The One Simple Tool That Can Change Your Brain (and Your Life) - 13

In this episode of Lady(ish), Autumn explores the science and soul behind journaling — and why this one simple tool can literally change your brain. Drawing from Dr. James Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing and Allison Fallon’s The Power of Writing It Down, she breaks down how writing helps regulate your emotions, strengthen your immune system, and reveal the unconscious stories that shape your life. 

You’ll learn: 

• The science behind why writing heals
• How journaling strengthens both your mind and your body
• A simple 5-step reflective writing practice for awareness and change
• Why awareness — not time — is what truly heals

Whether you’re new to journaling or returning to the page after a long break, this episode will inspire you to pick up your pen and start writing your way toward clarity, freedom, and peace.

Welcome to Lady(ish)—the podcast where real talk meets whole-self transformation. Hosted by coach, healer, and wellness guide Autumn Noble O’Hanlon, this unfiltered space is for women who want more out of life—but on their own terms.

Each week, we dive into the messy, beautiful, and often contradictory layers of wellness, covering everything from career shifts and body image to energy healing, intuitive living, fitness, burnout recovery, and creating change that actually sticks.

Whether you're chasing a new chapter, healing old wounds, or just trying to reconnect with yourself in a loud, overwhelming world—Lady(ish) is here to support your evolution. Expect honest conversations, coaching wisdom, holistic tools, spiritual insights, and permission to be a little bit of everything (and nothing you're not).

Because wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all—and neither are you.

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Transcript

Autumn Noble (00:00)

everyone, welcome back to Ladyish, your collective for mind, body and soul alignment.

Lately, I've been finding myself giving my clients a lot of the same feedback. And for many of the clients that have worked with me for many years, this is feedback that I've given them several times over many years. And it's a tool that I offer to them to work through the challenges that they're having and get clear on their next steps. But as I continually offer this resource to them, I often get pushback where they say, I've tried it and I absolutely hate it. It just doesn't work for me.

And I finally realized that I thought it might be helpful to put some information out there about this tool to help people understand why this is something that I am constantly recommending and pushing my clients to do. And until they do it and really invest the time in doing it right, they don't get it. But once they do, they always come back and say, okay, I finally did it and you're right, it's changed everything. So I wanna offer that tool to you here and provide some of the science behind

why this tool is so helpful.

So what is this deceptively simple tool? It is nothing more than journaling.

Many of us know intellectually that it's good for us, but few of us actually understand why it's so powerful. And so that's the gap that I wanna bridge today.

There is real science and real soul work that comes in to play when you start putting pen to paper.

Writing can actually change your brain, strengthen your immune system, and shift the way you see yourself.

We are entering cold and flu season. If writing can help boost your immune system, maybe this is the season of your life where you take a chance on this simple tool and see what impacts it yields for you.

So let's start with the science of writing and healing.

Dr. James Pennebaker did research on expressive writing and what he found was that when individuals engaged in this practice for just 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, the impact and the effects on their life were actually pretty dramatic.

Not only did the participants report less stress and better moods, but they also went to the doctor 43 % less for things like flu and upper respiratory infections.

What's more, months after conducting the experiment, they went back and found that the participants' immune systems were still stronger than the controlled group. So the lasting impacts of that type of an introspective engagement can last well beyond the practice.

It's pretty wild to think about us just simply writing words on a page and how that can change our body's chemistry. But if it can have that kind of an impact on yourselves and your immunity, imagine what it can have on your energetic body and your spirit, your relationships and your emotional life. Because the truth is that writing helps us get unstuck and get clear, not just mentally, but energetically.

As many of you know, I have a energy practice as well where I engage in energy work and energy healing. And I'm a firm believer that our emotions are energy within our bodies. And when we don't allow those emotions out or we don't attend to them and honor them and we just cram them down instead and move on with our day and kind of continue with the hustle. When we do that, we're like a tea kettle with so much.

pressure and energy just stuck inside our bodies and our cells. And I truly believe that keeping that energy stuck within us does have a negative impact on ourselves and our cells and can manifest as illness. And I think that Dr. Pennebaker's research on this expressive writing and how it improved our immune system really speaks to that because I believe that through writing, we're honoring those emotions, we're attending to those

discomforts or challenges in our lives and we're releasing that pressure. And in doing so, we're allowing some of that energy to escape and no longer stay buried inside of us, just boiling to get out and having negative impacts on ourselves, our bodies and our health. So in my mind, Pennebaker's work actually dovetails perfectly with my understanding of emotions and energy and how they work and impact our bodies.

