After a bad day: think it over, or say it?
· Source: Lyubomirsky, Sousa & Dickerhoof, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006
The day went wrong early and never quite recovered. A plan fell through, a message came out sharper than you meant, and on the train home you went over all of it again, scene by scene. You’re home now, dinner is in the oven, and the film in your head is still running.
Most of us handle evenings like this by thinking. It feels like the responsible thing to do: go over it, understand it, then let it go. The letting go rarely arrives on schedule, though. A team of psychologists set out to compare quiet thinking with two other options, writing it down and saying it out loud.
Three ways to spend fifteen minutes
Lyubomirsky, Sousa and Dickerhoof invited university students to the lab and asked each of them to pick the worst experience of their life so far. The students named things like a death in the family, a breakup, a car accident or the loss of a pet. On average they rated these events as extremely upsetting, and the typical event lay one to three years back.
Then came the part that differed. One group wrote about the experience. Another talked about it into a tape recorder. A third group sat with it and thought, privately, without writing or speaking. Each student did this for 15 minutes on three days in a row. A fourth group, 36 students, did nothing at all and simply filled in the same questionnaires.
All three active groups were given nearly the same words to guide them. They were asked to really let go and explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about the event, and not to worry about complete sentences or being logical.
What “talking” meant in this study
The talking group is the reason this paper matters for anyone who keeps a voice diary. A small microphone was clipped to each student’s shirt, and a recorder sat on the desk. The instructions said to think out loud, as if talking to themselves. Nobody was on the other end.
The researchers expected this to feel strange, and they said so in the instructions:
Although talking aloud may seem awkward at first, we find that most people get comfortable with it after a few minutes.
That’s worth remembering if you try it at home and the first minute feels silly. Speaking to an empty room was part of the method, and it was expected to feel odd at first.
Four weeks later
The students filled in questionnaires before the three sessions and again four weeks after. Their main measure was life satisfaction: how a person rates their life as a whole.
Those who had written or talked about their worst experience were more satisfied with their lives than those who had only thought about it. They also reported better mental health and better health overall. Writing and talking both came out ahead of thinking.
The thinking group did worse than the writers and talkers on these measures. On life satisfaction, the thinkers scored lower even than the students who hadn’t done anything.
One thing didn’t change. Short-term mood, measured a month later, was about the same in every group. The authors suggest that a mood is too passing a thing to carry a difference across four weeks. So the result is about how people judged their lives and health, not about feeling cheerful.
Why putting it into words might help
The authors offer an explanation, and it’s worth reading as their reasoning rather than a tested fact. Language has structure. When you write or speak, you have to put events in some order, name what you felt and connect one part to the next. That pushes toward a story with a beginning and an end.
Thinking alone has no such frame. It drifts, jumps back to the worst moment and plays it again. The paper describes how private thinking about something painful can slide into repetitive dwelling, which psychologists call rumination, and keep the pain fresh instead of settling it.
The researchers also coded what the writers actually wrote. Over the three days, their writing moved away from replaying the event and toward analysing it, step by step. Something similar showed in the talkers’ recordings, though less clearly.
What this study can’t tell you
The students were young, around nineteen on average, and everything was measured by their own reports. Each group was small, about twenty people. As the authors themselves point out, results for older people with heavier hardships are hard to predict.
There’s another gap, and it matters here. The study was about the worst event of a person’s life, not about an ordinary bad day. Using the same approach for a rough Tuesday is our suggestion. It’s a reasonable step from the findings, but nobody tested it.
Saying the day out loud, at home
Here is how this could look in practice. This is our advice, built on the study’s method.
Give it a set time and a set length. The students had fifteen minutes, which is long enough to get past the first few sentences and short enough to stop. Use a timer if you tend to keep going.
Talk as if to yourself, the way the instructions said. You don’t have to be fair or tidy. Start with what happened, then say how it felt, and let the rest follow in whatever order it comes.
Then stop, even mid-thought. The point isn’t to finish the subject in one go. In the study, people came back to it on three days, and that repetition was part of what was tested.
An invented example: Theo had a review at work that went badly. On the way home he replayed his manager’s words a dozen times. At nine that evening he sets a timer and talks. “The review was today. She said I miss deadlines. I was angry, and also embarrassed, because she’s partly right.” Ten minutes in, he hears himself say what he’d change on the next project. He hadn’t reached that sentence once on the train.
When a bad day keeps coming back
Some days don’t settle after a few evenings of talking. If the same event keeps flooding back weeks later, or a low mood has stayed for most of a month, a therapist or your family doctor can help in ways a diary can’t. The same goes for anything that feels too heavy to face alone. Talking into a microphone can sit alongside professional help. It doesn’t replace it.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, set a timer for fifteen minutes and say out loud what went wrong today.
- Talk to yourself, in any order, without trying to be fair or neat.
- Stop when the timer ends, and come back to it tomorrow if it still feels unfinished.
Say it out loud in Halflight. It writes it down under today’s date, so on the third evening you can hear how the story has changed.