Roland Allen
speaker
51 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Roland Allen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I used to write down song lyrics, for instance, when I was a teenager. And those songs that I wrote down, I can still tell you all of the words to this day. So, I mean, those are just two of the reasons, but also another reason is it probably made you feel better at the time.
If you were writing down anything about your emotions in particular, how a given situation or an event or a person made you feel, just the act of writing it down would have made you feel measurably better.
Ah, that's an interesting question. In terms of emotional writing, this is interesting. People were writing about their own emotional states in letters for centuries before they were doing it in diaries. So it's quite normal now. It's considered quite normal to write a diary about how your day went, how you feel about things. Like I said, how you feel about...
situations people events they make you feel happy or sad and you write about it and that's a very normal thing to do in the medieval era in the renaissance era it really wasn't but they would very happily write very personal letters to their friends and family telling with all of that same stuff in it how they felt about everything so i think the letter came first in that sense
And there is a lot of research on this. I think there is something like more than 1,200 studies, and they all confirm the same basic result, which is writing stuff down about your emotions makes you physically healthier. So the first study was done by a professor called James Pennebaker.
and he's an American, and he got some of his students to just keep a short journal detailing an emotional trauma that they had experienced in their life, which he didn't have to specify what it was. It was just anything which they considered traumatic. So it might have been a bereavement or an assault or something bad which had happened to them. They wrote it down.
They didn't do anything with it subsequently. And then for the following semester, visits to the doctor in that cohort of students went down by 50%. They were so much less stressed. They were carrying around so much less bad stuff in their heads that their bodies were literally...
just working better so 50 lower visits to the doctor so that's one there's another which i think is equally incredible which is the same process but imagine that you write a an emotional diary like that about two weeks before you have an operation your body will heal
measurably faster, something like twice as fast from that physical operation if you've just dumped the bad, unhealthy or unhappy emotions out of your head and onto the page. Whether or not you throw them immediately on the fire or keep them forever or show them to a friend or to a therapist or whoever, it doesn't matter.
Just getting them out of your head and on the page will help you recover from an operation. I find that mind-blowing.
I think, well, everyone says it must be to do with reducing stress in the body. And I think people are coming to understand that stress just has incredible negative effects on the way your entire body works. But no, I don't understand the mechanics of it. I can't pretend to do.
It doesn't fix it, but what it does, because you are turning an emotion, a feeling into words, you're turning it into something which you sort of have control over. It stops being, for instance, a nameless dread or a massive overwhelming fear. When you turn that big analogue fear in your head into something which is digital and which is concrete and which is measured,
by writing it down, that is in fact, in fact, it's a mindful process, because you're identifying your feelings and naming them. And that is what reduces the stress.
Oh, the glorious variety. I mean, it's fantastic. But since people have started making notebooks, so let's go back to 1300 again, you had huge business ledgers, which were so heavy, sort of pages a foot high and a foot wide, hundreds of pages, which were so heavy, you could barely lift them.
But you also had tiny little pocket notebooks for going around and making your everyday records, keeping track of your expenses, for instance. And then over time, notebooks get more and more specialised into different ways. So you start to have the date book and then you start to have the sort of dated journal, which gives you a whole page to write about your day.
And then you go up like legal pads, which I think are the late 19th century. And then you have spiral binding, which is the early 20th century as people invent these new formats, which are practical in their own way. And it's glorious variety. I love it.
What I love about it is, for instance, musical staves appearing on the page. That made musicians' lives a lot easier very quickly and composers' lives much easier. Putting lines on the page was something that people did anyway if they wanted to write more neatly. You know, they would rule them by hand themselves.
And then what I love about this is that even sometimes when you see lines on the page today, they haven't necessarily been printed. They've been put on by these sort of arrangements of lots of pens in parallel and the paper is moved underneath them. So they're actually drawn on the page rather than printed. And I like that very much.
Now, there you're looking at a cultural difference, because over here in Europe, we don't have three ring binders. We have two ring binders. So I can't answer that, I'm afraid. Why that is, I've got no idea. But yeah, three ring binders I find kind of ugly. Two ring binders are slightly more elegant, I suppose.
Yeah, it's one of those differences. It's like letter paper versus A4 paper, I guess. Why Americans stick with letter and Europeans have moved everything on to A4 and A3 and A naught and so on is again, what is A4 and A3?
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