#43: You don't know how you're feeling
Do you think that finding out how you're feeling is simply a matter of turning your attention inward? Oh, mate. You're so wrong. Often, we only ever reflect on how we're feeling when we're feeling bad - and when we do reflect on it, we're not genuinely interested in finding out how we feel. Instead, we're standing by ready to pounce on ourselves with nasty judgments if we dare acknowledge that we don't feel that great. We only allow ourselves two possible states: we're either fine, or we're a pathetic snowflake making a big fuss about nothing. Being able to tune in to how you feel isn't a skill that you can take for granted. You need to practise it. Here's what to do.
Episode transcript:
Working out how you feel is a skill that you need to develop.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey, everyone. It’s your old friend Rebecca again. Let me share with you something that happened while I was recording my last podcast episode. I know you’re going to be able to relate to it. I recorded it on the Thursday, which was the day before it was released - I know, I know, I shouldn’t leave it until the last minute, but you know what it’s like. Anyway. I’d been feeling a bit under the weather for a couple of days - just a bit, you know, bleh. I briefly considered postponing the episode, but then I took a moment to reflect on how I was feeling. Was I really that bad? Was sitting at my desk writing a 15-minute podcast episode, and then recording it, really that challenging. It wasn’t like I was working down a coal mine. It wasn’t even as if I was sitting at a supermarket checkout scanning people’s shopping. All I had to do was sit there in my jammies on my own and talk into a microphone. I mean, I’d be doing roughly the same thing if I did cancel the episode, so what was the fuss about? I pulled myself together and did the episode. Later that day, I decided I may as well do a covid test. My symptoms didn’t really match what I’d heard about covid, so there was probably no point, but I decided it was best to test anyway before I went out spreading any germs. The test was positive, which will be no surprise to you if you listened to the last episode and heard how grim I sounded. Not only was I covid positive, but in retrospect I was experiencing one of the two worst days of the illness - luckily for me it was reasonably short and sweet, and the most noticeable symptom, bizarrely and unexpectedly, was bleeding gums. Anyway. I realised, then, that earlier that day, while I was wondering whether or not to go ahead with the podcast episode, I hadn’t been genuinely interested in finding out how I was feeling. Instead, I’d basically told myself to shut up and do the work because I was obviously fine. And, of course, it turned out that I was wrong about that. Turns out I’m really bad at working out how I feel, at least when I’m feeling bad.
It wasn’t the first time that it had occurred to me that I am not very good at knowing how I’m feeling. I was talking through this with my therapist last week. I think I’ve mentioned before on this podcast how, about a decade ago, while I was in the depths of an abusive relationship, I would occasionally reflect on how I was feeling, and I’d decide - having turned my conscious attention to the matter - that yes, I was more or less fine. Maybe I wasn’t experiencing the dizzy heights of happiness, but I was basically ok. This was during a period where I was so stressed that I was regularly dissociating, and where I’d have out-of-body experiences whenever I was drifting off to sleep - something that only ever happens to me when I’m really stressed. By anyone’s measure, I was definitely not happy. I was pretty much at rock bottom. But when I consciously reflected on how I was feeling, I decided I was fine.
