Insight | Write it out: expressive writing beats venting for stress

The Short Version

When something painful is stuck in your head, writing about it in a structured way tends to help more than venting about it to a sympathetic friend. Andrew Huberman lays out James Pennebaker's expressive writing protocol, four private sessions of 15 to 30 minutes of continuous writing about the same difficult experience, which more than 200 studies link to lower anxiety, better sleep, stronger immune responses and relief in conditions from arthritis to irritable bowel syndrome [1]. Psychologist Ethan Kross explains why: writing forces sentences, and sentences force structure onto the chaos of looping thoughts, while venting to someone who only validates you can leave you feeling closer to them but just as stuck, or even worse [2]. Huberman's grief episode shows a gentler version, writing about a lost loved one, which helped some people more than others [3], and therapist Lori Gottlieb warns that feelings pushed down don't disappear: they turn into anxiety, insomnia, numbness and depression [4]. The shared lesson is that emotion needs an outlet, but the outlet works best when it builds a coherent story instead of replaying the same complaint.

What They Said

Huberman on Pennebaker: the four-session protocol

Huberman devotes an entire solo episode to one protocol, something he says he has rarely if ever done: the expressive writing method developed by psychologist James Pennebaker, first at Southern Methodist University and now at the University of Texas at Austin [1]. He learned about it from Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel and was surprised to find it backed by more than 200 peer-reviewed studies [1].

The original setup. Pennebaker's first study, published in 1986, brought undergraduates into the lab one at a time to write for 15 to 30 minutes about the most difficult, even traumatic, experience of their lives [1]. They were told to keep writing the entire time without stopping, to ignore grammar and spelling, and that no one would ever read what they wrote; they could tear it up afterward [1]. Later studies showed typing works as well as handwriting [1]. The core instruction Huberman reads is: "write down your deepest emotions and thoughts as they relate to the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it" [1]. Participants were encouraged to connect the experience to their childhood, parents, siblings, loved ones, career or schooling, and to who they have been, who they are and who they want to become [1].

What to write about. If you don't have a true trauma, you can write about your most stressful experience or conflict [1]. Suitable topics include things you worry about too much, deliberately avoid thinking about, dream about, or feel are affecting your life in unhealthy ways [1]. Huberman cites psychiatrist Paul Conti's definition of trauma, any experience that changes the brain or body so that we function less well emotionally, behaviorally or cognitively afterward, and notes that by that standard many people carry some trauma [1].

What to include. Pennebaker asked for three things: the facts (what happened, or what didn't), the emotions you felt at the time and the ones you feel now while writing, and any links that come to mind between the experience and anything else, past, present or future, however obvious or random [1]. Aim for loosely complete sentences so you can read it later, but you are writing only for yourself: not for an audience, a novel, a eulogy or an autobiography [1].

The schedule. The key is writing about the same experience four times, either on four consecutive days or once a week across a month; either works [1]. Studies found no meaningful difference between 15- and 30-minute sessions, though some experiences need more time [1]. After four sessions you are done: unlike daily habits, this is a short-term intervention whose benefits last months or even years [1].

How it differs from other journaling. Huberman contrasts it with morning pages (stream-of-consciousness writing to clear clutter), gratitude journaling (which has its own proven benefits), and diary-style journaling like his own composition notebooks from the 1990s [1]. Pennebaker's method is the opposite of gratitude journaling: it deliberately confronts the worst experiences [1]. That makes it hard. Participants often cry, hold their breath and feel as though they've run a mental marathon [1]. Studies gave them 5 to 15 minutes afterward to settle down, and Huberman strongly recommends that buffer: if you allow 20 minutes to write, allow about 10 to recover, breathe normally, splash cool water on your face and remind yourself you made it through [1].

