I’ve heard it jokingly (and sincerely) said…if you haven’t had an existential breakdown during this pandemic…are you even doing it right?
Existential crises usually involve life’s big questions: Who am I? What matters in life? What is a good life? What is worth living for? What is happiness? What makes me happy? What can I do to live a life well-lived? What do I believe in? What do I do with my time? Etc. Etc.
Basically, what I mean to convey is… if thoughts of your own mortality, the mortality of those you love, what in your life has purpose or meaning, what matters, or what to do with your life have crossed your mind in the last year – you’re in good company. It’s important to normalize a good existential crisis. They’re actually deeply important for what it means to be human and to find out how to live our best lives.
It was just this past weekend, I was feeling this ugly, unsettled feeling. Kept me restless during the day, feeling over- and under-stimulated at the same time. Bored, but not really… I was definitely uneasy. I couldn’t quite name how I was feeling. Everything in my life seemed great…nothing stood out as a “cause” for this niggling feeling. I wanted to cry and curl up in a ball for the rest of the evening. I didn’t know what to do about it or what would make it go away.
This is just one experience of an existential crisis. Yours might look completely different from this or you might resonate with this description. The point is, most of us (if not all) have ‘em. It’s a part of being human… of existing. In this post, I seek to normalize and utilize our existential crises to bring about more wellbeing and flourishing in our lives.
There’s power in naming an experience.
Once I named this experience, categorized it, gave it meaning, I was able to make a bit more sense of it. It takes awareness to name something: you first have to acknowledge it. This can be difficult when our instinct is to push away, avoid, deny, or drown these feelings. Familiarize yourself with what your own experience of existential unease looks like. It could be obvious, or not at all. Pay attention. Look for patterns. Listen to your body’s sensations. In reality, this can be a lot harder than it sounds. While this is the first step, it isn’t always so easy or simple. Really spend time with yourself and your body to familiarize yourself with how you experience existential issues popping up in your life.
Why it’s important…
Existential crises are our psyche and body’s way to tell us to pay attention! Often times, there’s an unmet need, a neglected part of ourselves that is screaming for attention. A lot of crises happen during points of transition, change, loss, or upon entering a new life stage. There’s a reason for this. As you go through life, you change. Your needs, wants, goals, dreams, abilities…etc. In order to adapt well through life’s sometimes predictable (sometimes not) changes, you need to be able to flex and grow. Having checkpoints where we engage with these bigger questions and answer them anew for ourselves (even if our answers don’t change) is a powerful way to approach the inevitable change that life demands of us. There’s a reason “midlife crisis” has become so ubiquitous in America… middle life is a time of reckoning with what life is left before you. It can be a time of drastic change, from family life (empty nesters, divorce, caretaking or death/loss of parents, etc.) to personal life (questions of retirement, reckoning with physical health, abilities, ailments, etc., questions of did I spend my time well…). The list goes on. Our ability to face ourselves and take the time to ask and answer life’s big questions can be the difference of aging well with grace or living in denial or despair. (A note here that existential crises can happen at any age, not just during mid-life.)
What you can do…
So let’s say you’ve spent some time with yourself, you’ve noticed the unique constellation of sensations, symptoms, and feelings that mean you, too, are experiencing some existential anxiety. What now?
The next step is to lean in.
Lean into the discomfort.
Be curious about it.
When do you feel it most? Is it before work? After work? When you’re all alone? When you aren’t being entertained by TV, social media, or others?
In the discomfort, lies the key to further understanding.
To lean in requires us to be brutally honest with ourselves and our own penchants to avoid, distract, numb, or deny. We need to call ourselves out and our many ways of coping. As a species, human beings generally avoid discomfort and seek comfort. We must go opposite this innate tendency to find any type of answer.
Once you lean in, be curious, and be honest you can finally start to listen and interpret what you’re hearing.