I know I’m not alone here. This inability to notice when we’re struggling has popped up in various guises during my coaching sessions. People will say things like they feel guilty about having a sit down for 20 minutes because there’s so much to get done, and none of the things that need to be done are super challenging - like, how lazy to sit there doing nothing when it would take 5 seconds to tidy that pile of papers off the dining table? And neither is this simply a ‘hapless perfectionist’ problem. I was reading a book about running a couple of weeks ago - 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald. The basic idea behind the book is that, if you want to improve as a runner, you need to do 80 percent of your training at an easy level, and only 20 percent at a more challenging level. Recreational runners tend not to do this, and instead they do all their running at a level somewhere in between - moderately hard, not easy or difficult. This was exactly what I was doing until recently. Fitzgerald guides the reader through the science behind the 80/20 approach, and explains how to implement it. One problem he highlights for recreational runners is that we’re really bad at making subjective judgments about how hard we’re running. We think we’re running at an easy pace, but really what we’re doing is moderate or even hard. Bizarrely, it’s actually really difficult to tune in to how we’re feeling when we’re running. I had a striking illustration of this yesterday. I recently got a new running watch, which tells me what sort of run to do - like, what pace to run at, and for how long. At the end of the workout it prompts me to rate how difficult I found it, and how I’m feeling. The workout it had me to yesterday was faster than the pace I’d usually settle into naturally, but I was surprised at how easy I found it. I rated the difficulty as 3 out of 10, which Garmin classes as ‘easy’. But when I looked at the app later, and the details of the workout, I noticed that my heart rate told a different story. I’m not much of an expert on heart rate zones, but for a significant portion of that run, I was in the highest of the 5 heart rate zones that Garmin uses. Despite my perception of that workout as easy, there was an obvious sense in which it hadn’t been easy - it had actually been pretty hard, in the sense that my heart had been working hard, and yet I hadn’t noticed. My perception of it as easy wasn’t a result of me being stoic about it, or not wanting to make a fuss. It was a result of me lacking the particular skill of being able to tune into how my body is feeling and picking up on signs that at least part of my workout wasn’t easy. And while this is a skill that novice runners often lack, it’s something that comes with practice. Elite runners’ perceptions of their workout intensity are much more fine-tuned than mine. An elite runner whose heart was working as hard as mine was during yesterday’s run wouldn’t rate the run as an ‘easy’ 3 out of 10, as I did. She’d rate it as something like a 7, as pretty hard work. And that wouldn’t be because she’s a precious little snowflake who makes a big fuss about having to run fast. It’s because she has developed a skill that I currently lack, of being tuned into what’s going on with her heart and her breathing and how her body feels in general. Fitzgerald is pretty matter-of-fact about this in 80/20 Running. He doesn’t do what I’m doing here, and focus on the emotional side of reflecting on how we feel, which often involves judging ourselves negatively for deciding that we feel below par. He’s more like, ‘If you’re a recreational runner, you’re probably rubbish at this, and need to improve’.
Let’s loop this back to the original point, which was that lots of us are bad at working out how we feel, and in particular we’re bad at noticing when we’re struggling. Perhaps we can learn something from the analogy with running. What if we accepted that recognising how we’re feeling is a skill that we need to develop? This is pretty counterintuitive - there’s a pervasive idea that all we need to do to know how we feel is turn our attention inward, and there it is, we can read our inner states like a book. But actually, the idea that we might be bad at knowing how we feel is more familiar than we often realise. You’ve probably encountered people who keep on working and working until they crash and get ill, having mistakenly believed that they were fine and could just keep on doing. Perhaps you’ve even experienced that yourself. Or maybe you’ve had the experience of realising only after receiving some good news - that a loved one is safe, that you got the job you applied for, that your divorce is finalised, or whatever - that you were actually much more stressed about it than you realised. We often struggle to pick up on these negative states in ourselves. What’s going on?
Well, one thing that might be going on here - and credit to my therapist for this insight - is that when we turn our attention inward and ask ourselves how we’re feeling, we’re not genuinely open to learning about our inner states. Instead, we’re ready to judge ourselves for complaining or making a fuss, and often we view any acknowledgement of a negative feeling as ‘complaining’ or ‘making a fuss’. It often seems that, when we ask ourselves, ‘How am I feeling?’, what we’re doing is daring ourselves to pick up on anything negative. This is certainly what I was doing a couple of weeks ago when I was wondering whether or not to go ahead with the podcast episode. I asked myself how I was feeling, and when my answer was something like, ‘pretty rotten, actually’, I didn’t accept this answer from myself. I challenged it. I said things to myself like, ‘Really? So rotten that you can’t even sit there at your desk and speak into a microphone? God, Rebecca, you pathetic little snowflake - there are people out there who can’t afford not to get things done when they’re ill, or who struggle with chronic conditions and have to get on with life anyway, and here you are expecting everything to grind to a halt just because you’re feeling a bit under the weather?’ And so I decided that I was basically fine - certainly well enough to do the all the things I needed to do that day. No wonder we have so much trouble working out how we feel. We create toxic self-reflection environments for ourselves. When we ask ourselves, ‘How am I feeling?’, our attitude is often, ‘I’m either fine or I’m a lazy, pathetic malingerer who should just shut up and get on with it.’
