Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?

Today’s feature is aimed at helping mainly two kinds of people:

• “I have so many emotions that I don’t always know what to do with them”
• “What is an emotion, really? I think I felt one some time ago”

So, if either those describe you and/or a loved one, read on…

Alexithymia

Alexi who? Alexithymia is an umbrella term for various kinds of problems with feeling emotions.

That could be “problems feeling emotions” as in “I am unable to feel emotions” or “problems feeling emotions” as in “feeling these emotions is a problem for me”.

It is most commonly used to refer to “having difficulty identifying and expressing emotions”.

There are a lot of very poor quality pop-science articles out there about it, but here’s a decent one with good examples and minimal sensationalist pathologization:

Alexithymia Might Be the Reason It’s Hard to Label Your Emotions

A somatic start

Because a good level of self-awareness is critical for healthy emotional regulation, let’s start there. We’ll write this in the first person, but you can use it to help a loved one too, just switching to second person:

Simplest level first:

Are my most basic needs met right now? Is this room a good temperature? Am I comfortable dressed the way I am? Am I in good physical health? Am I well-rested? Have I been fed and watered recently? Does my body feel clean? Have I taken any meds I should be taking?

Note: If the answer is “no”, then maybe there’s something you can do to fix that first. If the answer is “no” and also you can’t fix the thing for some reason, then that’s unfortunate, but just recognize it anyway for now. It doesn’t mean the thing in question is necessarily responsible for how you feel, but it’s good to check off this list as a matter of good practice.

Bonus question: it’s cliché, but if applicable… What time of the month is it? Because while hormonal mood swings won’t create moods out of nothing, they sure aren’t irrelevant either and should be listened to too.

Bodyscanning next

What do you feel in each part of your body? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your shoulders tense? Do you have a knot in your stomach? What are your hands doing? How’s your posture? What’s your breathing like? How about your heart? What are your eyes doing?

Your observations at this point should be neutral, by the way. Not “my posture is terrible”, but “my posture is stooped”, etc. Much like in mindfulness meditation, this is a time for observing, not for judging.

Narrowing it down

Now, like a good scientist, you have assembled data. But what does the data mean for your emotions? You may have to conduct some experiments to find out.

Thought experiments: what calls to you? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like curling up in a ball? Breaking something? Taking a bath? Crying?

Maybe what calls to you, or what you feel like doing, isn’t something that’s possible for you to do. This is often the case with anxiety, for example, and perhaps also guilt. But whatever calls to you, notice it, reflect on it, and if it’s something that your conscious mind considers reasonable and safe for you to do, you can even try doing it.

Your body is trying to help you here, by the way! It will try (and usually succeed) to give you a little dopamine spike when you anticipate doing the thing it wants you to do. Warning: it won’t always be right about what’s best for you, so do still make your own decisions about whether it is a good idea to safely do it.

Practical experiments: whether you have a theory or just a hypothesis (if you have neither make up a hypothesis; that is also what scientists do), you can also test it:

If in the previous step you identified something you’d like to do and are able to safely do it, now is the time to try it. If not…

• Find something that is likely to (safely) tip you into emotional expression, ideally, in a cathartic way. But, whatever you can get is good.
  • Music is great for this. What songs (or even non-lyrical musical works) make you sad, happy, angry, energized? Try them.
  • Literature and film can be good too, albeit they take more time. Grab that tear-jerker or angsty rage-fest, and see if it feels right.
  • Other media, again, can be completely unrelated to the situation at hand, but if it evokes the same emotion, it’ll help you figure out “yes, this is it”.
    • It could be a love letter or a tax letter, it could be an outrage-provoking news piece or some nostalgic thing you own.

Ride it out, wherever it takes you (safely)

Feelings feel better felt. It doesn’t always seem that way! But, really, they are.

Emotions, just like physical sensations, are messengers. And when a feeling/sensation is troublesome, one of the best ways to get past it is to first fully listen to it and respond accordingly.

• If your body tells you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and give it some reassurance by taking some action to appease it.
• If your emotions are telling you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and similarly take some action to appease it.

