The NY Times published a fascinating article about James Pennebaker's work in the study of words and people who talked about their traumatic injuries or medical conditions.
Dr Pennebaker is a professor of pyschology at University of Texas, and has spent a lifetime looking and and counting the words people use.
He found that people who speak and write more objectively and from a popint of view of looking at causes improve more than those who don't.
Here's a snippet:
There are social words (talk, they), biological words (cheek, hands, spit), “insight” words (think, know, consider) and dozens of other groupings...Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises.
The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.
Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things".
So take that in. It means that changing the way you think about, and express words about, your diabetic condition can help improve your condition. That's good news for all of us.
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