STRESS RELATED PROBLEMS REDUCED

Although psychology has tended to focus on the negative side of human nature, in recent years, positive psychology has received increasing attention. Past research has established that keeping mum about personal traumas can increase the stress associated with those events, while talking about them in a supportive atmosphere, or even writing about them in a private journal, has healing effects.

Is the same true for exceptionally positive experiences, such as mystical moments, near death experiences, and the like? Many folks who have these experiences keep mum for fear of how other folks would react.

To determine if sharing these exceptional experiences in a supportive atmosphere would have positive consequences, researchers at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology invited people who had had such experiences to participate in a special study project. These folks wrote an account of their experiences and participated in group discussions about them over a period of ten weeks.

According to the report published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, the researchers evaluated the participants, before and after the program, on a variety of attributes and qualities. The results indicated that the opportunity to write about and discuss their experiences was beneficial, improving their sense of well being, of having purpose in life, and reducing complaints of stress-related problems.