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Motherkind

MOMENT | The neuroscience behind journaling with Dr Tara Swart

Motherkind

Zoe Blaskey

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.8864 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Motherkind Moment is your place for calm, connection, and a shift in perspective before the week ahead.  This week’s Moment: The neuroscience behind journaling with Dr Tara Swart This week’s Moment is with the wonderful Dr Tara Swart. Tara is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, executive coach and the bestselling author of The Source. In this short but powerful clip, we dive into one of my all-time favourite tools for wellbeing – journaling. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll know how much I love journaling. It’s one of the simple, foundational practices that helps me stay balanced and connected every day. Tara explains the fascinating neuroscience behind why putting pen to paper is so effective. She shares how journaling helps to reduce cortisol (our main stress hormone), process emotions, and even support recovery from trauma. I found it so interesting when she described how writing – or even speaking – our thoughts out loud helps release them from our “brain-body system”, allowing us to feel calmer and clearer. We also talk about intuition, self-trust, and why we’ve become so conditioned to outsource our wisdom rather than tune in to our own inner knowing. As Tara says so beautifully, “We are all such powerful guides for ourselves – we just have to listen.” I hope this Moment inspires you to grab your pen, release those swirling thoughts onto the page, and reconnect with your intuition. Trust me, it makes a massive difference. To listen to the full episode with Dr Tara Swart, listen here. Click Here to order your copy of 'Motherkind: A New Way to Thrive in a World of Endless Expectations’ Motherkind is sponsored by Wild Nutrition, the brand raising the bar for women’s supplements. Want to feel the Food-Grown difference yourself? Get 50% off for three months at wildnutrition.com/motherkind. Ts and Cs apply. For a £100 sponsored job credit, visit Indeed.com/ Motherkind Continue the Conversation: Join our community over on Instagram for inspiration, tips, and sometimes a bit of humour to get us through our day - @zoeblaskey Join our mailing list to receive news, updates and new episode releases Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everyone and welcome to this week's Motherkind moment.

0:08.3

This is your place on a Monday for the calm connection and maybe even a shift in perspective before the week ahead.

0:15.4

This week's moment is with the wonderful Dr Tara Swart.

0:19.2

Dr. Tara is a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, coach and best-selling

0:23.6

author of the brilliant book, The Source. In this short clip, we talk about the power of journaling.

0:29.7

And if you know me, you know that I love journaling. It is one of those foundational tools that I

0:35.6

use day in, day out to keep myself on an even keel.

0:39.3

So I hope this short clip inspires you to grab your pen and get those swirling thoughts down on the page.

0:46.4

It will make a massive difference. Trust me. Here it is.

0:52.6

What's the neuroscience behind journaling?

0:55.1

Why is it so effective?

0:56.7

I know there's some incredible studies coming out at the moment around journaling and treatment for PTSD and all sorts.

1:03.4

Why is just putting pens and writing our thoughts down so powerful?

1:08.1

There's a correlation between stressful emotions or stressful events like from PTSD,

1:15.3

which is more imagery than word thoughts, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And they're

1:21.6

absolutely correlated. So if you have high cortisol levels, like we all were during a global

1:27.0

pandemic, then you will have symptoms of stress, like we all were during a global pandemic,

1:28.2

then you will have symptoms of stress, even if you're not that aware of them.

1:32.6

And that's another thing that journaling is good for,

1:34.5

things like tracking insomnia or anxiety or muscle twitching or whatever stress looks like for you.

1:41.5

And so there's two ways to deal with that.

1:43.8

And one is that you can

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