Another reason that writing and journaling is so powerful is that it can be a very helpful mirror to allow us to see things that may be easy for others to see, but that we're just kind of missing as we move along with our days. There's this really amazing book out there called The Power of Writing It Down. If you haven't read it, it really goes much deeper into a lot of the things I'm talking about today, but it really bolsters the arguments that I'm making in that there is real

power and real change and evolution that can come from writing things down. But one of the most fascinating things that I read in that book was this idea that you can tell a person's quote unquote religion by looking at their calendar.

Now, anyone who has coached with me knows that everything that I do during my day is on my calendar somewhere. If it's not on my calendar, it's not getting my energy. But for those of you that don't engage in kind of obsessive compulsive calendar practice, imagine taking everything that you spend your time and energy on during any given day, any given week, any given month or year, and you put it all on your calendar.

What this practice can show us is what matters to us and not necessarily what we choose as the most important things, but where we're choosing to give our energy and thereby what we're making the most important things to us day in and day out. Gandhi says action expresses priorities. And so if we took our whole world, our whole life and put it on our calendar for a year and evaluated it,

it would give us real clarity around what we are prioritizing because it would reflect what we're giving energy to. And with that sort of picture painted, it sort of tells us about what we value in kind of our own internal personal religion.

And by religion, I don't necessarily mean sort of traditional religions in that sense. What I mean is where are you giving your allegiance, your power and your energy and focus? So if you looked at that calendar, who and what are you worshiping? Is it your job? Is it something else in your life? Is it keeping your home clean and allowing yourself to evaluate that from a clean space?

Journaling can come in here and allow us to examine where are we giving our loyalty, our focus, and our life force energy day in and day out. A powerful journaling practice invites us to ask about what we're seeing in that calendar and where we're giving our energy. And we can ask ourselves, where am I spending my time?

Why am I doing these little things? Why is this getting priority attention day in and day out? What is my quote unquote religion according to this calendar? What am I making the most important thing in my life?

At the end of my life, will I have found that I spent my time well and would I make those same choices again?

Writing can be a powerful way to really examine where we're giving our energy and analyze whether or not our rationale for giving our energy in those places and in that order continues to make sense and aligns with our greatest and highest intentions. So in this way, writing can serve as a mirror to evaluate, course correct, and ensure that we are showing up authentically and in alignment to the best of our abilities.

Next, I want to talk about the brain-body connection and how writing can facilitate this exploration. In cognitive behavioral therapy and in many coaching practices, we talk a lot about how we have thoughts. know, things happen in our life that we can't control and we have thoughts about them, thoughts that we choose even though oftentimes they're so automatic, we don't even realize that we're choosing them or have made a habit of choosing them in the past. But things happen.

We have a thought about those things that have happened and those thoughts create feelings and emotions. And from those feelings and emotions, we either take action or we don't take action. From there, we create our whole life and all of the outcomes and results that we have.

those of you that may be familiar with the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, he takes this idea a little bit farther and adds some science behind it.

What he says is that every time a thought fires a neural connection, the brain releases a corresponding and matching kind of chemical cocktail into your body that makes you feel a certain way that aligns with that thought. So if your thought is, you know, my life is terrible or I'm not very good at that, there's going to be a corresponding negative emotion of shame or guilt.

or embarrassment, something along those lines, but there will be a chemical released into your body that aligns with that thought.

And then from that energetic space, we do or don't do a lot of things. And as many of you can imagine, and I've talked about before, when you're feeling shame or guilt or embarrassment, we don't often take action to change our lives. Instead, we take small actions, we retract, we pull back, we second guess, all of the things that are counterproductive to achieving goals or changing our lives. So the net result is if we don't start paying more attention to those thoughts,

and paying more attention to our own thought patterning, we're never gonna create different results in our lives. So if we have a thought pattern of this is never gonna work, I'm not good enough, we're gonna continually spin in those thoughts, those neuropathies will continue to fire sort of automatically, because the brain likes routine, and we will continue to take action that aligns with all the negative emotions that come from those crappy thoughts. So.