Low and high expressors. People tend to fall into two groups, unrelated to introversion or extroversion [1]. Low expressors use less emotional language and show less physiological distress (in cortisol, skin conductance, heart rate and blood pressure) during the first session; high expressors use many negative emotion words and show much more distress on day one [1]. Over the four sessions the patterns reverse: low expressors become more distressed as they open up, while high expressors' distress drops sharply [1]. Both groups benefit equally, reporting much lower distress three weeks, three months and even years later [1]. Huberman's advice is to write in whatever style comes naturally [1].

The words change. In a Pennebaker study titled "natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being," people who habitually use more negative emotion words tend to have more negative emotional states, and those using more positive ones feel better, on both mental and physical measures [1]. Pennebaker's later work suggests the words we use may also shape how we feel, not just reflect it [1]. Across the four entries about the same event, people use fewer negative words, more positive ones, and a more coherent, story-like narrative [1]. Huberman suggests an optional self-analysis a week or more after the fourth session: reread all four, circle negative words and draw squares around positive ones [1].

Measured benefits. Across studies, the protocol has reduced chronic anxiety and insomnia and improved symptoms in people with arthritis, lupus, cancer treatment, fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome [1]. It has also reduced symptoms of depression and PTSD, though Huberman stresses it isn't a cure, and it has improved memory and decision-making [1]. Crucially, control groups also wrote for the same amount of time about everyday topics, so the benefits come specifically from the emotional content [1]. One study drew blood before the writing and six weeks in, isolated T lymphocytes and challenged them with concanavalin A, a compound that mimics infection; cells from people who wrote about trauma responded more strongly than controls', and those who disclosed the most showed the strongest responses [1]. Pennebaker's interest in the mind-body link began with his own childhood asthma, which he noticed flared around certain family members regardless of season [1].

Huberman's own plan. He listed two or three candidate experiences, ranked them by severity and chose the middle one for his first attempt [1]. He plans to write once a week for four weeks rather than four days in a row, because consecutive days feel too intense for him, and to stick to the same event for all four sessions [1].

Ethan Kross: why venting backfires and writing helps

Kross, who directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, studies "chatter, which he describes this way: I think of chatter as a dark side of the inner voice [2]. Chatter is looping over the same negative material without progress, like asking over and over why something happened or calling yourself an idiot [2]. It soaks up attention, leaving less for problem-solving and creativity [2]. He calls it transdiagnostic: filled with sad thoughts, it pushes toward depression; with fears, toward anxiety; with traumatic memories, toward trauma [2]. But experiencing chatter doesn't mean you have a disorder: welcome to the human condition" [2].

The problem with venting. Huberman opens the episode by previewing "data pointing to the fact that venting your negative emotions to others is actually bad. It tends to amplify bad emotions" [2]. Kross's own framing is more careful. "Venting is good for strengthening bonds between people," he says, but if a friend only validates you without helping you see the bigger picture, you leave feeling closer yet the problem remains, and it can become co-rumination [2]. Good advisers first empathize, then help broaden perspective and problem-solve [2]. Research by Bernard Rimé shows we are strongly driven to share emotions [2]. Kross adds that technology has changed venting: before social media, finding someone to talk to took time, which let emotions fade, and face-to-face or phone conversations gave feedback that kept emotions in check [2]. Texting and posting remove both, which may help explain cyberbullying and the spread of moral outrage [2].

Why writing works. Kross explains the mechanism in terms of structure. Turning inner chaos into a story "is essentially what the penny baker writing cues you to do because we are taught when we write, we write in sentences. There's a structure to our writing that we impose on our thinking. Up here in our minds, it's a free for all. It can go in all sorts of directions and that chaos is in part what can make chatter so aversive" [2]. So "the writing provides a tool to structure your thinking. Talking has a similar modality" [2]. In his studies, both writing and talking helped people feel better about a chatter-provoking experience compared with simply thinking about it [2]. His description of Pennebaker's method is slightly different from Huberman's: writing freely about a difficult experience for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days, backed by hundreds of studies [2].

