It’s Saturday morning and the tiniest hint of light is creeping in, just barely beginning to illuminate the dark blanket of sky outside of your window. Your eyes flash open and you’re slightly disoriented, but undoubtedly awake. You throw back the heavy blanket. You’re too hot and can sense your heart beating quickly in your chest.
You try to assess whether a loud noise awoke you or just, once again, the zaps of your own body.
You look at the clock: it’s just past five. You groan in frustration. This was your morning to sleep in, to catch up on rest after an adrenaline-fueled week. You squeeze your eyes shut, breathe deeply in, and will your mind to let you get just a little more sleep. Maybe it will work today?
But with your eyes closed, your mind starts running like a ticker tape. You didn’t log in to the portal to request the refill on Jonas’ medicine yet. The dishwasher isn’t running any better since you cleaned out the drain – it’s probably time to start researching new ones. Your sister called two days ago and seemed anxious – how could you not call her back yet? Your client asked you to get him an answer by EOD Friday. It’s Saturday morning!
Your brain doesn’t even know where to land right now. As soon as it starts to work out one problem, it’s moved on to the next – bouncing like a kid at a trampoline park. You reach over to your nightstand and grab your phone, pulling up your notes app to start making a list. As soon as you write them down, make sure you don’t lose them, you’ll try to get back to sleep, you assure your tired body.
But with your notes app open, you see the note from yesterday about Abby’s proposal. Shit. That decision comes flooding back. What am I going to do about that? You were going to think about it last night once you got everyone to sleep, but you were just so tired. You start running through the points in your mind now, feeling your breath quicken as do.
As you imagine all of the changes that the proposal would bring, you feel worried and anxious for the future. This wasn’t how I wanted it to go, but maybe it’s all we can do at this point? You need to get up. Your stomach is starting to hurt and you need to move.
You head to the kitchen to try the dishwasher one more time before you start shopping for a new one. As you wait to see if it will start, you start scrolling on Instagram. Every image you pass seems to remind you of something you could or should be doing, and your jaw clenches. You toss your phone onto the counter and want to scream, if it wouldn’t wake everyone else.
You just need one thing to work, you tell yourself. Maybe if you could just get one damn thing off your to-do list, your brain could settle down. Maybe if you had more help from your husband. Maybe if you had that time management app. Maybe if you lived in a quieter place. Maybe if you did yoga and could approach all this with equanimity. You wish you could just be asleep.
The dishwasher sputters.
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If you’ve been around a baby or very young child who is experiencing an intense emotion, they can almost look like they are being swallowed by the feeling. The young child has no language, no concept for what they are experiencing, and so instead every ounce of their body is filled with the energy of the emotion. It usually involves some screaming.
Most of us grow out of this stage (though I can think of a few politicians who I’m not so sure have, but that’s for another day), and a big part of doing so involves starting to make sense of our own experiences. The making sense usually comes through the development of language, which our early caregivers help to facilitate.
If you’ve been paying attention at all to parenting advice in the past decade or so, you’ve undoubtedly heard the urging to help kids name their feelings. It looks like you’re feeling really angry with your brother right now because he took the toy you were playing with. The experts tell us to add some validation, too. That makes sense. You really wanted that toy.
When we do this, we’re helping kids to take the overwhelming and nebulous experience inside their own body and give words to it. Emotions, at their core, are physiological patterns of energy. Fear, anger, or jealousy, for example, are just names for what happens when electric signals activate our body’s networks and produce particular sensations in the body. As we all know, those sensations can be extraordinarily intense at times.
What ideally happens is that when we are young, we are given words to describe those energy patterns in our bodies. Those words are incredibly useful in a few different ways. First. they allow for sense-making inside of us. Understanding something can have a profound effect on helping us cope with it. Brain scans show that simply by naming an emotion, we can reduce its intensity. The other very helpful aspect of languaging emotions is that we can communicate them to others. As relational animals, this is really important.
We might call this giving-words-to-what’s-unseen process creating a story. I’m not using the term story here to imply that the words we are using are untrue or fantasy. I’m using it to describe something that is a concept – intangible and created by language. Human beings love story; we rely heavily on story and it’s often thought to be what differentiates our species. Using story to describe and explain our internal energy patterns is what we call emotion.
Here’s a slightly different way of saying it: an energy pattern plus the story we use to explain it equals emotion.
What I want you to especially notice about what I’m saying is that the explanation for what and why we are feeling an energy pattern comes after the energy is already in our bodies. Our mind is working to make sense of what our body is already feeling. A way of describing this is a phrase I find particularly useful: story after state.
Maybe this seems obvious as you read it, but it’s not actually how we typically think about what’s happening. What’s more common is to think that we ‘feel’ angry or anxious or satisfied and then our body experiences those sensations. We tend to believe we can easily point to what is making us angry or anxious or satisfied because that thing caused the feeling. But what I’m telling you here is that very often the body sensation – the energy – comes first. Then our minds do what they were trained to do – they look for an explanation.
