“You’re too busy," I got told. My days were packed in, but I didn't recognize it as a problem. After all, I had been busy most of my life and it was simply normal for me. I now find myself remembering her words in a new understanding. She wasn’t just making a random observation; she was sharing a piece of wisdom that my busy lifestyle was causing me problems that I wasn’t seeing.
I just read the book “When the Body Says No” by Dr. Gabor Maté, a family physician from Vancouver who also does palliative care. The theme of the book is about stress and health. It is an interesting read, but a hard one because you have to be willing to look at your own life. Maté explores questions like why do some people spontaneously recover from melanomas (a deadly skin cancer)? How is it possible for a person to have Alzheimer’s in the brain on an autopsy, but never had symptoms of dementia when they were alive? Why do some smokers get lung cancer and others don’t? The point is not a matter of blaming oneself or others, but rather examining the multiple factors that lead to illness and how to mitigate them. He describes how disease isn’t just from environmental risk factors, genetics, or personality; it is also about the generations before us and the influence of the society and culture we live in. After all, genes are activated by the environment and don’t explain everything. The role of personality in stress is described as a major theme of the book. The pleasant, dutiful person who works to fulfill responsibilities long after their body limits them, is stoic, who thinks of others and doesn’t ask for help is typical of the patients in his book who have MS, ALS, cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. It is shocking how much these personalities can matter. Researchers who interviewed patients without knowing their diagnosis were able to detect those who had cancer by 94% based on their psychological interview (page 62)! Maté writes, “While we cannot see that any personality type causes cancer, certain personality features definitely increase the risk because they are more likely to generate physiological stress. It is stress – not personality per se- that undermines the body's physiological balance and immune defences, predisposing to disease or reducing the resistance to it…Certain traits-otherwise known as coping styles- magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them to them all is the diminished capacity for emotional communication” (page 127). Thus, he reveals that personalities are not fixed but rather just coping mechanisms and can be changed over time, emphasizing that being able to be emotionally intimate is key. When emotions are pushed down instead of recognized and expressed in a healthy way, it affects our nervous system, immune system, and hormonal systems through stress. One cannot simply shut down emotions without having consequences. He writes, “In numerous studies of cancer, the most consistently identified risk factor is the inability to express emotion, particularly the feelings associated with anger. The repression of anger is not an abstract emotional trait that mysteriously leads to disease. Is a major risk factor because it increases physiological stress on the organism” (page 99). In one example on breast cancer patients “researchers found that emotional factors in social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of the disease itself” (page 61). With a heavy scientific basis, his book describes how a combination of these factors lead to disease in individuals. One of the most important factors then to being able to prevent disease is realizing our coping strategies and patterns of our personalities to be able to change them, and to learn to recognize and express our emotions.
I learned a huge number of lessons out of this book and I couldn’t possibly share them all, but I will reflect a few and how I’ve related them to myself, as well as possible solutions. I have had this belief in myself that I can do anything and that I should never give up for the longest time. A while back I realized that actually, I didn’t want my work taking over my life. I decided to increase activities that would balance work, and therefore I stopped thinking that being busy was a problem. It wasn’t like I was a busy workaholic; I was busy with other activities. For example, learning rabab, singing, listening to kathas while exercising, staying up until 1 am working on advocacy projects, leadership roles, being there for friends, paath, walks with family, simran, learning new shabads for the Gurdwara, blogging, learning history, journaling, etc. Then the pandemic happened, and I cut back my work but added on cooking and santhiya. I found myself wanting to do more and more myself rather than relying on others, like making my hummus from scratch! To me, these projects were good because they were interesting and exciting. I figured I am sent here to do this sewa so I might as well give everything 100%. Eventually one of my family members got sick and everything just kind of toppled over. I realized that it isn’t possible for me to do it all. It didn’t matter whether these activities were started as a way of keeping me well balanced, and I thought they were a type of “good busy.” Doing these activities was a type of work in itself because there was new learning involved in most of the activities. As proud as I was of powering through and doing it all, strength, determination and all, I realized that it was a mistake and that being busy was actually a cost to myself. My body was not happy any longer with my level of being busy. Maté writes “‘Sometimes the problem is not that we lack strength but the demands we make on ourselves are impossible’” (page 232). There were many examples of people like me in the book, who thought that it was good to be busy with things you enjoy. One such woman described: “’It was a challenge to juggle homemaking, parenting, business, gardening, interior decorating and chauffeuring, but I loved the roles and perform them with great intensity’” (page 45). Maté describes how stress can go unrecognized and still cause us problems, and that stress isn’t necessarily bad events but can also be chronically lacking things in our lives like connection (especially a problem during covid), sense of identity, having one’s emotional needs met, etc. He explains we have ignored our body’s warning systems for so long sometimes we are unable to see the signs of stress. Eventually the body sends a lot of signals to us that there is something wrong in the form of pain: “Physiologically, the pain pathways channel information that we have blocked from reaching us by more direct routes. Pain is a powerful since secondary mode of perception to alert us when our primary modes have shut down. It provides us with data that we learn ignore at our own peril” (page 152). Like many, I certainly learned to ignore my body over time. How many of us just ignore that pain in your neck, or your knee and just keep going? I learned to compartmentalize what my body was doing, so I could be professional and present in my workplace. I didn’t want to be seen as the person with whatever thing going on, but for my skills and capabilities. Having to prove myself and going above and beyond was something I learned a long time ago. Eventually when I got into yoga, you learn to start to connect to your body again. I was surprised at what my body was holding onto, and it was hard, but it was important to do that reconnection and to try to learn what my body has been telling me. Recognizing our stress and our pain as an important signal from our body is something that is key to our health.
