Unmoored Feelings

I thought it would be good to do a blog post about how to work through a feeling that you don’t prefer to have, especially one that you are not sure where it comes from.  As you start to work on yourself, it is common to have feelings start coming up that you didn’t realize were under the surface all the time.  This is the delayed maintenance phase of self-work and it can be frustrating, especially after the initial honeymoon phase where you address the easy and low hanging incorrect thoughts.  Most people describe this phase as repeated bouts of a feeling that doesn’t seem associated with any thoughts or circumstances that they can identify.

There are a few key phases to managing an unmoored feeling.

1. Drop the resistance
2. Get curious about the possible sources but accept that you may not find a definitive cause
3. Nurture the unmet needs suggested by this feeling
4. Be open to secondary thoughts and feelings arising after you lean into the primary feeling
5. Cautiously apply thought work to the secondary thoughts and feelings, but only after you really have leaned into, stopped resisting and gotten curious about the primary feeling
6. Repeat as needed – strong unmoored feelings are probably rooted pretty deeply and so it may take many iterations of this process to develop a strong approach to each of these feelings.  The good news is that most of us will only have a few really primary unmoored feelings which come up for us.

Fatigue

An example from my own life recently was fatigue.  I think fatigue is an interesting one to think about because it could actually be physical, mental, emotional or physiological.  So how can one sort out what is the cause of a feeling?  As I say to patients who ask about how to distinguish between seasonal allergies and a cold, you can always try taking an antihistamine.  If your symptoms disappear, it was probably not a cold!  The same is true of feelings – they will have multiple contributors.  As anyone who has every been “hangry” can attest, our emotional state is attuned to our physical as well as to our cognitive and physiological processes.

Physiological

Physiological sources of fatigue include low iron, underactive thyroid, illness, autoimmune disorders and many other medical conditions.  If your fatigue is new and lasting more than a few weeks, book an appointment with your primary care provider to get some basic lab tests done.

Physical

Physical sources of fatigue are things like sleep and sleep hygiene.  How well are you sleeping?  Do you schedule time for unwinding, time to be in bed and do you maintain a consistent sleep-wake time and routine?  Could you have sleep apnea, restless legs, small children or other sources of physical disruption to your sleep?  Do you have pain that keeps you up and when was the last time you replaced your mattress and pillows?

There are infinitely many articles, listicles and blog posts written about improving sleep hygiene – I will just distill the most common advice I give and have seen.

1. Avoid alcohol and caffeine in the later part of the day.
2. Avoid exercise, blue light (screens) and excitement in the two hours before bed.
3. Keep the room temperature cool and consider stopping bed sharing if your partner snores or has disrupted sleep.
4. Keep your sleep/wake times consistent between work days and non work days and aim to allow 7-8 hours of sleep for most adults.
5. If you snore or have frequent night awakenings, get tested for sleep apnea.

I find that people have often done a lot of work on the pillows, mattresses and caffeine, but they are reluctant to give up their screens before bed.

People often also struggle with setting and following a consistent bedtime – try to be really curious about what you want that you aren’t getting when you go to bed at a time you have pre-determined is right for you!  This difficulty with self-care may be rooted in scarcity – me time is often difficult to come by until everyone else is asleep – which is in itself an emotion which can be processed instead of reacted to.

Mental

Mental or cognitive fatigue is common when you are learning something new, or working at your limits.  We are all familiar with this feeling when we have started a new job, gotten a promotion, or are taking a class which is stretching us with its demands.  The interesting thing about mental fatigue is that your body is not actually physically tired so sleeping more to try to address the fatigue is often impossible and certainly counter-productive.

If you are mentally fatigued, you have to consciously create restorative time in your schedule to ensure that you are recovering and you have to take good physical care of your body, including getting in light to moderate intensity exercise.  It will be beneficial to get this exercise without needing to think much – so this need would not be well served by taking a challenging fitness class. Mental fatigue is best supported by the kind of exercise which allows your mind to rest and wander.

Some signs of mental fatigue include trouble falling asleep at night due to “busy mind”, decision fatigue, feeling drained but unable to nap, and over desire for dopamine releasing activities such as video games, easy books and movies/TV.

Emotional

Emotional fatigue is really a feeling, rather than an objective truth.  Like other feelings, it is caused by thoughts, and exacerbated by resistance.  We have all felt emotional fatigue when we see the caller ID of some acquaintance who really is quite nice but so deadly boring we honestly don’t feel like answering the phone.  And we have all felt the instant relief of emotional fatigue when a dull but necessary task faces us (taxes) and a phone call from an exciting friend rescues us from our drudgery.

The topic of this blog post is when the fatigue you feel is not intimately connected with a particular task or situation but is more generalized and harder to pin down.  I posted some suggestions earlier – here is my application of them to the specific example of unmoored fatigue which appears to have a significant emotional component.

1. Drop the resistance
   • If you cannot immediately tell why you are fatigued, just accept that you are.  Tell yourself – “Wow, I sure am fatigued today, and that’s OK.”  Resistance just adds fuel to the fire and tires you out emotionally even more.
2. Get curious about the possible sources but accept that you may not find a definitive cause
   • Try to figure out if there is a way you are thinking about what you need to get done or how you are performing in your tasks or how you are sleeping that may be generating the feeling of fatigue.  One I see often is that people believe they will be very tired if they do not sleep eight hours in a row.  Another is that certain kinds of work/stages of life are intrinsically more tiring.  You may not find any obvious thoughts and that is ok.
3. Nurture the unmet needs suggested by this feeling
   • If you are tired, be gentle to yourself and compassionately provide regular sleep/wake times, nourishing food, gentle exercise, rest, meditation and unscheduled time to restore yourself.
4. Be open to secondary thoughts and feelings arising after you lean into the primary feeling
   • Stay curious and open about what comes up for you when you drop the resistance to feeling fatigue and start nurturing yourself.  You may discover that you are scared of having more responsibility and the fatigue is a stress response.  You may discover that you are angry about excess work being given to you but you don’t want to cause any friction at work/home by bringing this up explicitly.
5. Cautiously apply thought work to the secondary thoughts and feelings, but only after you really have leaned into, stopped resisting and gotten curious about the primary feeling.
   • You MUST spend time in the original feeling without resistance and with curious, self-compassionate nurturing before you can move on to working through the secondary thoughts and feelings.
6. Repeat as needed – strong unmoored feelings are probably rooted pretty deeply and so it may take many iterations of this process to develop a strong approach to each of these feelings.  The good news is that most of us will only have a few really primary unmoored feelings which come up for us.

TL;DR

All feelings are caused by thoughts but if you have a strong, unmoored feeling which keeps coming up for you, try accepting the feeling as a reality and dropping the resistance to it.  When working through an unmoored feeling, consider that it may have many contributing causes and try to address the non-emotional components as well as the emotional ones.