According to new research in Psychological Science, writing down your negative thoughts and tossing them in the garbage can erase your bad mood. …

In one of Petty’s experiments, 83 people were asked to write down thoughts on their body image, then either throw them away or keep them. The results: People who kept their thoughts were more likely to side in favor of their notes–so if they wrote negative notes, they rated themselves more negatively–but those who trashed their thoughts saw no change in how they rated their bodies.