If you improvise with or teach more than 10 people, you’ve already done improv with someone who has alexithymia. You probably just didn’t know it.
Alexithymia affects about 10% of the general population. Rates are higher among autistic people, people with depression, and youth. It’s not in the DSM and it’s not a diagnosis. It’s a trait that affects how a person identifies and experiences emotions, which puts it right in the middle of improv.
This page covers episodes 18 and 19 of Your Improv Brain. Episode 18 covers what alexithymia is and how it affects scenes and performances. Episode 19 covers what students and teachers can do to work with it in class and at jams.
These two episodes are about what that actually looks like in a scene, in a class, and on a team. You can find them embedded below.
What alexithymia is
The word itself means “without words for emotions.” That’s a reasonable starting point.
A person with alexithymia might feel something physical in the moment but not be able to attach a word to it. They might feel fear, feel it in their body, and have no way to identify or describe it as fear. They might think about emotions in a very concrete way, looking for the right or the wrong answer, and feel stuck when the label doesn’t land.
Delayed emotional processing is part of this too. The emotion might arrive fully formed well after the fact, once there’s been time to think it through. In real time, during a scene, there can just be nothing to grab and hold on to.
This is experienced on a spectrum. Some people have a mild version of it. For others it’s more significant. It also compounds with other things. Autistic people often have interoception differences, meaning the body signals themselves are harder to read, and when you combine that with alexithymia you can end up with both the signal and the labelling being unreliable.
About half of all autistic people are considered to be alexithymic, though alexithymia is also distinct from autism and occurs in people without any other neurodivergent diagnosis.
Why emotional labels are a specific problem in improv
The issue tends to show up most clearly with emotional labels: the moment someone assigns you an emotion in a scene, or an exercise gives you a word to start with.
The assignment itself can be the problem. When someone hands you the word “terrified,” your brain may immediately start analyzing. Is this the right label? Is that what I’m feeling, when have I actually felt this specific thing vs similar emotions, what did I act like? Is that how terrified would actually look? For a concrete thinker, that word becomes a puzzle to solve rather than a starting point, and it puts you in your head immediately. And “just go with it” does not work as a note or a recommendation (unless you, say, take that label away).
This matters in performance too. Gifting a scene partner an emotion, saying “you look terrified” or naming what they’re feeling, is common early-on improv. You mean it as a generous offer. For a teammate with alexithymia, it might land as an extra cognitive load.
One more layer: reading other people’s emotions. Missing a scene partner’s emotional cues and not being sure what they’re expressing is also part of this. When you’re also managing your own uncertainty about what you’re feeling, tracking someone else’s emotional state in real time gets complicated fast.
What performers can do
The main thread across both episodes is lean into honesty. Whatever is actually happening for you in the scene is a valid place to start.
Play the character. For many improvisers with alexithymia, accessing emotion as a character is easier than accessing it as yourself. It removes the concrete thinking. If it’s fiction, if it’s make-em-ups, then the emotion is the character’s and you’re not trying to identify whether that label is actually correct for you. You’re just feeling what the character would feel, and there’s no right or wrong answer for that.
Use flash memory. Flash memory is an improv technique where you quickly access a memory to use in a scene. For someone with alexithymia, this can work because you’ve already processed the emotion from that experience after the fact. You’ve already assigned it a word. Returning to that memory, especially if you have visual imagination available to you, can let you access what you felt then and bring it into the scene. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic memory. A dog walk at the beach where you know you felt joy is enough. You can learn a lot more about visual recall and memory in episodes 10 and 14, and this article here.
Work at the level of good or bad. If finding the exact label is impossible, you can go more general. Good or bad. Something that resembles the assigned emotion. Adjacent to it. You don’t have to land precisely on the word you’ve been given. Getting somewhere in that direction and showing it honestly is valid improv.
Ignore the label and do the scene. If an exercise asks you to hold an emotion the whole way through and you can’t access the second label you’re supposed to reach, drop it and follow the scene. Let the scene go where it goes emotionally. The point of those exercises is usually to get somewhere different from where you started, and doing that honestly even without the label gets you to the same place.
Use physical description. If you’d naturally say “I feel this thing in my chest” rather than “I feel anxious,” that is a valid way to work. Show it physically. Verbalize the physical if that’s what comes. If someone tells you you’re doing it wrong, they’re incorrect.
What teammates can do
You don’t need to know who on your team has alexithymia. You don’t need to have a conversation about it, though having that conversation in a trusted environment can help.
The practical adjustment is simple: avoid gifting emotional word labels in scenes wherever you can. You don’t need to say “you look terrified.” Show what’s happening. Let your scene partner react to the action and feel whatever they feel. This is also just good improv. As I like to say. VERY GOOD IMPROV.
If someone seems to not be responding the way you’d expect, you can offer a verbal cue. Yes, it’s telling rather than showing, but it might help your scene partner process what you’re expressing, and it can also clarify things for any audience members who might not have caught the moment.
What teachers and coaches can do
A few specific things come up in episode 19 for teachers running exercises involving assigned emotions.
Make the label optional when you can. Some students will find that a given word immediately unlocks something for them. That’s great, and the exercise works as written for those people. For others, the word is the obstacle. Offering alternatives, or accepting physical descriptions as valid, opens the exercise up without changing what it’s designed to do.
Suggest flash memory as a route in. Instead of “feel anxious,” try “think of a time you felt something like that.” The label becomes a direction rather than an assignment.
Suggest trying it as a character. If a student is struggling, especially one who might be doing more reality-based work, encourage them to try the exercise as a character further from themselves. That small distance can take some of the concrete thinking out of it.
If an exercise with multiple assigned emotions across a scene isn’t working for a student, suggest they just do the scene. Follow the scene emotionally wherever it goes. That’s usually the underlying goal of those exercises anyway.
One moment from episode 19 is worth including here. In an early improv class, after a scene, a teacher asked what emotion the scene had been playing. The answer that came out wasn’t an emotion word, it was a physical description. The teacher’s response was: if you can access emotion that way, just keep doing that. Both ways of getting there are valid.
That interaction was the moment of realizing how emotions actually worked in scenes. Not from being told the right way. From being told that the way that was already happening was fine.
Listen to both episodes
Episode 18 covers what alexithymia is, who experiences it, and how it shows up in scenes and team performances.
Episode 19 covers practical approaches for students in class and jam environments, and specific adjustments teachers can make to their exercises.
Both are around 28 to 30 minutes.
Your Improv Brain is a podcast and YouTube show about improv, neurodivergence, and how the nervous system affects performance. New episodes release regularly.
