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September 6 - September 30, 2025
Sulking is when it’s no longer an active emotion, alive in our bodies, but instead a scenario playing out in our minds, such that we’re no longer feeling anger manifest as heat in our chests and clenching in our throats but we’re still stuck in the same loop of the same imaginary argument we’ve had seven times.
Notice that an emotion is coming up for you.
Invite the emotion to be there for a second, like you’re welcoming an old friend.
Get Curious about the emotion:
Return to what’s real and true right now.
Notice that you’re feeling something, that something has shifted internally for you.
Mindfulness is about accepting reality,
Mindfulness is about being flexible with what’s happening right now and being connected to your inner world while engaging with the outer world.
The countless instances of using my precious words to overapologize instead of speak up about my needs.
After years of inner tension, after years of ignoring intuitive nudges and whispers, my body started to scream.
Fawning disconnects us from our bodies, and so does living in a society that teaches us to be at war with our bodies—to shrink, make ourselves smaller and slimmer, so we won’t be able to take up enough space to fulfill our potential.
We’re lured into a world of detachment from our bodies to increase the profit of companies that thrive off our self-loathing.
It’s an act of rebellion against the system when you become embodied—in harmony with your body, nurturing it and accepting it in all its seasons, cycles, and fluctuations—because that means you don’t need to be smaller, younger, or differe...
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More recently, research has shown a relationship between unprocessed stress and autoimmune disorders, particularly in women.
we must also consider the psychosocial and emotional factors and the toll that silencing both our needs and our emotions takes on the body.
chronic stress and suppressed emotions, particularly anger, can contribute to immune system dysfunction and increase the risk of autoimmune disorders because of elevated levels of stress hormones. Not surprisingly, this stress-induced immune dysregulation is especially significant in women, and even more significant for women of color.
You mask your true self in social settings. Your brain is on high alert when you don’t need to be. You use up so much of your precious energy to overthink, overanalyze, and overextend.
When we’re stuck in a fawn response and in survival mode, our bodies are flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
When we’re in chronic survival mode, we usually don’t realize it because we’ve been there for so long.
On emotional and behavioral levels, prolonged survival mode can manifest as a sense of urgency in the body, leading to a low frustration tolerance, a feeling that things need to get done right now or something bad will happen. I need to respond to this text immediately! I have to resolve this conflict pronto!
It’s a feeling of being in a rush even if you’re not rushing anywhere.
“allostatic load,” which is the cumulative burden of chronic stress on your mind and your body.
When our bodies are handling such a heavy load of stress and rarely returning to a baseline state of safety, they will take longer to feel like they are being restored and recovering. This is why it can feel like a weekend isn’t enough time, that eight hours of sleep isn’t enough—because the body has been working so hard, it needs more time and sleep to recover. And yet, it might feel impossible to relax, because the mind is constantly racing with thoughts and the body is swirling with agitation, so we’re in this vicious cycle of needing to rest but not being able to.
Our bodies cannot properly heal while in ...
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We heal by showing our bodies that we can be anxious and safe at the same time.
We can be angry and safe at the same time. We can be uncomfortable and safe at the same time. This takes time to learn and practice.
How can we listen to our bodies if we never learned to?
research has actually shown that our perception of stress can significantly affect its impact on our health.
When we’re in survival mode, our bodies can’t heal, restore, and balance themselves the way they’re supposed to.
researchers at Columbia University discussed their finding that slow, deep breathing was associated with reduced stress in groups of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Not only that, but the evidence of stress reduction was often immediate—and, over the long term, deep, diaphragmatic breathing has been shown to reduce cortisol levels in the body.
When our bodies are frozen in the past, focusing on our breath affirms that we’re actually here, right now. It’s how we can communicate to our bodies that we’re calm and safe.
When the sympathetic nervous system is always activated (refresher: that’s the state we go into when the body thinks there’s a threat), it becomes hard for the brain to prioritize anything else; it’s focused on looking for imminent danger. Even situations that are supposed to be fun, like social gatherings, can quickly become exhausting because we’re unconsciously hyperfocused on people’s moods, facial expressions, and perceptions of us. This intense, narrow focus can lead to overwhelm when we are dealing with daily tasks or even making small decisions because the brain is using so much of its
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and so challenging to rest when we’re in survival mode—because our bodies unconsciously become addicted to the stress.
During these times of high levels of stress, the brain releases dopamine, which activates its reward center. And because the brain’s job is to protect us from danger, it is like, Ooooh, sweet, I got a reward! Positive reinforcement! I need to keep being stressed! This is why, so often, we unconsciously seek out situations that aren’t good for us (e.g., high-stress jobs, toxic relationships, and so on). Our bodies have only ever known that level of stress, so they crave it.
what feels familiar to the body is going...
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By first noticing that we’re tensing up, feeling stressed, we can immediately insert a pause into this automatic process and begin to soften our bodies. Being aware of the stress is what allows us to start to break the cycle. Even when we notice it, we may still be stressed and tense! That’s okay. Just by being aware of it, we’re already doing something new. Remember, the goal isn’t to get rid of our challenging emotions but to become more aware of them and then change our relationship to them.
Black individuals had the highest rates of PTSD. The prevalence of trauma in Black communities is systemic and systematic.
Pain travels through families until someone is ready to face it.
But self-regulation happens when we meet this urgency with slowing down.
When we focus on slowing down, we actually have a greater ability and a higher capacity to get things done, because our bodies feel safe enough to focus. We need to slow down to speed up.
Remember, we want to dip our toes in the discomfort and be able to come back out.
When I found myself hyperfocusing on a part of my body that I felt badly about, I would first notice that negativity, allow it to be there, then practice acknowledging what that part of my body did for me:
Every second of every day, our bodies are working endlessly to allow us to live.
Consciously choosing to stop being at war with our bodies and instead work with them, thank them, understand them, pay attention to them, and care for them is an intimate act of returning home to the self.
Many of us fawners have been conditioned to take things personally for our own safety.
We learned to rely on external validation to tell us that we’re safe and loved, and to then feel worthless when that external validation is taken away, causing us to crave more of it. We internalized others’ bad moods as proof that something is wrong with us, using self-blame as an effective coping mechanism to make sense of criticism, neglect, or chaos.
