You're Not Managing Stress. You're Managing Grief.

It works just well enough that you never stop. That's the trap.

I’ve created a free tool for men, or a man you love. The Gut Check will show you what you're doing to cope is protecting you from. It’s at gutcheck.tools.

I’m not sure how I know I’m awake. The house is quiet, it’s pitch black, and everything just as it should be. Am I dreaming? No, there’s something wrong. I can feel the threat. My body looks still from the outside, but it’s a different story under the surface. Neurons are firing like mad, my heart rate is jacked up, and my breath is shallow.

I’ve been here before and know what this is. A quick glance at my watch confirms it’s 4:40 AM. Fuck. FUCK. I planned to get up at 4:30. I need to get up by 4:30.

What’s ten minutes to you can be like the sky falling for me. Getting up at the same time means I can be at the sauna by five. Which means I can be at Starbucks ready to work by 5:45. That means I can get a solid three hours in my best thinking window of the day. And all that means I can maintain the illusion of control I depend on for a few more hours.

When I’m standing at this fork in the road, until recently, I’ve only been able to see two options. The first is to write the entire day off as unsalvageable. This usually happens within thirty seconds of waking up. Not long after, I’ll find myself hate-eating a donut or three to make sure the day is well and truly destroyed. I spend the rest of the day in self-imposed purgatory. I obsess about everything that needs doing and then ignore all of it.

The other is to get busy and do whatever I need to do to rescue this dumpster fire of a day. I start making excuses, moving or cancelling meetings, and most importantly, get the hell out of the house so I don’t fall further behind. I’m so busy beating myself up that I head for a donut anyway and we’re back at option one.

Regardless of the path I chose on this day, I’m confident three things were true. The choice was more tortured than it needed to be and I was harder on myself than I needed to be.

The third? It felt more like a reflex than a choice. I was already acting to change my state before taking a moment to think about the situation. I was protecting myself without understanding the threat.

That’s what’s happening with you too (or to a man you love). Your reflexive response is designed to protect you from something that feels too awful to face. That natural pivot away from whatever you’re afraid of is one of the most finely-tuned skills in your arsenal. It’s also the one that keeps you stuck.

The first thing you reach for to cope with the pain and discomfort always makes things worse in the end.

Your personal operating system is programmed just like the operating system on the device you’re using to read this article. They’re both doing their thing in the background, almost unnoticed. The way they’re programmed is determining much of your experience. You probably don’t remember giving anyone permission to program yours. Yet, here we are.

It Works. That’s the Problem.

You lost someone you love and the world didn’t stop spinning. You’re still responsible for all the same things and no one seems to be stepping up to make sure they get done. It’s on you. Everyone else is already suffering with their own grief. Adding to their burden would be a violation of your sacred duty toward them.

So you keep going. Your calendar stays full. You’re spending more time at work than you used to. The projects that don’t need doing get done anyway. You know this isn’t working. You have explanations for why it happened, what it means, and how everyone’s supposed to think about it.

None of these means you’re stupid, because it can seem like it’s working. The busyness passes the days that hold the pain you’d rather not face. Relying on logic helps you make sense of the chaos that’s taken over your life. The drinks and the weed are the only things taking the edge off.

The edge is razor sharp, and relief can feel like a matter of life and death. That’s the problem. It works just well enough that you keep doing it, and the costs mount slowly enough that it can become impossible to connect the bill to the purchase.

You’re tired all the time. You snap at people you love and hate yourself for it afterward. You feel like you’re watching your own life through glass. And you call all of that stress, because stress is a problem a capable man can manage.

You’re not managing stress. You’re managing grief. You’re managing what’s left of your life instead of rebuilding a new one.

Holding It In Doesn’t Turn It Off

Look around and you’ll see the evidence that stuffing it down and locking it up doesn’t work. You might see an old, tired guy staring back at you in the mirror. You can see what’s happening to your relationships and you’re too exhausted to do anything about it.

Holding your thoughts and emotions down doesn’t do anything to make them go away. You’re just burying them alive and they don’t need light or air to survive. Your guilt, shame and regret are all the fuel they need to live long and multiply. The feelings stay just as big and now your body, and everyone you love, is forced to pay rent on the storage.

Your heart rate climbs, your muscles tense, and the exhaustion makes you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck. The feelings stay, like they always do. The only thing you’re able to hide is some of the evidence of their intensity.

Don’t mistake the time you spend obsessively thinking about it with learning to live again. You replay the same conversations endlessly. You analyze your decisions with information you have now but didn’t then. You find mistakes and things you wish you’d handled differently.

The middle-of-the-night root cause analysis feels like good productive work. You’re doing something. The words in your head keep you from fully experiencing what your body is trying to tell you.

We rarely hear what we’re not listening for.

Your Head Feels Safe Because Your Body Doesn’t

The reflex fires before the thought does. By the time you’re building the case for why the day is already lost, your body has been making the case for a while. Something happened inside you, and before letting yourself experience it, you got busy explaining what it means.

