How You Feel Feelings
It is literal science that emotions are physiological, and not “all in your head.”
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
Here’s a real question for you: how do you decide you’re sick enough to stay home from work? And if you’re someone whose job IS staying home and taking care of the infinity of things there are to take care of when you’re a parent or a home-maker, how do you decide you’re sick enough to ask for help?
For me, it’s always been a fever. Well, it’s a fever or throwing up, but I am not a big thrower-upper, so: fever. But a lot of times I feel awful and I don’t HAVE a fever. In those cases, I reluctantly decide that I’ll have to have a fake fever. (As in, tell everyone that I’ve had a fever.) With a fake fever comes a whole slew of side effects — mostly, guilt; and checking my temperature religiously every twenty minutes just in case I DEVELOP a fever and can therefore PROVE with SCIENCE that I am actually sick.
I say this with a dire metric ton of caveats1, but a positive effect of the COVID-19 epidemic is that some people (not all people, not even necessarily most people) have taken more seriously the importance of staying home from work. Of course, when you have a family who is also sick, staying home from work is not the same as staying home from work. But every once in a while, a person who would have gone to work feeling like crap in 2019 will take a COVID test, see that it is positive, and not go to work in 2022. As in this SNL sketch from a few weeks ago:
What’s underneath this sketch is this: people need more breaks, and it’s hard to know when it’s OK to take them. A COVID test makes it easier. But even that is changing. When I got COVID a few months ago, I was told to go back to work five days after first testing positive, regardless of whether I was still testing positive (I was). I also had a fever (not a fake fever; a fever), so I didn’t go back to work five days after. But I did go seven days after, even as I was still in a terrible fog. This was probably not the responsible thing to do, but it was hard not to feel pressured to do it anyway.
*
Parts of the story of my appendicitis remind me of many other stories told to me by people socialized female — although, because it is simpler, I usually begin that story in the middle. The middle of the story (the familiar part) goes like this: My stomach hurt, but doesn’t my stomach hurt regularly? What did I eat that caused this? It was probably something morally repugnant, like a sugary candy bar, and now I was being punished. So: I tried to offset my candy-sin by eating virtuous foods, like a kale smoothie. I tried to do yoga. These things felt impossible, and I vomited. OK, I vomited. I guess my body wanted me to not eat anything, and lie in the bed. But lying in the bed felt terrible. On the other hand, DID it feel terrible? Was I making up the pain? If I just focused on the pain and breathed into it, could I make it go away? Because this was probably nothing. I took a sleeping pill and tried to sleep. Only, I couldn’t sleep. I woke up sweating and shivering and unable to move, and I asked Luke to get me a mug of hot water, because it was SO COLD IN THIS ROOM, and THAT was the problem; we needed to turn up the heat. But I threw up the hot water all over the bed, and now I had ruined the bed, so Luke wouldn’t be able to sleep in the bed, and so I was a bad partner. I apologized to Luke, who took my temperature, which was 104 F. And Luke said, “We’re going to the emergency room,” and I was too tired and felt too terrible to argue with the person whose bed I had just ruined, and so we went. And at the emergency room, they got mad at me, because why hadn’t I come in sooner? Because now the appendix was perforated (it had burst), and that was dangerous because of the possibility of sepsis, and this could have been prevented if I had just come in a little sooner.
That’s the middle of the story and the end of the story (minus the horrible steamed green beans I ate three days after my surgery that were alarmingly bright green and therefore memorable but boring). The beginning of the story is this: I had a fight with a friend. I felt so, so sad about it. All night, I lay in bed crying. Something about the sadness reminded me of an older sadness — a sadness from childhood that was unresolved. I tried to move through the sadness, which I had been practicing, but I couldn’t. In the morning, I went back to my regular life and pushed the unresolved sadness away. Twenty minutes later, my stomach started to hurt.
These events felt linked to me, but I didn’t want to seem crazy. “I got in a fight that made me cry, and so my appendix burst?” This was not a thing people said.
A year and a half later, I read “Burnout” by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, at the suggestion of people who read this newsletter (thank you!), and suddenly, there it was: THE EXACT SAME APPENDICITIS STORY, experienced by Amelia, but including, without apology, the beginning part. Her beginning part was about work and life-related stress, but the story was the same. An emotional reaction had caused her appendix to burst. The writers of the book treated this like a cautionary but scientifically believable conclusion to any story that begins with a person shoving aside the things they are feeling and forcing their bodies to keep doing doing doing without, as the authors put it, “completing the stress cycle.”
That book digs into the science of stress cycles methodically and convincingly, and it led me to study after study after study that all proved, with brain scans and chemistry and EVERYTHING, that emotions are physiological. That is: you can’t think your way out of your feelings; they’re not all in your head. Your feelings exist INSIDE YOUR BODY, and, critically, they can make you physically sick.