Consider a classic experiment in psychology that demonstrates this well. The researchers in a study told their unwitting participants that they were studying the effect of a vitamin on people’s vision. They then gave the participants a shot of adrenaline, the chemical that creates the fight-or-flight response. Some of the participants were told that the shot they were being given would produce some strong physiological responses in them – a racing heart, flushed skin, trembling hands. The rest of the participants were left to experience the physical effects without an explanation, but they were divided into two groups. Half were placed in a room with a person who was instructed to act jovial and playful, and the other half in a room with someone acting irritable and angry.
The participants in the study who had not been given an explanation by the researchers – a story – for the energy they felt tended to adopt the emotions of the person with whom they were placed in the room. Participants with the irritable person reported they’d been feeling angry; participants with the playful person reported feeling happy. All three groups (those given an explanation, those with the angry person, those with the playful person) had experienced the exact same physical sensations in their bodies. However, their interpretation and responses to the sensations were dependent on the story they developed about them. And importantly, in the absence of an explanation being directly given, their minds attached to the nearest story to adopt as their own.
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What does this all have to do with waking up in a sweaty panic on a Saturday morning and frenetically trying to cross everything off your to-do list? Everything, really.
We easily become convinced that we are anxious because the to-do list is lingering or we haven’t somehow optimized our life, but in reality our body often entered the activated state first – and then our mind attached to whatever was near or familiar to give it a story. Story after state.
Even if this makes sense to you, we tend to believe we can ‘outsmart’ this process or we are the exception. We think, sure bodies get activated and can make up stories about it, but all of the stressors in my own life are real and causing my misery. If I could just get rid of these stressors, then I could finally feel calm and regulated in my body. If my to-do list was complete or if that person would just treat me differently, I’d finally get to feel peace.
To be clear, your stressors are real and may make things more challenging. But it’s still worth considering how trying to solve for the story (the explanation, the stressor) rather than addressing state might be keeping us stuck. Because if I do miraculously complete everything on my to-do list, it’s very likely that I’ll still feel that driven by a motor feeling. And then my mind will search for the next explanation (The gutters need cleaned! That’s it!) and around and around I will go.
This is especially relevant when there are direct reasons for physical activation in our bodies – such as the hormonal shifts caused by the menstrual cycle or perimenopause. (For a deep dive into Pre-menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, go here.) Anxious energy in our bodies is often also caused by things like alcohol use, sleep problems, or longstanding trauma symptoms. These create energy patterns in our bodies that trigger our mind to look for stories, and our stories then direct our actions.
We start to realize it was never the dishwasher.
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As we start to integrate this idea of story after state, we can start to truly make use of its power. Perhaps the clearest thing we can begin doing is shift from trying to address the story to tending to the state.
Tending to the state means putting our attention on that energy pattern itself rather than what we assume is its cause. An important caveat is that I’m suggesting we just need to calm our bodies down at all costs. It’s actually more about practicing a willingness to be with and tolerate the discomfort of the energy pattern without having to jump to story or fixing something. Engaging in practices to be with our uncomfortable sensations is much of what makes things like psychotherapy or meditation or breathwork potential keys to a more expansive life.
When we don’t have to get rid of the feeling as quickly as possible – by solving for whatever the story might be – we find that everything eases a bit. Maybe the sensations don’t go away immediately, but they tend to be more manageable. And we’re not then busy exhausting ourselves trying to solve for every story.
I’ll be honest, this can be quite hard to convince ourselves to do in the moment. We have usually become habituated to solving for story, and in our activated state everything in us will try to say that if we can just change this one thing (or six things), we can feel better. But deeper down we know that it’s a losing battle. And the part of us that knows that can help us try something different.
Fortunately, we don’t have to be totally convinced in the crisis moment that addressing state versus story will help. We just have to be willing to take the first step. If we do something like take a walk or a hot shower to address our physical state before diving into fixing, the worst case scenario is that we’re still anxious but we’ve moved or are clean. But more than likely, our energy pattern will have shifted a bit and we’ll be seeing whatever it is we need to do with different eyes.
The other gift of story after state is that paying attention to it helps us start to reveal our habitual stories. We begin to see that particular stories tend to take on a familiar hue for each of us. They might have to do with self-criticism (If I could just be better in this way, I would feel better.), over-functioning (If I could just get all of this done, I would feel better.), or self-righteousness (If they would just do this differently, I would feel better.). The bottom line is that our stories – whether ‘true’ or ‘untrue’ – will rarely be the key to our actually feeling differently. Not if they keep leading us into the same familiar behaviors.
We spend so much of our lives trying to rearrange the outside world in hopes that it will finally quiet something inside us. Sometimes that work is necessary.
But sometimes the more powerful invitation is simply to turn toward the body first. To notice the racing heart before the to-do list. The tight jaw before the dishwasher. The energy before the explanation.
