"I'm Fine" Lie: Your Body Kept the Score
--- There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep.
"I'm Fine" Lie: Your Body Kept the Score
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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep.
You know the one. You've had eight hours. You've had the weekend. You've had the holiday, even — five days somewhere warm, a few good meals, the sea. And still you come home feeling like you've been carrying something heavy for a very long time, and you can't quite remember when you picked it up.
Psychology has a name for what happens when the mind decides a feeling is too inconvenient to process: *emotional suppression*. Not repression — that's the unconscious version, the one that happens without your consent. Suppression is the one you choose. The deliberate turning away. The *I'll deal with this later* that becomes *I'll deal with this never*. It's the emotional equivalent of pushing laundry under the bed before guests arrive. The room looks fine. But you know what's under there.
And here's the part that nobody tells you until they have to: the body is always listening.
The research on this is not soft. It is not metaphor. A landmark study published in the journal *Psychosomatic Medicine* found that people who habitually suppress their emotions show elevated cortisol responses — meaning their stress hormones don't come down the way they should. The nervous system stays at yellow alert. Not red, not crisis — just permanently braced. And chronic bracing has a cost: immune suppression, disrupted sleep architecture, higher cardiovascular risk, and a baseline of low-grade anxiety that people learn to call *just how I am*.
I sit across from this presentation regularly in my clinic. The person who comes in because they can't sleep, or because they keep getting ill, or because their relationship has gone flat in a way they can't quite articulate. They are, by every visible measure, fine. They are functional. They are managing. And that managing — the years of it, the discipline of it — is exactly what has brought them here.
The Stoics get misread on this constantly. *Apatheia* — the word we've corrupted into apathy — didn't mean the absence of feeling. It meant not being *ruled* by feeling. There's a crucial difference between a person who has processed grief and moved through it, and a person who has buried grief and paved over it. One of them is free. The other is load-bearing a house they built on unstable ground.
What makes this harder to spot in yourself is that suppression is, in the short term, enormously effective. If you are the person in your family, your office, your relationship who *doesn't fall apart*, you will be rewarded for it. People will call you strong. They will call you capable. They will lean on you, and the leaning will feel like love, and the love will feel like proof that you are doing something right. The feedback loop is almost perfectly designed to keep you from ever stopping to ask what the suppression is costing you.
The body, meanwhile, keeps the invoice.
What actually helps — and I want to be specific here, because generic advice is the enemy of real change — is not *expressing* the feeling so much as *allowing* it to be present without immediately managing it. There is a practice in acceptance-based therapy called *defusion* — learning to observe a feeling without fusing with it, without either suppressing it or being consumed by it. You notice the grief, or the anger, or the fear, the way you'd notice weather. *It's raining.* Not *I am the rain.* Not *there is no rain.*
This requires, at minimum, a few minutes of actual stillness each day — not productivity dressed up as meditation, not scrolling until you fall asleep. Genuine, uncomfortable stillness. The kind where the feelings you've been outrunning have a chance to catch up.
Start smaller than you think you need to. Five minutes. No phone. Sit with whatever comes. If nothing comes, that's data too.
The goal isn't catharsis. It isn't crying it out or screaming into a pillow, though neither will hurt you. The goal is simply to stop treating your own inner life as an inconvenience to be managed around, because the inner life has a way of making itself inconvenient anyway — through the back door, through the body, through the slow collapse of things you thought were fine.
You don't have to process everything. But you do have to stop pretending nothing needs processing.
That, more than any wellness practice I've
