Autistic nervous system regulation is often the reason people start journaling, and “just write out your feelings” is usually the first advice they get. For many autistic adults, that advice under-delivers. Some find it leaves them more wound up than when they started. This post is for autistic adults who tried journaling to calm down and quietly concluded they were bad at it. It explains the specific reasons the usual approach can miss an autistic nervous system, and what tends to help instead.
Tallulah was 37, a veterinary technician, identified as autistic four years earlier. A previous therapist had suggested she write out her feelings every night before bed. “So I did,” she told me. “I’d sit down and write three pages about the day. By the end I was more upset than when I started, and then I couldn’t sleep. After a month I stopped. I figured I was doing it wrong, or I was just bad at this.” She paused. “Honestly, I figured I was bad at therapy too.”
In this blog post, I’ll look at why “write out your feelings” became the default advice and why it is a reasonable thing to have tried. Then I’ll walk through three specific ways it can under-deliver for an autistic nervous system: when feelings haven’t arrived as words, when body signals are hard to read, and when writing turns into replay. Finally, I’ll describe what tends to work better, so you can try something that fits rather than trying harder at something that doesn’t.
3 Key Takeaways
- “Write out your feelings” assumes you can find the feeling, name it, and stop when you’ve said enough. For many autistic adults, each of those steps is the hard part.
- If journaling has left you more activated, that is information about the method, not evidence that you are bad at journaling or bad at regulating.
- Journaling for regulation tends to work better when it starts with the body, stays short and bounded, and offers words to choose from rather than asking you to produce them.
The Advice Everyone Reaches for First
“Write out your feelings” is good advice for a lot of people, and it didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of decades of research on expressive writing, which began with a simple and surprising set of studies.
In one of the earliest, students wrote about a traumatic or upsetting experience for a short session on four days in a row. Those who wrote about both the facts and their feelings had fewer visits to the health center in the months that followed. But the same students felt worse right after writing, with more negative mood and higher blood pressure in the moment (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). The benefit came later. The immediate effect was arousal.
That detail rarely makes it into the advice. The studies were short, time-limited, and spaced across a few days. Nobody was asked to write three pages every night right before trying to sleep. And the people in them were not chosen for having nervous systems that take longer than average to settle once they are stirred up.
So if you tried “write out your feelings” and it didn’t go well, you weren’t naive. You took reasonable, widely repeated advice that was built on a particular kind of person and a particular set of conditions. Nobody told you the conditions mattered.
When the Feeling Hasn’t Arrived as Words Yet
The first assumption inside “write out your feelings” is that the feelings are there, waiting to be written. For many autistic adults, they aren’t, at least not as words. Something is clearly happening. It might be a heaviness, a buzz, an urge to be alone, or a sense that the day went wrong. Turning that into “I feel hurt” or “I feel anxious” is a separate step, and sometimes it doesn’t happen for hours or days.
That difficulty has a name: alexithymia, which means difficulty identifying and describing emotions. It is common in autistic people, but not universal. In a meta-analysis of studies using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, 49.93% of autistic participants scored in the alexithymia range, compared with 4.89% of the neurotypical comparison participants in those studies (Kinnaird et al., 2019).
Now picture what happens when someone with that profile sits down to write out their feelings. The instruction asks for the one thing that is hardest to produce. What comes out instead is often the story of the day, retold in detail, with mounting frustration that the “real” feeling won’t show up. That frustration becomes the loudest feeling on the page. Tallulah described it exactly: “I’d write and write, and I never got to the bottom of it. I just got more annoyed that there wasn’t a bottom.”
If that sounds familiar, it isn’t a failure of effort. You were asked to translate before the words were available.
When the Body’s Signals Are Hard to Read
The second assumption is that you can tell, from inside, how stirred up you are and whether the writing is helping. That depends on interoception, the sense of what is happening inside your body: heartbeat, breathing, tension, hunger, fatigue.
Interoception in autistic adults is more complicated than “poor body awareness.” In one study, autistic adults were less accurate than comparison participants at sensing their own heartbeat, yet rated themselves as more sensitive to their body’s signals. It was the size of that gap, between how accurate people were and how accurate they believed they were, that went along with higher anxiety (Garfinkel et al., 2016).
In everyday terms, this can mean you don’t notice you are getting more activated as you write until you are well past the point of easy settling. You finish a page feeling “fine,” then discover an hour later that your jaw is clenched and sleep isn’t coming. The writing didn’t feel like it was stirring you up. It was.
What I notice with clients is that this is where a lot of self-blame starts. “I don’t even know when I’m upset” becomes another item on the list of things supposedly wrong with you. It is more accurate to say your body’s signals arrive late or quietly, and a regulation practice has to account for that rather than assume them.
When Writing Turns Into Replay
The third assumption is that writing about a hard moment will help you process it and move on. Sometimes it does. For many autistic adults, though, open-ended writing about a difficult interaction turns into replay: going back over the exact words, the tone, what you should have said, what they might have meant. Many autistic people remember interactions in vivid, specific detail, and a blank page with no end point invites you to relive every second of it.
Replay feels productive because it is so thorough. But in my practice, I often see it keep the nervous system in the moment of threat rather than letting it leave. You are not processing the conversation so much as having it again, with your body reacting as if it were happening now.
This is part of why the timing of “every night before bed” can backfire. Replaying a hard day right before sleep asks a nervous system that is already tired to do one more round of high-alert work, then switch off.
