about this from the POV of accounting and thought “why would we need studies, accounting would be really hard if I couldn’t use a general journal”

5

I don’t know, I was thinking it’d be interesting to see whether reduced server downtime is more of a benefit than the potentially higher performance you get by not journaling.