The catch: people don't do it. During COVID, Kross's team found that "expressive writing when people used it was really, really useful. It moved the needle on their COVID anxiety, but it was an underutilized tool. People didn't do it very much. And I think that's in part because it is somewhat effortful" [2]. Those studies also showed there is no one-size-fits-all solution: people typically used three or four tools a day, and which ones worked varied widely [2]. As he puts it, he can go through every tool in the toolbox, but "I can't prescribe combinations of tools" for a given person yet [2].

Other tools in the kit. Kross's first line of defense is distancing: distanced self-talk, using his own name and the word you to coach himself as if advising a friend, and mental time travel, asking how he'll feel about something tomorrow morning when chatter wakes him at 2 a.m. [2]. If those aren't enough, he walks in nature and calls members of his chatter advisory board [2]. He also uses music, touch, organizing his space and WOOP goal-setting [2]. And he challenges blanket rules like always confront problems: his grandmother, who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, rarely discussed it but let her emotions come out on one remembrance day each year, and research supports that kind of flexibility [2]. He stresses that "all emotions are functional when they are experiencing the right proportions, not too intensely and not too long" [2].

On helping others vent. Kross warns that unsolicited help can backfire: "if you see someone suffering and you volunteer to help them and they haven't asked you to help them, that can blow up in your face" [2]. He recommends invisible support instead, like quietly picking up an overwhelmed partner's dry cleaning [2].

Huberman on grief: writing to the person you lost

In his grief episode, Huberman describes grief as a motivational state, a yearning for someone permanently out of reach, and explains that the brain maps relationships along space, time and closeness [3]. Healing means keeping the closeness while remapping where and when the person can be found [3].

He describes a study in Biological Psychology of 35 bereaved people [3]. One group wrote about their deepest thoughts and emotions about their loss, including a letter to the person who died, three times a week; a control group wrote about how they spent their time [3]. Overall, there was no difference between the groups [3]. But when researchers looked at vagal tone, the ability to slow the heart through the vagus nerve, "a subset of individuals who had a high degree of vagal tone seemed to get more benefit from this writing type exercise" [3]. Huberman is candid about the evidence: "this is one study and I would consider it fairly preliminary with 35 subjects" [3]. Still, he says it set the stage for later work showing that "accessing these states of emotionality by writing or thinking about somebody is quite powerful in terms of engaging the bodily states and the mind states associated with the attachment" [3].

He suggests strengthening vagal tone by consciously slowing your heart on the exhale for one to five minutes a day, since inhales speed the heart and exhales slow it [3]. He also notes that this may help people who struggle to feel their attachment, while those already overwhelmed by intense grief may not need more of it [3].

His core grief tool, which he calls "rational grieving," fits alongside writing: set aside 5 to 45 minutes to deliberately feel the full depth of your attachment while staying anchored in the present, and during that time avoid counterfactual what-if thinking, which he says strengthens the old memory map rather than loosening it [3]. He acknowledges "This is obviously a tightrope walk" [3]. And he explains the two-part logic of change: plasticity is triggered by focusing on the attachment, "maybe even writing about the attachment to the person as was described in that previous study," but "the literal rewiring of connections occurs during deep sleep and in what I call non-sleep deep rest or NSDR" [3]. He stresses that therapists, psychiatrists and bereavement groups are valuable, especially for complicated grief [3].

Lori Gottlieb: what happens when emotion has no outlet

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, supplies the warning behind the whole practice: suppressed feelings become physical and psychological ailments [4]. She says unresolved emotions often show up as anxiety, insomnia, addictions, burnout and emotional numbness [4]. "Depression is not sadness. It's what happens when we suppress sadness" [4]. Emotional numbness, in her view, isn't peace but being overwhelmed by unacknowledged pain [4]. She names unprocessed shame, the sense that "I am bad" rather than "I did something bad," as a root cause of depression, addiction, emotional disconnection and chronic inner pain [4].

Her therapy is itself a kind of rewriting. She says we all carry childhood-formed stories that haven't been revisited with adult eyes, and therapy becomes an editorial process that revises a faulty narrative [4]. She calls being stuck a psychological "writer's block" [4]. One exercise she recommends is rewriting a key story from your past through the lens of the other people involved, not to excuse harm but to gain compassion, expand perspective and break out of a victim-only narrative [4]. If we don't revise the story, she warns, "we will relive it" [4].