Over the past several years there’s been some normalization and even more pushback regarding the importance of taking “mental health days.” I’m all for mental health days, but I think we should stop separating mental health from physical health. Your mental health literally is your physical health. It’s like saying “The blue sky is the same sky as the gray sky.” Or, “Brown M&Ms and green M&Ms are both equally M&Ms.” It’s not like your body has a separate compartment for your emotions: your body is mostly liquid, after all. It all gets slushed and slurried together.
And while it helps to look at brain maps and understand that stress cycles are real (learn more about them here), and every scientific study shows that ignoring your emotions can lead to serious physical ailments, that will only get you so far. It is more important, and way more difficult, that you believe your body when it tells you something. An emotion is a telegraph from your body: it wants you to pay attention to something, and its driving force is to keep you alive.
It’s become more widely understood that depression is a real medical disorder that affects at least millions of humans on earth. We have gotten better at normalizing the reality of mental health problems that make life difficult for so many people. But we are not as good at truly honoring “minor” episodes of grief, stress, sadness, anger, or disappointment. Emotions can take longer to move through than we want them to. Consider the last time you applied for something and didn’t get it. That feels terrible, but you’re encouraged to NOT feel terrible about it. Maybe you feel terrible for a week (which is totally normal), but you’re ashamed. You don’t want to tell anyone how sad you are about it. You don’t want other people to know you were rejected, and more than that, you don’t want them to know that you care. And so you quietly berate yourself: “WHY am I still so upset over this TINY LITTLE THING? This is NOT A BIG DEAL!” But: things don’t have to be big to matter.
Consider what happens if you don’t pay attention to your body when you have a cold, or the sniffles, or a twisted ankle. Your body tells you to slow down, do less, take it easy; and if you don’t listen, the ailment will get worse. Your body will tell you something similar when it’s going through an emotional response cycle (they can take hours, or they can take days — or longer!), and if you don’t listen, the feeling can turn into something more serious (depression — although this is not by any means the only cause of depression; or burnout), or it can turn into something more obviously physiological (a burst appendix).
It would be nice to be able to turn feelings off sometimes. But there’s no “off,” there is only “through.” You can and should take physical measures to address your emotions in order to get through the difficult ones with more ease. The Nagoskis and others offer these concrete ideas for things you to do when your body is saying, “UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTION INCOMING! TAKE HEED!” (I’ve supplemented them with my own suggestions.)
Rest. Rest is not always available, but if you haven’t taken any in a long time, your body is probably STARVING for it. I love TV, and TV can be a part of rest, but it’s a little like candy (I also love candy): it doesn’t do ENOUGH for you, nutritionally, when you’re starving. So if you have an hour for TV, consider spending that hour putting on lotion, lying in bed with your eyes closed and listening to soothing music, taking a “luxury shower” (thanks to paid subscriber Melanie for that term), or doing anything that’s slow, quiet, relaxing, and allows you to be WITH your body in a non-stressful way.
Community. Tell your people that you’re struggling and ask them for help. “Help” is not “fixing.” Help can be assisting with physical and emotional labor (cooking, cleaning up, caring for a child, feeding pets, watering plants, all the minutiae); sharing space; or offering conversational connection (which can be DayQuil for sadness, if you find the right person).
Movement / exercise. According to SCIENCE, moving your body around is actually necessary for completing a stress cycle. That doesn’t mean you have to go for a jog (although, sure!); it can mean you stretch your whole body out on the floor, or ride your bike, or dance to a song you love, or take a walk, or even just jump up and down a little. If you’re stuck and feel like you’ve been stuck for a long time, and when will the stickiness get unstuck, try moving around for a whole hour and see how you feel differently afterwards.
In terms of community: this letter could be written to so many people around you. People suffer in silence, feeling like they’re feeling the wrong thing, and forcing themselves to do more than their bodies want to do. Notice other people, and see how you can show up for them. Once you’ve taken what you need, perform wellness as an action. We belong to each other.
A note for the Northern Hemispherians, which I will repeat and repeat until things start to change: YOU HAVE LESS DAYLIGHT. LIGHT AFFECTS YOUR BODY. YOU NEED MORE SLEEP. Be extra extra EXTRA gentle with yourself and other people.
OK? Good.
Love,
Sophie
Caveats: COVID-19 has been horrible, heartbreaking, tragic. Using the word “good” in the same sentence as COVID-19 requires mentioning that it has been and continues to be a tragedy with indescribable scope. And that for folks who are immunocompromised, staying home is still a life-or-death necessity.
thank you for this one ♥️
i love this sophie. thank you for the reminder/permission to rest. i have been so tired lately, just inexplicably tired. i took a nap yesterday instead of working on anything like holiday presents/treats or doing any housework. i napped. then in the evening i went to bed early. this morning i actually felt more like myself again, waking before my alarm. i needed to rest, i didn’t need to pile on the guilt and i didn’t need to over analyze why i was feeling so tired. i just needed to rest! 💗