What this tells us is that if we want to take different actions in our life, if we want to do something different that we haven't done before, we have to change our thinking patterns and we have to start paying attention to what those patterns are so that we can start taking different actions from different emotions and different thoughts.

That is why trying to take different action without addressing our thoughts and feelings, it never works. I often see as a personal trainer in the gym, I get a lot of people coming in that want to change their body right away and they want to get into fitness. And I hear the things that come out of their mouths about their body and about what they think about their abilities and themselves. And it's all negative stuff.

And I really make an effort to correct those statements because unless and until they start paying attention to how they talk to themselves, how they view themselves and their abilities, their actions of showing up at the gym and changing their body, they're never gonna flow in the direction that they want because they're bringing this energy of failure and shame and guilt and judgment. And so it's really, really difficult, if not impossible.

to take different actions in our lives until we let go of some of our own negative thinking patterns. This is where writing comes in. When we write down and just do a free write of everything in our brains about going to the gym or trying something new, whatever it may be, but when we write that down and we start letting the thoughts come through to the pen, to the paper, we can start seeing those patterns much more clearly. And once you can see them,

then you can start to shift them or change them. But without that awareness, you're sort of moving like a robot, not even aware of the thoughts and emotions that are following you everywhere you go. So writing is a really essential tool in rewiring those patterns and starting a new path forward in a new direction with new actions.

So I want to offer you a very simple writing practice that's sort of a five step reflection that can help you identify and understand some of your own patterns and maybe dismantle some of the control and hold that they have over you because these thoughts are persuasive. There's a part of us that believes that they are the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that's why we keep believing them. And so we have to sort of get to a space where we start to understand and see those thoughts as

just optional stories that we've been telling ourselves. And this is where journaling can really help push that through.

So the first thing we do in this writing practice is to just write the facts of the scenario. So continuing on the theme of my personal training clients, the facts of the scenario may be, you know, I have a BMI of 35. I have not been in the gym for two years, right? Very factual. I weigh, you 235 pounds, but really just writing the facts of the situation down.

without any drama, without any judgment, without any sort of descriptors, but just the facts of the situation you're ruminating about.

Next, we allow our brains to go wild and tell us the story about those facts and dig into the thoughts around those facts. So this is where all the negative self chatter and body image chatter comes into play. All those judgments, this is never going to work. It's never worked before. My body is disgusting. Like I'm just not an athlete. All of those little thoughts and judgments that feel very factual, they feel very true.

But we want to get all of those stories out on paper.

Next, we ask ourselves how those stories and thoughts make us feel and where we notice those emotions in our bodies.

When you name a feeling, you can regulate it. What science tells us, what neuroscience tells us is there's this thing called affect labeling. So when you name a feeling, the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala, starts to calm down because now we sort of understand what this thing is. We've labeled it, that feeling. The amygdala then calms down and the reasoning part of your brain, that prefrontal cortex, can now sort of light up, step in,

and help you navigate logically this thing that we're now very clear what it is, right? When it's unknown and it's uncertain and it's just sort of running amok within our bodies and our systems without naming it, the amygdala really kicks in because it's frightening and terrifying to have these emotions running through us. But when we name them, it's no longer scary. Now we just need the logical brain to sort of solve for it. And so we've written down the facts, we've written down the story about those facts and all of our thoughts about it.

And now we write the feelings that those thoughts elicit so that we can start using our rational brain to solve this puzzle. The next step then is to ask ourselves, okay, if I'm feeling guilt or shame or embarrassment, what do those emotions drive me to do or not do?

Going back to my scenario with individuals in the gym, this is very simple, right? They show up to the gym, they have all these negative thoughts about their bodies. We get out on the gym floor, they see themselves in the mirror and all of those thoughts come running back in. This is never gonna work, my body's disgusting, I'm not an athlete, I don't belong here. All of those thoughts. So over time, they stop showing up or they stop putting in the effort and sort of their energy falls into this very victim sort of giving up mentality. So they start missing appointments,

They start making excuses. They start trying less. They don't try as hard during our session. So we start to explore what all of those emotions create for us. What do we do? What do we not do? Because we're feeling those negative emotions.

