Why Journaling Sometimes Makes Overthinking Worse

Journaling has a good reputation — and for most people, in most situations, it deserves it. The act of writing can help you process difficult experiences, gain perspective, and find language for things that feel tangled. Therapists recommend it. Research supports it. And yet a significant number of people find that when they sit down to journal about something they are worried about or stuck on, they feel worse afterwards, not better.

If this has happened to you, you have not been doing journaling wrong. You have probably been encountering a well-documented trap: the difference between expressive writing that helps and ruminative writing that extends the loop.

How journaling is supposed to work

The research on expressive writing — pioneered by psychologist James Pennebaker in the 1980s — found that writing about emotionally significant experiences for short, structured periods had measurable benefits for both mental and physical wellbeing. Participants who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings around difficult events showed improvements in mood, immune function, and psychological processing over time.

The theory is that giving narrative structure to an experience helps the brain process and integrate it. An unprocessed event is like an open file — the mind keeps returning to it, looking for resolution. Writing gives it a form, which allows the mind to begin treating it as something that has been addressed.

This is real. It works. But it does not work for everyone, in every situation, with every approach to the blank page.

The ruminative journaling trap

Rumination is a specific cognitive pattern: repetitively turning a thought or problem over in your mind, returning to it again and again without reaching resolution. If you are a person who tends to overthink, the blank page can become a place where rumination continues rather than a place where it resolves.

The problem is the format. Unstructured writing invites you to go wherever your mind goes — and if your mind tends to spiral, unstructured writing tends to spiral too. You write about the thing you are worried about. That surfaces another angle. You write about that. Now you are thinking about three other connected things. Forty-five minutes later you have three pages and you feel considerably more anxious than when you started.

This is not a flaw in journaling. It is a mismatch between a tool and a way of thinking. The blank-page format works well for people who naturally move toward resolution when they write. For people who naturally move toward elaboration, it can make things worse.

What structure does that blank pages don't

Structured journaling approaches — prompts, constraints, specific questions to answer — tend to perform better for people prone to rumination. The structure does something the blank page cannot: it limits the territory. When you are asked a specific question, you have a boundary. You answer the question and the space closes. The mind does not have room to extend the loop indefinitely.

Good prompts for overthinkers tend to redirect attention from the event or worry itself to the feeling underneath it. Not: what happened and what does it mean? But: what do I actually feel right now, and what does that feeling need? This is a much smaller, more answerable question — and the answer tends to create movement rather than more material to loop through.

Other useful structural constraints: limiting writing to a fixed time (five minutes, not forty-five), writing about what you are grateful for alongside what is difficult, or specifically naming what you want to set down and leave on the page rather than carry forward.

When to use journaling, and when to try something different

Journaling tends to work well when you have something specific to process, when you have time and space to write without pressure, and when your natural mode of writing is exploratory rather than spiralling. It tends to work less well when you are already in a loop, when the thing you are writing about does not have clear edges, or when unstructured reflection tends to make you more anxious rather than less.

Knowing which situation you are in on a given day is part of building a useful practice. Some days the blank page is exactly what you need. Other days, a structured check-in that asks a smaller question and closes after a few minutes is more useful.

Relent is built for the second kind of day — when the blank page is not enough, or when you need a container for what you are carrying rather than an open field to wander in. See also: journaling alternative and overthinking journal app.