Gottlieb also adds a check on venting's social side. She distinguishes "idiot compassion" (blind agreement, "you're totally right, they're horrible") from "wise compassion" (truth with kindness, lovingly holding up a mirror) [4]. That matches Kross's point that a friend who only validates you can keep you stuck [2]. Her suggestion for supporting someone in pain is to ask, "How can I be helpful to you right now?" [4], which echoes Kross's warning about unsolicited help [2]. She also warns couples against "pain competition," trying to prove whose pain is more valid [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: emotion needs an outlet. Gottlieb's warning that suppressed feelings turn into illness [4] and Huberman's evidence that confronting painful experiences in writing reduces anxiety, insomnia and physical symptoms [1] point the same direction. Kross adds that simply thinking about a problem did less than writing or talking about it [2].

Agreement: structure is the active ingredient. Kross says writing imposes sentence structure on chaotic thought [2]; Huberman says the four sessions produce a more coherent, story-like narrative with fewer negative words [1]; Gottlieb frames therapy as editing a faulty story [4]. Across all three, the benefit comes from making sense of the experience, not from simply expressing it.

Agreement: venting alone is not enough. Kross says venting builds bonds but can become co-rumination if it lacks perspective [2]; Gottlieb says "idiot compassion" feels supportive but doesn't help [4]. Neither says never share; both say sharing should lead somewhere.

Nuance on how strongly venting is condemned. Huberman's episode introduction says venting "tends to amplify bad emotions" [2]. Kross's own words in the summary are more balanced: venting is good for strengthening bonds, and the trouble comes when it's all validation [2]. The fair reading is that venting fails when it replays the problem without widening the view.

Differences in the protocol. Huberman describes four sessions of 15 to 30 minutes, on consecutive days or weekly [1]. Kross describes 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days [2]. The grief study used letters three times a week [3]. These are variations on the same idea rather than conflicting instructions, but they show there's flexibility in dose.

Where the evidence is mixed. The grief writing study found no overall difference between groups, only a benefit for people with high vagal tone, and Huberman calls it preliminary [3]. Kross's COVID data show that writing helped when used but was rarely used [2], and he says no single tool works for everyone [2]. Huberman notes the protocol isn't a cure for depression or PTSD [1]. And Kross's grandmother's story shows that constant confrontation isn't always needed; flexible attention can be healthy [2]. So writing is well supported, but it is one tool among several, and it doesn't suit everyone at every moment.

Why It Works

Coherence and the prefrontal cortex. Huberman's proposed mechanism centers on the prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, predicting outcomes, our sense of self and coherent narratives, and helps regulate subcortical structures like the hypothalamus and amygdala [1]. Neuroimaging, including work from Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA, shows that recalling traumatic events lowers prefrontal activity and increases subcortical activity [1]. Trauma seems to leave a fractured representation: no coherent story, a mismatch between bodily state and thoughts, and confusion about who was responsible, which leads people to push the memory away [1]. Writing the same story four times forces more coherence and truth, and appears over time to raise baseline prefrontal activity [1].

Truth-telling. Huberman cites a PNAS study, "Increasing Honesty in Humans with non-invasive brain stimulation," in which people reporting private dice rolls for money claimed matches 68% of the time when chance predicts 50%, and stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex brought reports down to the honest 50% [1]. Other studies show truth-telling raises prefrontal activity and that the effect persists [1]. In his words, the truth-telling is the stimulus and the emotion is what allows plasticity to occur [1].

Emotion opens the door; sleep does the rewiring. In adults, neuroplasticity is triggered by heightened emotional states with high levels of dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine, while the rewiring happens later during sleep and non-sleep deep rest [1]. His grief episode states the same two-part process [3]. That is one reason the writing feels bad at first: the distress is part of what makes change possible [1].