There is a reason people feel better after “having a good cry”, or “pounding it out” against a punchbag. Even stress can be dealt with by physically deliberately tensing up and then relaxing that tension, so the body thinks that you had a fight and won and can relax now.

And when someone is in a certain (not happy) mood and takes (sometimes baffling!) actions to stay in that mood rather than “snap out of it”, it’s probably because there’s more feeling to be done before the body feels heard. Hence the “ride it out if you safely can” idea.

How much feeling is too much?

While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?

For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently pathological. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.

If you do think “I would like to not think/feel this anymore”, then there are tools at your disposal too:

• How To Manage Chronic Stress
• How To Set Anxiety Aside
• How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)

Take care!

Statistically, those who live longest, do so in happy, fulfilling, committed relationships.

Note: happy, fulfilling, committed relationships. Less than that won’t do. Your insurance company might care about your marital status for its own sake, but your actual health doesn’t—it’s about the emotional safety and security that a good, healthy, happy, fulfilling relationship offers.

We wrote about this here:

Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!

But that’s not the full story

For a start, while being in a happy fulfilling committed relationship statistically adds healthy life years, being in a relationship that falls short of those adjectives certainly does not. See also:

Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits

But also, life satisfaction steadily improves with age, for single people (the results are more complicated for partnered people—probably because of the range of difference in quality of relationships). At least, this held true in this large (n=6,188) study of people aged 40–85 years:

❝With advancing age, partnership status became less predictive of loneliness and the satisfaction with being single increased. Among later-born cohorts, the association between partnership status and loneliness was less strong than among earlier-born cohorts. Later-born single people were more satisfied with being single than their earlier-born counterparts.❞

Source: The Changing Relationship Between Partnership Status and Loneliness: Effects Related to Aging and Historical Time

Note that this does mean that while life satisfaction indeed improves with age for single people, that’s a generalized trend, and the greatest life satisfaction within this set of singles comes hand-in-hand with being single by choice rather than by perceived obligation, i.e., those who are “single and not looking” will generally be the most content, and this contentedness will improve with age, but for those who are “single and looking”, in that case it’s the younger people who have it better, likely due to a greater sense of having plenty of time.

For that matter, gender plays a role; this large survey of singles found that (despite the popular old pop-up ads advising that “older women in your area are looking to date”), in reality older single women were the least likely to actively look for a partner:

See: A Profile Of Single Americans

…which also shows that about half of single Americans are “not looking”, and of those who are, about half are open to a serious relationship, though this is more common under the age of 40, while being over the age of 40 sees more people looking only for something casual.

Take-away from this section: being single only decreases life satisfaction if one doesn’t enjoy being single, and even then, and increases it if one does enjoy being single.

But that’s about life satisfaction, not longevity

We found no studies specifically into longevity of singledom, only the implications that may be drawn from the longevity of partnered people.

However, there is a lot of research that shows it’s not being single that kills, it’s being socially isolated. It’s a function of neurodegeneration from a lack of conversation, and it’s a function of what happens when someone slips in the shower and is found a week later. Things like that.

For example: Is Living Alone “Aging Alone”? Solitary Living, Network Types, and Well-Being

What if you are alone and don’t want to be?

We’ve not, at time of writing, written dating advice in our Psychology Sunday section, but this writer’s advice is:don’t even try.

That’s not nihilism or even cynicism, by the way; it’s actually a kind of optimism. The trick is just to let them come to you.

(sample size of one here, but this writer has never looked for a relationship in her life, they’ve always just found me, and now that I’m widowed and intend to remain single, I still get offers—and no, I’m not a supermodel, nor rich, nor anything like that)

Simply: instead of trying to find a partner, just work on expanding your social relationships in general (which is much easier, because the process is something you can control, whereas the outcome of trying to find a suitable partner is not), and if someone who’s right for you comes along, great! If not, then well, at least you have a flock of friends now, and who knows what new unexpected romance may lie around the corner.

As for how to do that,

How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

Take care!