What Helps Instead
None of this means journaling can’t help with autistic nervous system regulation. It means the method needs to fit. These are the adjustments I suggest most often. Treat them as options to try and adapt, not rules.
Start With the Body, Not the Feeling
Instead of “How do I feel?”, try “What is my body doing right now?” Write three short lines: shoulders, breath, temperature, energy. “Shoulders up. Breathing high. Hands cold. Want quiet.” That is a complete entry. You are recording signals, not interpreting them, which skips the translation step that alexithymia makes so hard.
Choose a Word Rather Than Produce One
Naming a feeling does seem to help regulate it, and how it was studied is worth knowing. In a brain-imaging study, people looking at emotional faces showed a quieter amygdala response when they matched the face to an emotion word than when they matched it to a non-emotional label. They weren’t asked to come up with the word. They chose between two (Lieberman et al., 2007).
That points to a gentler way in. Keep a short list of feeling words, or a feelings wheel, beside your journal, and pick the closest one rather than searching your mind for it. “Closest” is good enough. “Some kind of tired-angry” is a perfectly useful entry.
Keep It Short and Bounded
Set a limit before you start: three minutes, five lines, one page. A clear end point protects you from replay. When the time is up, stop, even mid-sentence. You can come back tomorrow if something still needs saying.
Regulate Before You Reflect
If you are already activated, writing about the cause can wait. Settle your body first, with movement, pressure, a cold drink, a walk, or a few minutes of the vagus nerve exercises for autistic adults I describe elsewhere. Then, if you still want to, write a sentence or two about what happened. Reflection lands better on a calmer body.
Move the Timing
If writing at night stirs you up, try another time: after work, before a transition, or in the morning with a coffee. Some people find regulation journaling works best in the middle of the day, as a brief check-in rather than a review.
Tallulah switched to three body lines in the car before she drove home from work, and a feelings list taped inside the cover of her notebook. “It feels like cheating,” she said, a few weeks in. “I write three lines and I’m done. But I sleep.” She still writes longer entries sometimes, on weekends, when she has the energy for it.
It Was Never a Willpower Problem
If you have tried journaling and felt worse, it is worth saying plainly: you didn’t fail at journaling. You used a method designed around someone who can find their feelings in words, read their body’s signals quickly, and stop once they’ve said enough. For many autistic adults, none of those can be assumed.
Trying harder at a method that doesn’t fit usually produces more of the same result, plus more self-blame. Changing the method is not giving up. It is taking your own nervous system seriously.
Other kinds of journaling serve other purposes. If you want to understand how emotions show up for you over time, my post on autistic emotional processing goes into that. If you want to work with the stories you’ve been told about yourself, the post on narrative therapy for autistic adults is the place to start. Regulation journaling is narrower: its only job is to help your body settle.
Regulation First, Words When They’re Ready
Journaling for autistic nervous system regulation works best when it follows your nervous system rather than leading it. Body first. Words chosen, not dragged up. Short, bounded, and timed for when you can afford to be stirred. The deeper writing can come later, on a calmer day, if you want it.
Tallulah told me the most useful thing she learned wasn’t a technique. “I always thought the journal was where I was supposed to figure everything out,” she said. “Now it’s just where I check in. It turns out that’s enough most days.”
If you’d like help finding a regulation practice that fits the way your body actually works, therapy for neurodivergent adults can be a place to work that out together. You’re also welcome to Book a FREE 20-minute “Clarity & Connection” Zoom session.
I’m Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788. I work with neurodiverse couples and neurodivergent adults, including autistic adults who tried journaling to calm down and came away feeling worse.
Client stories referenced in this post are composites, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does journaling make my anxiety worse?
Open-ended writing about upsetting things often raises arousal in the moment, even when it helps over time. If you also find it hard to name feelings or notice body signals, you may not realize how activated you’re getting until well afterward. Shorter, body-first entries with a clear end point usually work better. If journaling keeps leaving you worse, it is fine to stop and try a different approach.
What is the best journaling method for autistic adults?
There isn’t one best method, because autistic adults differ a great deal. For regulation specifically, many people do well with a few lines describing body sensations, a list of feeling words to choose from, and a time limit. Others prefer voice notes, drawing, or simple checkboxes. The right method is the one that leaves you calmer afterward.
How long should I journal to regulate my nervous system?
Often less than you’d think. Three to five minutes, or a handful of short lines, is plenty for a regulation check-in. Longer reflective writing can be useful, but it does a different job and is better saved for times when you have the capacity to be stirred up and settle again.
What if I can’t tell what I’m feeling at all?
Start with what you can observe: your posture, breathing, energy, temperature, and what you want to do or avoid. Those are real data, and they are often enough to guide what you need next. Over time, many people find patterns emerge that make naming feelings easier. If it never feels easy, that isn’t a failure; it may simply be how you’re wired.
Is it okay to journal before bed?
For some people it’s soothing. For others, especially if bedtime writing turns into replaying the day, it makes sleep harder. If you notice you’re more wound up after writing at night, try moving the practice earlier, or keep bedtime entries to a few body lines and one thing that went okay.
References
Garfinkel, S. N., Tiley, C., O’Keeffe, S., Harrison, N. A., Seth, A. K., & Critchley, H. D. (2016). Discrepancies between dimensions of interoception in autism: Implications for emotion and anxiety. Biological Psychology, 114, 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.12.003
Kinnaird, E., Stewart, C., & Tchanturia, K. (2019). Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2018.09.004
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274