What if, instead of injecting our self-reflection with all this toxic judgment, we took a leaf out of Matt Fizgerald’s advice for runners? In other words, what if we accepted that tuning into how we’re feeling, and being able to rate how we feel on a scale of 1 to 10, and to compare how good we feel right now with how we’ve felt at various times in the past - what if we accepted that all this is part of a skill that we currently don’t have, and that we need to develop? How might we go about that? Well, one thing we can do is practise tuning into how we feel at moments when nothing depends on it. So, instead of waiting until you’re contemplating cancelling an appointment or taking a day off sick in order to reflect on how you’re feeling, practise doing it on regular days when you’re planning to go about your day as usual. How is your body feeling? Any particular thoughts that have been cropping up a lot recently? Anything you’ve been avoiding - and if so, how does that thing make you feel: anxious? Afraid? Nauseous? By practising in this way, you’re turning reflection on how you feel into something that you do routinely, rather than something you only do when you’re feeling bad, at which point not only is your ability to reflect on your inner state out of practise, but you’re also standing by waiting to pounce on yourself with negative judgments if you dare to entertain the thought that maybe you’re not feeling that great. When my kids were younger, their teachers used to have a chart to help them tune into how they were feeling. At the top would be the question, ‘How am I feeling?’ and then the whole poster was taken up with lots of different emojis, with the name of emotions written underneath. The teachers would regularly have the kids point to how they were feeling, and if kids were not great at discerning how they were feeling, this would be flagged up. For a time, my son’s teachers noticed that my son would only ever identify two emotions in himself: happy and sad. They talked this over with me, and discussed strategies for how we could encourage him to reflect on his feelings and identify a wider range of emotions. But even while he was limited to identifying ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ in himself, he was doing twice as well as many of us adults. Many of us, 99 percent of the time, will only accept one answer to the question ‘How am I feeling?’ and that’s: Fine. If that’s a problem for a seven-year-old, then it’s a problem for you too. Make it a priority to tune in to how you feel. Journaling can help here. Or get yourself one of those emoji posters that primary school kids use.
Another thing you can do - and this is really hard, and something that we all struggle with - is get used to the idea that resting and taking it easy are not somehow illicit or shameful. Too many of us have internalised the belief that hard work - that overwork - is virtuous, and taking a break is for lazy degenerates. I talked about this way back in episode #2: But I haven’t earned a rest! In that episode, I challenged the idea that resting is something that needs to be earned. Rest, I said there, is a physiological need. All animals do it. We get into trouble when inject it with emotion and judgment, so that you end up thinking that you’re a bad person if you rest when you haven’t earned it by working hard and basically burning yourself out. Resting, we often assume, is something that should only be done begrudgingly, when you have no choice, because you’ve become physically incapable of carrying on - and even when you’re physically incapable of carrying on, ideally you need some sort of independent confirmation of that, like a doctor’s opinion or a heart rate measurement or a positive covid test. How utterly ridiculous. I’ve got 4 cats here who are all lying around chilling without feeling remotely bad about it. How is it that we’re so smart, and yet so awful at recognising and giving ourselves what we need? Something that’s going to help you here is that old favourite strategy of mine: if you can’t bring yourself to accept that it’s ok for you to rest, ask yourself if you’d accept that it’s ok for your friend or your sibling or your mentee to rest when they find themselves in the circumstances that you’re in. We’re gentler and more compassionate to other people, and thinking about how we’d respond to other people’s needs can be a really useful way to calibrate our attitude towards what we need.
Most of all, though, the message I want to leave you with is that the ability to recognise how you’re feeling and what you need is not something you can take for granted. You’re bad at it. It’s a skill that needs to be developed, and you’re not going to develop it if you only ever exercise it when there’s something at stake, like when you’re feeling ill or tired or otherwise bad. It’s important to practise it when you’re feeling good - and not just because you’re less likely to judge yourself negatively then, but also to give yourself a reference point for when you’re not feeling good. Do you even know how it feels to feel good? Because, you know, your emotional range includes more than just ‘fine’. Explore it. Don’t do a Rebecca, and bully yourself into getting on with it even when you’re ill. Until next time, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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