You’ve been having trouble sleeping. You think of it as a sleep problem.
Then work becomes unusually stressful. You start waking earlier. Your shoulders stay tight during the day. You’re more impatient with people. By afternoon, you’re exhausted and having trouble concentrating.
A few weeks later, the situation at work settles down. You start sleeping better. Your shoulders aren’t as tight. You’re less irritable. Concentrating becomes easier.
We have different names for all of these things: insomnia, muscle tension, stress, irritability, fatigue, difficulty concentrating.
The names are useful. They help us describe what is happening. But they can also make it seem as though six separate things happened to the same person.
And once they look separate, we start looking for separate explanations.
The poor sleep must be a sleep problem. The tight shoulders are a physical problem. The irritability is an emotional problem. The difficulty concentrating is a cognitive problem. If you’re short with someone at home, now there’s a relationship problem too.
Pretty soon, one difficult period can look like five different things going wrong.
That can change what we notice. We may focus so closely on the sleep that we miss what changed before the sleep did. We may treat the irritability as a problem with our personality while overlooking the exhaustion. We may wonder why concentration has suddenly deteriorated without connecting it to how much attention is being used elsewhere.
The categories haven’t merely described the experience. They’ve changed how we understand it.
The person was never divided that way.
The body that couldn’t settle at night was the same body carrying tension during the day. The attention being used to think about work was the same attention needed for concentration. The exhaustion from poor sleep affected how much patience was available for other people.
Physical, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, relational. Those are categories we use to describe different parts of experience. They aren’t walls inside a person.
This is why something we call emotional can change something we call physical. It is why physical exhaustion can change how we respond to other people. It is why a difficult relationship can affect concentration, appetite, sleep, or energy.
Nothing has to cross from one separate system into another. The separation was ours.
We divided the experience so we could talk about it.
The person experiencing it remained whole.