Welcome to RenewHer, a podcast for women over 50 ready to reignite their energy and explore what's next. I'm Genell Lemley, brain fitness coach. Here, you'll hear real stories from women taking on new challenges after 50, along with brain health tips to boost focus, energy, and the mindset to move forward with confidence.
Let's dive into today's episode.
Hey there, and welcome back to RenewHer. Last night, I was having dinner with a group of women, and toward the end of the evening, the topic of journaling came up, and it got me thinking. We hear that journaling is good for us. Get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. Write down what's on your mind. Do a brain dump.
But why? Why can sitting down with a blank page and simply writing whatever comes to mind make us feel better? And what is actually happening in our brains when we do it? I started thinking about my own experience with journaling. I spent almost 30 years in the corporate world, and I don't remember anyone talking about journaling.
Now, maybe people were doing it and simply weren't talking about it. This was just my experience. But when I left corporate America and eventually moved into the entrepreneurial world, that changed. Suddenly, journaling was a common topic of conversation, morning routines, getting your thoughts onto paper, writing down whatever was on your mind. It opened my eyes to something I really hadn't been familiar with before.
Since then , I've journaled on and off. And when I've done it consistently, I've noticed something. I feel better. Sometimes I feel calmer. Sometimes I feel like I can think a little more clearly. And sometimes I just feel more in control of everything that's going on.
So I wanted to understand why. And one reason journaling may help involves something called cognitive offloading. It sounds complicated, but it's actually something we do all the time. You make a grocery list so you don't have to remember everything you need. You put an appointment on your calendar. You write down something you don't wanna forget. You're taking information that your brain has been trying to hold onto and giving it somewhere else to live.
And journaling can serve a similar purpose. When we put our thoughts on paper, they become external. We can see them. We can return to them. We don't have to rely entirely on our working memory to keep them active.
And that's important because working memory has limited capacity. Working memory is essentially the mental workspace we're using right now to hold and work with information. And there's only so much it can handle at one time.
Think about everything that might be going through your mind on any given morning. I need to call someone. I have to make that appointment. Why did she say that yesterday? I need to figure out what I'm doing about this problem. Don't forget to pick that up. I have an idea for something I wanna do. I'm worried about what's going to happen with... And on and on.
Not all of those thoughts are necessarily important, but they're all competing for our attention. Researchers who study journal writing think putting thoughts on paper can lighten the load on working memory. That frees up a little more room to actually reflect on those thoughts. A couple of studies give us some interesting clues about this.
In one study, people who wrote about stressful experiences showed improvements in working memory capacity and reductions in intrusive thoughts. And in another experiment, students were asked to spend ten minutes writing about their thoughts and feelings immediately before an important exam.
The students who were particularly anxious about tests performed better after writing about their worries. The idea is that worry itself takes up mental resources. If part of your working memory is occupied with, "What if I don't do well? What if I forget everything? I should have studied more," there are fewer resources available for the task you're actually trying to do.
Writing may help take some of that mental load and put it somewhere else. And that gets surprisingly close to what we mean when we say, "I just need to get this out of my head." But not everything taking up space in our heads is something we're trying to remember. Sometimes it's something we're feeling.
Maybe you're still thinking about a conversation from yesterday. You're angry. You're disappointed. You're worried. Or maybe you don't even know exactly what you're feeling. You just know something is bothering you. And this is where another interesting area of neuroscience comes in. It's called affect labeling.
Affect labeling simply means putting feelings into words. Researchers have used brain imaging to look at what happens when people identify and name emotions. In these studies, putting an emotion into words has been associated with greater activity in areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in regulation and lower activity in the amygdala, which plays an important role in processing emotionally significant information.
Now, these studies weren't specifically studying people journaling, so I don't want to suggest that every time you write, "I'm really angry about this," you're automatically turning down your amygdala. The brain is more complicated than that. But the research gives us an interesting clue about why putting words around what we're feeling can sometimes help.
There's a difference between simply feeling something and stepping back enough to name it. Maybe you begin writing, "I'm really irritated about what happened yesterday." And then you keep going. "Why am I still thinking about this?" And eventually, "Actually, I don't think I'm angry. I think I'm disappointed." Or, "I think what I'm really feeling is left out." You haven't changed what happened. You haven't necessarily solved the problem, but you've identified something that may have felt much less clear when it was simply swirling around in your head.
And I think that's where another interesting part of journaling begins. Once a thought is on the page, we can see it, and that's different from simply having the thought. Writing gives us an opportunity to look at our own thinking.
Maybe you've experienced this. You start writing about one thing, which leads to something else, which leads to something else, and suddenly you write something and think, "Where did that come from?" Or, "Maybe that's what's really bothering me." Or even, "That's a good idea." The thought may have been there all along, but writing gave you an opportunity to slow down enough to notice it.
And that's one reason I don't think freeform journaling has to be about problems or worries. It can also be where ideas show up, questions, possibilities, things you're curious about, something you noticed yesterday, a thought about a conversation, something you want to explore, a decision you haven't made yet.
When those thoughts stay in our heads, they can come and go very quickly. Putting them on paper gives us something we can return to, and sometimes we begin to notice connections. One thought leads to another. Something we've been thinking about for days suddenly looks a little different, or an idea that might have disappeared becomes something worth exploring.
That doesn't mean journaling magically makes us more creative or solves our problems, but it creates a place for our thinking to become visible. And I think that's one of the things I've misunderstood about journaling over the years. I used to think I needed to do it correctly. I'd sit down to write and somehow think I needed paragraphs. One thought should logically lead to the next. There should be some sort of order. Basically, I was editing something no one else was ever going to read. And once I started doing that, journaling became work, but that's not the point.
You can't do journaling wrong. Your thoughts don't arrive in perfectly organized paragraphs. Your journal doesn't need them either. One sentence might be, "I'm really excited about this idea." The next might be, "I need to remember to make that appointment." And then, "I'm still irritated about what happened yesterday," followed by, "Why is that bothering me so much?" And maybe two lines later, "Wait, I think I know why."
That's journaling. It doesn't have to be profound. It doesn't have to sound good. It doesn't even have to make sense to anyone but you. There's no audience. You're not writing a report. You're not writing an email. You're not creating something for someone else to read. You're simply giving yourself a place to put what's in your head.
I've been inconsistent with journaling over the years. And I find that interesting because I know that when I do it, I usually feel better afterward. Maybe you've had that experience with something in your own life. You know it helps, and somehow you still stop doing it.
So perhaps this episode is as much a reminder for me as it is for you. I'm going to start again, and this time I'm going to try very hard not to turn it into an assignment. No required number of pages, no perfectly constructed paragraphs, no worrying about whether I'm doing it right. Just a few minutes and a blank page.
What's on my mind? What am I thinking about? Is there something I don't wanna forget? Is there an idea I wanna capture? Is something bothering me? Is there something I keep coming back to? And then just start writing, because maybe the value isn't in producing anything at all. Maybe sometimes we simply need to give our brain somewhere to put what's already there and see which shows up on the page. Until next time, keep making space for what's on your mind.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of RenewHer. If today's conversation sparked something in you, don't let it fade. Take even a small step toward what's next. If you found value in what you heard, please subscribe, leave a review, or share this podcast with a woman who's ready to take her next bold step.
Together, we're building a community of strong, resilient women navigating what's next with courage and purpose. Until next time, stay energized and keep embracing what's possible