How to listen:
Well, so far you’ve been doing a great job increasing awareness, acknowledging feelings as they come, identifying/naming the pattern of sensation and emotion. You’ve been leaning in with curiosity and honesty, challenging your innate and learned response patterns to discomfort.
Now what?
This is the time to ask yourself: What is my psyche/body trying to tell me? What is it trying to communicate? What do I need or want? Is there something I’m neglecting (a need/ a part of myself)? Am I unhappy with some aspect of my life that I’m not addressing? Am I internalizing something I need to externalize (anger, pain, grief, shame, guilt “negative” feelings)? What could I do to address this need/want? What can I learn about myself from this experience?
These can be powerful questions to unlocking the answers you need to move forward and through your existential crises. While this list is helpful, it is far from exhaustive. You will need to reckon with questions of your own that aren’t included in this compilation, but this can be a good start.
Now that you’re asking, you can use what you’ve learned from the past steps of identifying, leaning in, being curious and honest to listen to your emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual responses to these questions. Our bodies don’t often respond to us with words. Our bodies talk with sensations, emotions, pain, ailments, tension, energy, color, memories, images, temperature, vibration, movement, etc. Try to listen from these different modalities. And if this is something that does not feel accessible to your or feels like a foreign language – that’s okay! Just like any other language, the language of our bodies is something we learn and practice. It is never perfectly understood, we just get a bit better at it. A therapist can help you learn your body’s language and connect you deeper with yourself by learning how to listen and respond to what your body is telling you.
Great! You’ve come so far already! Next are the last steps of interpreting and responding!
Let’s say you’ve realized that you feel tension in your shoulders every time you get off work. Your energy level sinks once you transition from work-time to non-work time. You feel rushed and like no amount of time is enough time to relax and attend to all the other things (or people) that need your attention. You’re spent. You get sick often. Your body doesn’t know how to relax. You get headaches or stomachaches, too. You feel irritable all of the time. Your sleep quality is miserable and not satisfying. You feel exhausted, depressed, and anxious most of the time.
This vignette presents the myriad ways your body tries to let you know something needs attending to. Now, there’s no one right way to attend to these sensations/feelings/signs. This same person can try getting massages 1x/month, going to therapy, quitting their job, balancing work and life with improved boundaries, learning how to care for their needs outside of work, learning relaxation and stress management skills, finding a better support system, etc. For every one need, there’s many, many ways to try and respond to trying to meet that need. Interpreting what the need is and what response fits the best can be tricky. It is often a case of trial and error. Remember, the language of our bodies is more of an art than a science. It will never be perfectly clear all of the time. We must guess. We must experiment. Try and try again. The great part is our bodies often respond well simply to us just responding at all! Even if we get it wrong. You acknowledging, naming, leaning in, asking, listening, interpreting, and trying to respond builds trust with yourself – which communicates: When something needs attention – you will attend to it. You will not be neglected or abandoned in your need.
It is this self-trust that we build out of this process that gives us the confidence and resilience to flexibly navigate life’s curve balls, it’s sufferings and joys. When we learn the language of our own psyche and body (yes, existential crises is our psyche and body speaking to us), we learn everything we need to make it through. You have a navigational system already internally-wired. Consider this a truncated, generic version of an owner’s manual.
When talking about existential questions, I must reserve some space for leaving room for the Unknown. The Unknown represents the things we cannot answer, the things we cannot control, the change that inevitably awaits us. Sometimes, you won’t have an answer to how you’re feeling, you won’t know what to call it, it won’t have a name or a sensation that makes sense, you won’t know what you need, you won’t know how to meet that need that you don’t know about, you won’t know the best way through this…that is utterly and deeply normal and okay! Part of the process is trusting the process and interfacing with discomfort--and for a large majority of humans, not knowing makes us wildly uncomfortable.
And so, the next time you have an existential crisis (‘cause there is most likely going to be another one)…I hope these words can be a guide for you to start learning the language of your own psyche and body, so that you can grow and find the flourishing and wellbeing that comes from attending to all parts of what it means to be human.