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Job Loss Journaling: What the Research Actually Shows
Unlike most topics we write about, this one has a direct experiment. In a 1994 study of 63 recently unemployed professionals, those assigned to write about their thoughts and emotions surrounding the job loss were reemployed more quickly than those who were not. It is one small study from three decades ago, and it tested writing, not speaking. A separate meta-analysis of 104 studies explains why the feelings are worth taking seriously in the first place: unemployed people had lower psychological and physical wellbeing than employed people.
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What losing a job does to wellbeing
A 2005 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology combined 104 empirical studies, with 437 effect sizes, on wellbeing during unemployment. Unemployed people had lower psychological and physical wellbeing than their employed counterparts. How long someone had been unemployed mattered, and so did who was studied: the link with mental health differed between school leavers and mature workers. The unemployment rate at the time and the level of unemployment benefits did not significantly change that relationship.
What goes with doing better while unemployed
Within unemployed samples, the same meta-analysis looked at what was related to wellbeing. How central work was to the person, their coping resources (personal, social, financial, and having structure to their time), how they appraised the situation, and the coping strategies they used were more strongly related to wellbeing than human capital or demographic variables. Put plainly: in this body of research, how a person was resourced and how they made sense of the loss told you more about their wellbeing than their qualifications or their age did. These are associations across studies, not proof that changing one of them changes the outcome.
The writing experiment
In 1994 the Academy of Management Journal published an experiment with 63 recently unemployed professionals. Some were assigned to write about their thoughts and emotions surrounding the job loss. They were reemployed more quickly than the participants who were not. That is the finding as the paper's summary states it, and it is a striking one, because the writing was about feelings and the outcome was a job.
What this does not show
The experiment had 63 participants, all professionals, and was published in 1994. We read it through its indexed summary and could not verify the details of the comparison groups, how much faster reemployment was, or why the effect happened, so we have left those out. We are not aware of whether it has been repeated at larger scale, and one small study should be held loosely. It also tested writing. We could not find a study of voice recording after a job loss. And nothing here says that expressing feelings replaces the practical work of looking for a job.
What that means if you want to try it
Do what the participants were asked to do: put your thoughts and feelings about losing the job into words, the anger and the embarrassment included, before you sit down to the next application. Keep it separate from the job search itself. Phi's 60-second voice entries are one place to do that out loud. That is a format, not a tested treatment: the experiment above studied writing, not voice journaling, and it is one small study.
Sources
Spera, S. P., Buhrfeind, E. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (1994). Expressive writing and coping with job loss. Academy of Management Journal, 37(3), 722–733.McKee-Ryan, F. M., Song, Z., Wanberg, C. R., & Kinicki, A. J. (2005). Psychological and physical well-being during unemployment: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(1), 53–76.Say it out loud instead.
Sixty seconds a day, in your own voice. Phi keeps it and shows you what returns.
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