From brain to body. A stronger prefrontal cortex can better keep the autonomic nervous system from firing when it shouldn't, which would explain less anxiety and better sleep [1]. Because the brain directly innervates the spleen and thymus and communicates with the bone marrow, it could also explain the immune effects [1].

Why venting differs. Kross's explanation is that chatter is a loop without progress [2]; venting to someone who only agrees keeps the loop going with company [2]. Writing, by contrast, is private, structured and self-directed, and the four entries become progressively more coherent and less negative [1][2]. Gottlieb's point supplies the other side: suppression doesn't work either, because unexpressed emotion finds its way out as symptoms [4].

Words shape feelings. Pennebaker's research suggests the words we habitually use track, and may shape, how we feel [1], which fits Kross's broader case that how we talk to ourselves changes our emotional state [2].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Good fits. A specific painful experience you keep avoiding, worrying about or dreaming about [1]; chronic anxiety or insomnia [1]; chatter that loops at night [2]; stress-related physical symptoms [1]; and grief, especially for people who can regulate their state well [3].

Use with care. The protocol is emotionally hard: expect to feel low, angry or sad right after, especially as a high expressor [1]. Don't write just before bed [1]. Keep it private or stored securely, and if you share it, choose a mental health professional, because hearing someone else's trauma can itself be distressing [1]. If it becomes too much or disrupts your life, stop [1]. For people already overwhelmed by grief, intensifying the attachment may not be what they need [3]. If you're dealing with trauma, depression, PTSD or complicated grief, work with a therapist or doctor; the writing is compatible with therapy and medication and may speed progress, but it is not a substitute [1][3].

When venting still has a place. Talking also structures thinking [2], and venting strengthens bonds [2]. The key is a listener who offers wise compassion, empathy followed by perspective and problem-solving, rather than just agreement [2][4].

When not to force it. Kross's research supports flexible attention: focus on a problem when useful, step away when not, and return if it keeps resurfacing [2]. He says he is at peace with his parents' divorce and doesn't need to revisit it [2]. Healthy distraction is different from avoidance through substances [2].

What To Do With It

1. Pick one experience. Choose the most difficult or stressful experience you're still carrying, or, like Huberman, rank two or three candidates and start with the middle one [1].
2. Book four sessions. Plan four sessions of 15 to 30 minutes about the same event, on four consecutive days or once a week for four weeks [1]. Kross's shorter variant, 15 to 20 minutes on one to three days, also has research behind it [2].
3. Write without stopping. Ignore grammar and spelling, write for yourself only, and follow the instruction to write your deepest emotions and thoughts about the experience and really let go [1].
4. Cover facts, feelings and links. Include what happened, what you felt then and feel now, and every connection to your past, present or future that comes to mind [1].
5. Build in recovery. Leave about half your writing time to settle afterward (for 20 minutes of writing, about 10 minutes of recovery), breathe normally, splash cool water on your face, and don't write right before bed [1].
6. Keep it private. Tear it up, delete it or store it securely; share only with a mental health professional [1].
7. Reread later, once. A week or more after the last session, reread all four entries and mark negative and positive words to see how your story changed [1].
8. Replace venting with a better conversation. Seek friends who empathize and then help you see the bigger picture, and offer the same wise compassion to others by asking how you can help rather than jumping in [2][4].
9. For grief, write to the person. Consider writing about your loss or a letter to the person who died, alongside slow exhale breathing for one to five minutes a day to build vagal tone, and set aside time to feel the attachment without what-if thinking [3].
10. Stop if it's too much, and get help when needed. If the writing overwhelms you or disrupts your life, stop and talk to a professional [1][3]; unexpressed emotion doesn't vanish, so find a safer outlet rather than burying it [4].

Sources

1. A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health · Huberman Lab
2. How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience · Huberman Lab
3. The Science & Process of Healing from Grief · Huberman Lab
4. Overcome Shame, Process Pain & Maximize Mental Health with Lori Gottlieb · The School of Greatness