Illustration of a diary and pen

There is no sense brooding over the past, we’re often told. After all, there is always tomorrow for getting things right. Well, taking a long look at a mistake may help you avoid, or at least deal with, it in the future. A new Rutgers study, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, makes a strong case that reliving a failure, and the anxiety it prompted, through writing about the episode can improve your performance the next time and strengthen your reaction to stress, according to Brynne DiMenichi GSN’16, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University–Newark who was one of the authors of the study.