Fifteen minutes
‘I’m fine.’ You’ve said it at work, to your partner, to your mother, to the doctor. Some days you even believe it, right up until your jaw aches and your shoulders are somewhere near your ears.
In the mid-1980s the psychologist James Pennebaker asked college students to write, for fifteen minutes a day over four days, about the most upsetting experience of their lives. A comparison group wrote about ordinary things, like their shoes. Many of the first group said it was the first time they had put the thing into words at all. In the months that followed, they went to the campus health center noticeably less often than the students who had described their shoes.
Holding it in has a physical price. Every ‘I’m fine’ goes on a tab, and your body pays it.
The complete set is the whole account, start to finish: how your body keeps the tab, where the debt came from, why it’s catching up with you now, and, book by book, how to pay it down.
