Before You Blow Up Your Life, Eat Something

Not every crisis is actually a crisis

Before I had a kid, I assumed the parents complaining about daycare germs were being dramatic. How sick could one toddler really get? Then my daughter started daycare, and over six weeks she brought home the flu, pink eye, hand-foot-and-mouth, and strep. For three months, she didn’t make it through a full week of school. It was such a haze that I don’t have much memory of that time beyond how sick we all were. But I do remember feeling like everything was wrong with my life. My marriage was strained, everything in the house was breaking. I even caught myself running mental calculations about whether we should move.

Thankfully the sicknesses ran their course before we made any permanent decisions. We all started sleeping again, and the life I’d been ready to tear apart turned out to be fine. I had just been sick and sleepless for weeks, and my body had been trying to figure out what was wrong.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret says your brain’s first and most important job is to keep you alive. So when it calculates that you’re short on the building blocks that keep your body running — sleep, food, water, connection, movement — it registers this as a threat to your life. At first it just tells you you’re tired. But when you keep overriding that, have another bad night, skip another meal, your brain stops trusting the simple answer and reaches for a bigger one. A depleted brain starts to say, “Something is wrong” (why else would you keep ignoring its signals?), and then it goes looking for what.

Soon it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. The more depleted you get, the worse your brain is at telling ordinary exhaustion from real catastrophe, so it keeps reaching past the obvious answer for the alarming one. From the inside, you can’t tell that your brain is doing this. If you’ve ever been furious at your partner and then eaten something and felt differently, you know what I’m talking about. “Hangry” is a real thing.

You can probably feel my advice coming. I wish I had something more exciting to tell you, but it is so important it bears repeating. Take care of your body’s basic needs before you assume something is wrong with your life. I know you’ve heard a thousand times about the importance of sleeping well, eating enough, drinking water, and spending time with loved ones… usually from someone with a supplement to sell. But we keep putting it off, telling ourselves we’ll sleep or go outside once we’re through the hard part. Usually the hard part is that we haven’t taken a break.

Sobriety gave me a checklist for exactly this, called “HALT”: before you do anything you can’t undo, ask whether you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. It was developed to help people avoid relapsing, but I find it applies to most mental health struggles. Because even if you do have incredible tools from books and therapy, they won’t be useful if you have no energy.

So the next time something in your life feels enormous, I want you to run through your basic needs. When was the last time you connected with a loved one? When was the last time you ate a full meal or drank a glass of water? When you stepped away from screens and took a deep breath outside? If you can’t remember, meet the need before you make a decision. It won’t fix the actual problem, but it can keep you from making a permanent call during a temporary low.

Most of what felt unbearable that winter felt unbearable at 3 a.m., a sick kid finally asleep on my chest, my mind running the worst-case version of everything. By morning, after coffee and a real stretch of sleep, the same thoughts were things I could handle.