One of the other lessons from the book was that you don’t always have to be positive. Dr. Maté describes that many people complain that they did everything possible for their health and are optimistic but still got a chronic illness. Studies show these individuals are more likely to get ill, for example breast cancer patients who reported little stress were more likely to die at the one year follow-up (page 245). He writes, “We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less like to survive. Genuine positive thinking- or, more deeply, positive being - empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth” (page 257). Positive being means being in Chardi Kala. It is different than being unrealistic and not recognizing what you are going through which he terms “fake positivity.” It can be exhausting to be fake positive and it expends energy into pushing everything down rather than being realistic. In order to be realistic, he tells us to ask, “What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions the stress responsible for a lack of balance will remain hidden” (page 244). The solution then, is that it is important to be realistic about your situation, and then you can find that positivity inside by not being afraid of seeing what your situation is.
An additional major theme of the book was also living by double standards. This was all too familiar to me. As a caring person, I get my heart broken by investing myself into others and the world, going to great lengths to ensure that others are well supported and not unnecessarily stressed. I have advocated fiercely for self-care, and for people to create a culture of caring for each other in our workplaces. Yet I feel guilty for that self-care and selfish for doing things for myself because of a culture of sacrifice. In his book, Maté gives a striking example of an ALS patient: “Because she could barely hold pen or pencil, Alexa often stayed up long after midnight to complete her daily marking of student assignments. In the morning she would arise at five-thirty, in order to arrive at the school early enough to scrawl the day’s lesson the blackboard, the chalk gripped in her closed fist” (page 39). We might think it is shocking why someone would continue to do this, but we might be able to see ourselves in these stories if we look deeper inside. Alexa’s story is one that I have repeated to many people when talking about this book. She physically is still trying to push her body to do what it can’t anymore out of a determination to power through. The question arose for me, What is the distinction between the sacrifices that we are taught to make in Sikhi and this? We are taught to give our lives if necessary, for the benefit of humanity, so why should I not give up myself as part of this sewa to others? I think the difference is distinct. Firstly, that self-care is a sewa and we need our bodies to be functioning to continue to do our life’s other sewas. Secondly, that the sacrifices made by Singhs and Singhniya in our history were made in full connection, Anand, and Hukam. While physical suffering was inflicted on them, their mind state was somewhere else, in a different avastha. The sacrifice of destroying your own wellbeing to help others is not balanced, or Anand, and is usually driven by external forces and becomes a type of suffering for the person doing it. In the book, Maté describes the solution to this double standard we set for ourselves, in which we have higher expectations of ourselves than others, is to have full acceptance for oneself. We must have full compassion for our boundaries and treat ourselves like we would advise someone else in our situation. In Sikhi that means remembering that Waheguru is within as well and we need to be taking are of this body and mind for it to be able to achieve its purpose. We can only really get to a higher avastha of trying to live fully within accepting Hukam and having that connection and not suffering if we are able to care for ourselves. When you are unkind to yourself in any way, you are applying a double standard and that duality is something that is a problem because it is not seeing You everywhere, within and without.
Lastly, the book also talked about the theme of living up to the expectations of others. Truth be told everyone probably has expectations of you- your cultural community, your bank, your job, your instructors, your peers, your parents, etc. Those expectations will be vastly different depending on who you talk to and can be a significant source of background stress: “‘Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,’ wrote Hans Selye” (page 255). To free ourselves from the expectations of others, Maté argues that we must be living with autonomy to make our choices freely: “One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The rule is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything…His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes he has ‘chosen’ his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities” (pg 245). Further to that point of choosing a stressed lifestyle, he describes that one of the biggest stressors is the expectation that if you don’t do anything and keep busy then you don’t exist in the world. We cannot be fully stress-free and living our best lives if we are chained down by who we think we should be. He argues that the solution is assertion, which “challenges the core belief that we must have somehow justify our existence... It is being, irrespective of action. Thus, assertion may be the very opposite of action, not only in the narrow sense of refusing to do something we do not wish but letting go of the very need to act” (page 279). Gurbani teaches us that our compass should not be external to ourselves and our Guru is our guide. We do not have to be meeting the expectations of others to be valuable because we are inherently valuable as a part of the Universal life energy and not because of our accomplishments. He writes, “No human being is ‘useless’, whether the helpless infant or the helpless ill or dying adult…All too frequently, people are given the sense they are valued only for their utilitarian contribution and are expendable if they lose their economic worth” (page 224). Thus, rather than living up to the expectations of others, we must realize that we have inherent value as we are.
While I have learned lots out of this book, I think it comes down to the fact that I thought there was a difference between work busy, and regular busy, and that now I understand that’s not true. There is value in each of us, even if we are not actively accomplishing something and just having fun and enjoying our lives. We must treat our bodies with compassion when we recognize our emotions and signals of stress, and rather than putting up double standards, sacrificing oneself, and powering through, it is important for us to stop living in duality and start living in the Oneness. While determination and strength and motivation are really great qualities, there is a point at which we should not keep powering through no matter what. Filling your own cup should matter because it is a respect, in awe to the Oneness, that we value Waheguru within. Rather than fighting to continue to be busy, I am starting to realize the art of just rest. As my cousin likes the say, the world will keep spinning.
