Can Your Feelings Make You Physically Ill?
The science is clear: listen to your emotions.
Here’s a real question for you: how do you decide you’re sick enough to stay home from work? And if you’re someone whose job IS staying home and taking care of the infinity of things there are to take care of when you’re a parent or a home-maker, how do you decide you’re sick enough to ask for help?
For me, it’s always been a fever. Well, it’s a fever or throwing up, but I am not a big thrower-upper, so: fever. But a lot of times I feel awful and I don’t HAVE a fever. In those cases, I reluctantly decide that I’ll have to have a fake fever. (As in, tell everyone that I’ve had a fever.) With a fake fever comes a whole slew of side effects — mostly, guilt; and checking my temperature religiously every twenty minutes just in case I DEVELOP a fever and can therefore PROVE with SCIENCE that I am actually sick.
I say this with a dire metric ton of caveats*, but a positive effect of the COVID-19 epidemic is that some people (not all people, not even necessarily most people) have taken more seriously the importance of staying home from work. Of course, when you have a family who is also sick, staying home from work is not the same as staying home from work. But every once in a while, a person who would have gone to work feeling like crap in 2019 will…