Living from the neck up is how you get some sense of control back over a life that’s stopped being controllable. Up there, thinking works. You can sort out the accounts, plan the service, and figure out who needs to be told what. Below that you have a tight chest, a pit in your stomach, and sweat glands that have betrayed you again.

Those signals are information, but you read them as danger. Your system isn’t making a mistake, either. You didn’t just start acting this way after your loss. You learned it decades ago, back when you first learned that what you’re able to handle is more important than what you’re feeling.

If you can explain the pain, you’re above it. If you can make it mean something, you’ve done something about it. You haven’t. You’ve found a way to beside it instead of in it. And the only reason you’re standing next to it is that you can’t drive it any further away. The control is a story, and underneath all that BS, you already know it.

You Won’t Cry Forever

Somewhere in you is a fear you’ve never said out loud.

“If I let this in, it’ll tear me apart and wreck what’s left of my life. If I start crying, I won’t stop and I’ll scare the shit out of anyone who sees me. If I let myself feel all of this, I’ll fall into a pit so deep I’ll never escape.”

So you meter it out. Tears ran down your cheeks at the funeral. You’ve pulled over, alone in your car, and cried. You gave yourself about ninety seconds because you wanted to get it out of your system so you could get your shit together before you walked in the door.

Hard feelings won’t kill you. Everything you’re doing to avoid them just might. A hard thought or emotion moves like a wave. It builds, it peaks and it passes. When the pain and sadness are crashing down on you, it can seem like there’s no relief in sight. When you can’t breathe, you’ll do anything for another breath.

What makes it feel endless isn’t the feeling. It’s the story you attach to it. You tell yourself you’re weak, you can’t handle this, and you need to get it together, and you tell yourself what it would mean if anyone else caught you in this condition.

So you do whatever it takes to make it hurt less. And that’s what keeps the cycle repeating for years, and at the costs of the lives of the people who didn’t die.

Looking Away Isn’t the Trap

Work isn’t the enemy and neither is distraction. You still get to coach the team, mow the lawn and watch the game with your buddies. Sitting in your grief to the exclusion of everything you enjoy is a choice you’re free to make it. Remember though, it is a choice.

Healthy grief moves toward the loss, away from it, and back again. Looking away gives you perspective that can change the shape of your loss when you turn toward it again.

You’re allowed to look away. You’re just not allowed to only ever look away.

The trap is not the managing. The trap is management as the only tool in your toolbox. You’ll notice it on a morning that has to go exactly one way or the whole day gets written off. You’ll notice it when you reach for something you know isn’t good for you before you recognize what’s happening. You’ll notice it when you choose relief over the people you love and tell yourself you’ll make it up to them later.

What I’m Learning

I know the man lying in the dark at 4:40 because I’m him.

I lost my first wife Cindy to suicide. I lost my daughter Chloe three years ago. In between and since, I built calendars you wouldn’t believe. I set unattainable targets about everything, every day, and berated myself when I couldn’t hit them. If I didn’t have six-pack abs, my life was in chaos and on the verge of imploding.

Right now I’m seeing a somatic experiencing practitioner, which is a body-based way of working with trauma.

The fact that I’m the one writing this is a miracle in itself. Up until just a few years ago, I would have laughed at the idea there were challenges you couldn’t mindset your way through. The power of positive thinking could see a man through anything.

Then my daughter died. Mindset matters, but it has a limit. I kept reframing, kept listing what I was grateful for, kept choosing my words so carefully. All of it worked. That’s what made it hard to see. Used that way, those tools don’t help me face the pain. They’re how I manage it.

Somatic experiencing has been one of the most difficult, and humbling experiences of my life. I’m learning to notice a sensation for ten seconds without making up a story about it. That’s the whole practice. The pressure shows up in my chest and I describe it. I say where it is, how big it is, and whether it’s moving. I don’t fix it, and I don’t decide what it means. I sit with it.

It’s turned out to be a monumental change for a guy whose life has been oriented around managing uncomfortable thoughts and emotions.

That morning I described at the top of this article happened again a few months ago. I woke up at 4:47 and felt the same thing move through me. I didn’t get up and I didn’t write the day off. I stayed where I was and described what was happening in my chest until it changed, which took about a minute. Then I got up and went to the sauna twenty minutes later than I wanted to.

A few seconds sounds like nothing compared to the loss of a wife and daughter. That’s the point. You don’t have to cry on the kitchen floor. You don’t have to lock yourself in a dark room for a week. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. Notice one true thing in your body, sit with it and watch it change, because it will. It might be the first thing that has in years.

Your loss changed my world forever. What’s left is learning how to live in the one you have now.

You won’t get there by managing better. You’ll get there by letting the thing you’ve been managing finally arrive.

If the man lying in the dark at 4:40 is you, or the man you love, The Gut Check will show you what all that managing has been protecting. It’s at gutcheck.tools.

And if any of this goes deeper than tired, if you’ve had thoughts of not being here, don’t manage that alone. You can find someone to talk to at findahelpline.com, wherever you are in the world.