This brings us to the final step and that is what is this creating for us in our life? And for those types of clients, it creates a never ending loop of being overweight, being unhealthy, never developing a positive relationship with their bodies or with the gym. And so we start to see, okay, going back to the top, there's these facts. You know, I have a BMI of 35.

and then I have all these negative thoughts about it. You know, I'm disgusting, you blah, blah, blah, all those negative thoughts, all those negative emotions, and they actually drive me to not solve the problem. They actually drive me to pull away from the situation, to hide, and engage in a pattern where I never really solve for it. This is really helpful information to have, and as we journal through it, we can start to see in our own handwriting the terrible things that we say to ourselves. But then we can also see how that makes us feel and what that creates.

in our lives.

Going through this five step process, it brings those unconscious stories to the forefront and brings conscious awareness to them by shining a light on them. You can't write for very long in this type of a practice without at some point, usually very quickly, revealing your true self on the page and your true relationship with yourself.

That is power. With that information, we can then decide what else to believe, what else to put our energy into. And that's where tools like coaching or cognitive behavioral therapy really come in and help you with that shift. But we have to start owning and recognizing our role in these patterns and the results that we create in our lives. Journaling is a way to do that.

Next, I want to talk about our limbic brain and creativity as it relates to writing.

One of the reasons that writing is so healing is because it activates the limbic part of our brain. That is the emotional kind of sensory part of our brain that thinks in images or feelings and not necessarily in words.

This part of our brain, the limbic part of our brain, it loves imagination and play and curiosity. This is a part of our brain where we can sort of lose track of time. And it connects dots that logic doesn't often see because we're thinking outside of the box and more creatively.

This is in contrast to our frontal cortex, our thinking brain that wants to manage and analyze and get everything right and in perfect order. That's the part of our brain that when we sit down to a blank page trying to journal and engage in this practice, we think, I don't know where to start. I don't know how to do this. The trick is to write from your limbic brain.

not your logical brain.

We don't edit, we don't censor, we don't overthink, we just write. I think of it as sort of a word vomit. Whatever is happening in your brain, whatever is coming up for you flows through your hand into the pen and onto the page and that's it. And we just see what comes up. That is where creativity and healing can happen. When we open the door, let go of this idea that we need to do a right

and just instead see where that limbic brain takes us and sometimes see if that limbic brain can solve problems by thinking outside of the box in a way that our frontal cortex cannot.

The last point that I want to make today about writing and why it is such an essential tool for all of us to begin engaging in is this idea that the awareness that comes from writing is the true healer. There's that common saying that time heals all wounds. I don't necessarily agree with this and I have a caveat for it. What I instead believe is that time can heal all the wounds if we use that time.

to explore what's happening in our minds and in our hearts. Without reflection and attention and awareness, those patterns will never change. We can just sit there and wait and our neural pathways are gonna keep running the way they've been running forever and nothing's going to heal and nothing's going to get better. They just dig deeper. But when we bring awareness to those neural pathways and those thought patterns, that's how we start to see everything more clearly. And that is where healing can step in.

Writing allows us to access pre-contemplation, which is that part of our experiences where we don't even really realize that there's a problem kind of going wrong in the background, right? Our crappy elevator music, like we're not paying attention to it, but we don't even realize that there's something amuck back there. Writing takes us from that kind of elevator music to, okay, what are the lyrics of that song, right? It takes us to contemplation, the act of looking thoughtfully and honestly.

at something for a long period of time. And so we sort of move from background elevator music, negative thoughts, judgments, and all the energy that we're not paying attention to. We bring it forward, we look at the lyrics, and we start to see and examine honestly, you why am I thinking that and where does that come from? And then from there, growth and healing can finally emerge.

