Karin Wildheart

Article originally published in April 2020.

This COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down.

For many, that means increased daily anxiety. For me, staying at home with my husband has meant an incredible sense of spaciousness, peace, and motivation.* But before this interruption to regularly scheduled life, I was struggling. I spent much of last winter living with near-constant anxiety.

I’d reached a dark place.

Between planning a wedding in four months and an ill-timed, unfortunate incident with a high-conflict personality, last year was difficult. As I adjusted to married life, I also put a great deal of pressure on myself to publish a lot of writing, and that wasn’t happening.

I beat myself up for not being happy.

I should have been on top of the world! I was a newlywed with a loving spouse, friends, and stable finances. I’d just gotten a promotion that gave me more free time during the day. How dare I not love my life? How dare I not publish my writing multiple times a week?

I felt driven to maximize every waking moment.

The question that most tormented me during the day was, “What should I be doing?”

I heard recently that hell is the intersection of “I have to” and “I can’t.” I have experienced this hell on several levels, but this winter it was, “I have to figure out what I should be doing, and I can’t.” At night, it was, “I have to sleep, but I can’t.” Though I’d been having trouble sleeping for months anyway, at one point it got so bad I could barely sleep through the night for days in a row.

At some point, I realized I never felt relaxed, and in fact did not even know how to relax. I tried blocking off an hour of my day to do nothing but relax, and I could not fill it. I ended up half-heartedly, confusedly, guiltily wrapping up some items on my to-do list, and not ending the time feeling relaxed at all.

As a voracious reader who works at a library, I turn to piles of books when life is hard. Kate Northrup’s book Do Less offers experiments to fight feeling overwhelmed and like a failure. I was drawn to “listening to your body.” The idea wasn’t new, but I’d never thought to apply it as the antidote to constant anxiety. Don’t I already know what my body is telling me? “I don’t like this!”

And yet, I had noticed that all the pain seemed to be in my mind. My body is usually patient and quiet even while my thoughts are racing.

If “What should I be doing?” is my hell in question form, “What does my body want right now?” is manageable. It makes me feel invigorated, not worried. Ultimately, answering it even answers the big questions, which I’ll explain more later.

I committed to a full day of experimenting.

One typically desperate Friday, I made a point of listening to my body. I had the day off, and I felt the familiar urge to force myself to catch up on whatever I felt I should have accomplished during the week. I used the fact that I was scheduled to work all day Saturday to give myself permission not to. I mentally repeated, “Today is your Saturday,” as often as I needed to.

I also kept telling myself that my only job in the world was to listen to my body. Northrup’s book outlined a few possible ways of “hearing”: words or pictures or sensations. She says the more you listen, the more your body will “say.” Northrup refers to her own body as “she” rather than it, and I found this helpful in creating a bit of mental distance/objectivity.

So, what happened?

I ate better.

Many mornings when I’m alone, I avoid eating until I’m so hungry that I also don’t feel like cooking. Listening carefully to my body helped me avoid that pitfall. I ate slowly and savored flavors. I didn’t hold myself to strict meal times.

Time seemed to slow down.

I was surprised and delighted each time I looked at the clock. Though it felt like I had extra time, I wasn’t worried about how to fill it. I didn’t feel like I was falling behind everyone else. I thoroughly enjoyed my life as it was passing.

I lived more creatively.

My body wanted to create, apparently. I added words and pictures to an artsy notebook project. I wrote a birthday card to my sister-in-law. When small obstacles arose, they didn’t trip me up. I thought about them slowly, and came up with creative solutions. I spent time more time than usual editing my writing in the afternoon.

I started more conversations.

When I checked in with my body I was surprised at how many texts that led me to send, things I’d been meaning to communicate. I finally replied to some old messages I’d let slip on various channels. I told at least three people about ways their behavior had made me uncomfortable (all received quite well by the way, so I guess my body can be quite tactful). I asked a friend with a new baby if I could help her with anything or pick anything up for them.

I spent extra time with friends.

Though I’d had no such plans when I woke up that morning, I ended my day at the home of dear friends. I loved sitting on the floor and chatting with them, meeting their very new daughter and visiting with their sweet toddler. I even briefly helped out with a home project. While I was there, another close friend’s husband dropped off dinner, so I got to see him, as well. When my husband was done with work, he came over with takeout for he and I, and we all enjoyed dining together. We still remember this night fondly and treasure the cute photos we took.

Before we left that night, we set up a plan to bring them a meal a few weeks later, which was great fun again.

After that dinner, we ended up crossing state lines on the friends’ behalf to help pull off a prank (the latest installment in a years-long back-and-forth). One of them brought my husband’s forgotten backpack to him the following morning as I dropped him off at work (because his car had broken down the day before). Picture this intimate, silly moment between friends: my husband had two people give him a morning goodbye hug and wave at him to have a great day at work as he entered the building. All of this because I committed to doing nothing but what my body wanted for a day.

I shudder to think what my Friday would have been like without this experiment. Another day spent alone, frustrated with myself for not being able to will myself into a good time, ashamed at what little I accomplished: exactly nothing, because I couldn’t even relax. I would have been living in fear and judgment instead of living out of my values.

Why does ‘listening to my body’ — work?

Some might assume listening to one’s body all day would result in eating frosting and lying on the couch all the time. But the exact opposite was true for me.

My body whispered to me to reach out and engage with others, to be of service. She is apparently more connected with the environment and relationships than I had thought. Listening to her did not lead me inward, but outward. I lived a peaceful, productive day aligned with my values during which I did not feel the need to meet the expectations of others.

It makes perfect sense our bodies react in alignment with what matters most to us. How do we determine our values? Ultimately, it comes down to our emotional reactions to concepts. What inspires and energizes us may leave others cold or uncomfortable. For example, think of the word “competition.” Do you think, “Bring it on!” or (like me) “No, thanks!”

Listening to one’s body is a shortcut. Rather than blocking out time to develop a list of personal values, then consciously running each task of the day through that metric, simply listening to the body achieves the same result.

The same intelligence that reveals to me what is important to me guided me every time I checked in with my body. As a result, I did only what I valued most deeply. If I lived every day like that, I couldn’t help but create a life based on my core values.

Creation. Connection. Community. On any given day, I might claim to care about these things, but would I live out of them? All I can say for sure is that I did this Saturday.

I mean, Friday.

I wrote this article in 2020 and it is as relevant as ever. In fact, it was the original inspiration for both my free Step One guide and the Values Deep Dive Session. Knowing your values is such a perfect shorthand for understanding your emotions and what’s going on in your body. In other words, reconnecting to your intuition. I don’t only mean moment to moment, but also in a very big way, for questions like, “Should I marry this person?” “Is it time for me to change jobs?” and more. Questions both big and small can be answered by paying attention to your body’s sensations and feelings.

You can tell if your life lights you up or lets you down by what’s going on in your body, and you can make important and helpful changes based on this information. I love walking people through this process in my Values Deep Dive Session. You can also get started on this right away by downloading the Step One guide.

* Hahahahaha. This did not last. It soon turned to increased daily anxiety for me as well.