How do you manage the stress caused by rheumatoid arthritis? How do you manage the stress in your life that can cause rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups? One of the top rated things you can do to manage all kinds of stress is journaling.

Research has shown that over 47 percent of a group of test subjects with rheumatoid arthritis monitored over a period of time improved their health through journaling stressful events. In the same group 23 percent improved with daily journaling of the days' events while 21 percent declined. The reason for the decline or improvement was not determined, but the difference in health before and after journaling was significant.

So how do you get started with a journal? What kinds of things do you record? Some basic ideas would include journaling information that pertains to your rheumatoid arthritis condition-daily medication and dosage, pain experienced and the absence of pain, exercise, diet, and any stressful events.

By journaling diet and exercise you can track things that either help or cause flare-ups. Evaluating your progress with exercise and diet provides encouragement to continue as well as discovering things to avoid.

Research shows that stress affects rheumatoid arthritis and may even be linked to its cause or initial onset. So tracking stressful events helps you to determine what things you might work to avoid.

Studies show that the process of writing about stressful events often relieves the stress of the event. By thinking it through in order to write it down we analyze the situation and often see it differently or see things we can do to alleviate the stress that we wouldn't have thought about otherwise.

Stress is strongly linked to rheumatoid arthritis pain and finding ways to deal with that pain are essential to those who suffer from this disease. Journaling is an easy way to begin to deal with the stresses that both afflict us and result in greater pain from rheumatoid arthritis.