It's that act of sitting with what hurts of writing through it instead of running away from it or avoiding it. That's where transformation begins. Going back to my earlier analogy about how when we don't pay attention to our negative emotions and our negative experiences, we're like those tea kettles that are just ready to boil because we've pushed all that energy and all those emotions down. We're just trying to get through our day. And look, I get it. Sometimes we just have to keep going. That's life.

but we have to recognize that until we release that valve on the teapot and actually see what's happening in there and what's causing us pain, without that, the only place this goes is to an explosion. Think of those times in your life where you've sort of cried at the drop of a hat. Somebody asks you some random question and the tears pop up or someone irritates you in the smallest way and you just lose your mind. That's because you're boiling beneath the surface and somebody just pushed you over the edge.

It is a sign that there is something within you, some powerful emotion that we haven't paid enough attention to, that we need to unpack and sit with. And that is how we resolve it. Burying it down, pushing it down, it doesn't go away. It just comes back stronger.

And that's why I think writing is such a beautiful practice because oftentimes we're not able to process that pain in the moment, right? We have a lot to do. You know, we're kind of running a marathon. We can't just stop and take a water break every time our emotions come up. But writing allows us to sort of go back and unpack those things at a better time, a later time, a more convenient and appropriate time. It's a way of honoring that experience that might have happened.

a day ago, a week ago, several years ago, recognizing that, in the moment, I couldn't really process it. I was just surviving. But now I'm going to honor that experience and honor that emotion and see what it has to teach me. And that's where real healing can begin.

So in conclusion, I wanna really impress upon you that writing is a very simple and cheap way to learn about the stories that we make up about our lives and that we carry with us and to explore the impact those stories have on you, how you're feeling, how you're showing up, everything you're doing and everything you're creating. With that information in hand, it's gonna give you the power to change it.

and rewrite those stories and narratives about yourself to start taking different actions to create a different future.

So many times I have really pushed and encouraged clients of mine to engage in writing and so many times they resist, but every single time they finally engage in it, they come back and they say, you're right, that was super powerful. I feel so much more clear. I feel like I've released a lot and they really get it and buy in. And so I feel like about writing the same way I felt about yoga for years. If you're resisting something so strongly,

and have that sort of visceral like, just really don't like this. There's probably something there to teach you. And I have felt the same way about yoga for a very long time. Like I love it, but I also kind of hate it. I don't want to do it, right? There's something there for me to learn, something to teach me. And I think writing is the same way. If you feel yourself very resistant to it, I think that is a green light to move forward. You found it. And there's something there that if you move forward, there's a learning or an insight that's waiting for you.

So tonight or today, I invite you to begin this practice to start really small, letting go of the idea that it has to be perfect or structured or guided or anything other than what it becomes for you. Me personally, I keep journals everywhere, in my house, in my gym bag, by my bed, in my office, in the kitchen, everywhere, because I don't want to feel like, I can't journal my journals in the other room. There's no excuse, it's right there.

So they're not organized, they're not perfect, and they're not all sequential, but they're available when I need them. And so filling your life, having a journal around you to make this practice more available, I think is the first step. And then allowing yourself to write, start with one minute, start with two minutes, and see where it goes. I promise you that if you allow yourself just to do it, let that limbic brain take the lead and just see what comes up.

you will find a practice that is deeply restorative and healing.

So a simple prompt that you can start with is this, what is on my mind at this moment? What is bugging me right now? And see where that takes you. So again, just letting everything from up here come down into the paper. No censoring, no editing, just you and the page and what's honestly happening in your brain and in your heart.

So today I really hope that you will engage in this tool to come home to your own awareness, your own wisdom, to your own story.

Thanks so much for joining me again today. If this episode resonated with you, be sure to share it with someone that might need a little bit of a reminder that healing doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to be honest.

Until next time, keep writing your story.

For any of you that might be interested in taking this work a little bit deeper, I am open to accepting a new client in my coaching programs. If you want to learn more about holistic approaches to energy care, emotional care, and practices to up-level your life and your career, no matter what aspect is weighing on you, we can coach you through it. If that sounds like something that might be beneficial to you in your life, don't hesitate to reach out, send me an email to Autumn

at theuncomfortabledream.com. If that's not something that works for you, be sure to check out my resources and tools on my website, autumnoble.com, where you can check out upcoming events, including weekly sound baths on Sundays for you to reset your energy and get ready for the week ahead. Again, thank you so much for listening, my friends. I can't wait to see you next week.