Underestimating the pace of healing can set us up for frustration and impatience.
A week or so after my first of two arm surgeries this fall, I began to return to my life.
Despite a brief fear that I’d never again have any ambitions beyond my couch, it turns out that about a week of the sofa lifestyle was enough. Even with a bum arm, I began to engage with the world beyond my living room.
I couldn’t do everything, but I could do some things. I drafted last month’s post. I sautéed some seitan. I started walking to pick up my two older kids from school.
One of my favorite parts of school pick-up is seeing people I don’t live with. Like a lot of folks, the pandemic taught me to cherish these weak ties. When I returned to my life and small talk with my arm in a sling, I began to field polite inquiries about how I was holding up.
One genre of this question stood out. It went something like this: “Is your arm better now? Is your pain gone?”
This kindly line of questioning felt completely absurd. I could see, plain as day, that my incisions — still held together by 13 stitches — hadn’t closed. According to my surgeon, this was totally expected one week post-op. Of course, my arm wasn’t better! Of course, my pain wasn’t gone! Healing from surgery takes more than a single digit number of days.
And yet.
I recognized the line of inquiry. It rhymed with questions I’d been privately asking myself since I’d grown bored of the couch. Why wasn’t I doing more? What was wrong with me?
All these questions reflect a shared misunderstanding. These queries imply that healing should be brief, linear, and total. Once you’re unwell, the clock starts ticking. There is a time you’re allowed to be other than your best. After the buzzer goes off, it’s back to baseline.
Healing Takes Time
But healing takes time. It’s probably more time than you’d think and almost certainly more than you’d like. That’s just the way it goes.
I remember being surprised when I learned during the pandemic that a normal, non-COVID upper respiratory infection can linger for weeks without it being a troubling sign. I’d surely had dozens of my own multi-week viruses by the time I encountered this fact, and it still floored me. It surprised me again this September when, after feeling terribly ill for just one day, it took an agonizing three more weeks for my heart rate to stop spiking during exercise and my energy to return. Despite our collective amnesia, healing taking time is actually the normal state of things.
Healing Doesn’t Always Bring You Back To Your Before
It’s also normal for healing to not return you to your old baseline at all. Some health issues stay, becoming integrated into new normals.
Even emotional health challenges can change you. Six months after a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, I remember tearing up in my therapist’s office. On top of my grief over the baby girl I’d imagined holding in my arms, I’d had a difficult emergency surgery, impacting my fertility and sense of safety. I’d lost a lot. My therapist at the time wondered aloud why I was still upset. The lack of wisdom in her question startled me out of my tears. Crying behind closed doors about a life-altering event wasn’t a problem. It was grief. Grief comes and goes. It changes you. That’s its nature.
The Science of Impatience
Research on impatience during waits suggests that by underestimating how long healing takes, we’re setting ourselves up for frustration. In one series of studies, researchers asked people how impatient they felt as a waiting period progressed. In various real-world scenarios – waiting for U.S. election results, waiting for the COVID-19 vaccine, waiting for a bus – the results were the same. People said they felt more impatient closer to the end of the wait.
While elegant, the results aren’t shocking. I can easily locate myself among the impatient waiters in these studies in exactly the situations described and many others. For instance, during the years when my husband and I were trying to conceive, I still remember how I checked my online medical chart with an increasingly agitated frequency when I knew my pregnancy blood tests were about to result.
To Increase Patience, Adjust Your Expectations
Both experience and science suggest that our collective miscalibration of healing’s timeframe adds unnecessary pain to the already taxing experience of healing. If we expect healing to be quicker than it is, we enter impatience mode sooner.
Healing takes a while. Its endpoint is ambiguous. We’d do well to adjust our expectations to accommodate these realities. One practical way to increase patience is to tell yourself the wait will be a long one – better to overestimate than underestimate, experts told the digital magazine Psyche.
Small talk on the playground and elsewhere gives me a chance to recognize how normal underestimation is and plant a flag for a more generous, true timeline. I can say, “I’m not done healing yet, but that’s normal.” And when I repeat this aloud, I’m telling myself something important, too: Recovery has its own timeframe. Accepting that truth can be its own form of healing.
My Latest Writing & Editing
It’s an unfortunate reality that it’s hard to get mental health care. You just have to ask around, and you’ll learn that closing clinics, long waitlists, provider shortages, and insurance hassles all make a hard situation harder for too many people. Even the well-connected and knowledgeable aren’t immune — including me.
Earlier this year my psychologist’s clinic shut down, and there was no way I could afford her new private pay fee. Serendipitously, around this time an editor asked me to review Headspace’s new mental health coaching services.
Mental health coaches don’t replace psychologists, but they’re another arrow in the quiver of professional mental health support. They tend to be cheaper and easier to schedule than other types of mental health care. But are they effective? Read my review for Everyday Health to hear what I think: I Used to Research Mental Health Treatments — Here’s What I Think About Headspace Mental Health Coaching.
Book Recommendations
BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, by Ruth Whippman
As a mom of three boys, it’s my growing conviction that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we approach parenting boys today.
It’s like in the age of #metoo and #smashthepatriarchy, we’ve overlooked the humanity and complexity of non-girl children. We seem stuck between rigid ideas of masculinity on the one hand and completely dismissive views on the other. But it’s tricky to talk about this topic while remaining in the good graces of my fellow feminists. Still, I think all children deserve nuance, understanding, and care. That’s why I’m so grateful for journalist Ruth Whipmman’s book BoyMom, which I found thanks to a New York Times rabbit hole.
In BoyMom, Whippman takes her own experience as a mom to three boys and weaves in reporting and cultural analysis to reveal the complex issues facing boys today. I like how she shies away from easy answers and acknowledges her own ambivalence. Male kids, like all of us, are complicated, so it’s appropriate this book is too.
This one’s essential reading for contemporary caregivers (whether they be #boymom or not). I also recommend BoyMom to anyone looking to understand a key factors at play in the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The way Gen Z men flocked to Trump suggests that Republicans spoke directly to a generation of boys who feel they have no place in a post-#metoo America.
How to Let Things Go: 99 Tips from a Zen Buddhist Monk to Relinquish Control and Free Yourself Up for What Matters, by Shunmyo Masuno (Author) Allison Markin Powell (Translator)
Written by a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, this book of wisdom is as easy to digest as a listicle. It’s the kind of book you can thumb through as needed or opt to begin or end your day with to stay grounded. Inside you’ll find advice for parenting, social media, work life, and general spiritual growth.
All the tips were wise. Many of the 99 were helpful call-backs to similar advice I’d previously encountered, but others, well, others were radically different. I filled my e-book with yellow highlights reflecting the many lines that landed deep in my gut. For these, I often wanted even more nitty gritty reflection, but each tip gets just a page or two, so it invites you to mull over particular point further on your own.
Recommended for any fans of Buddhist, Zen, and mindfulness slanted spiritual books.
*Thank you to NetGalley for the advance review copy. See my disclosure statement for my policy on accepting books for review.
Follow Your Tao: A Simple Guide to Balancing Your Energy for Inner Harmony, by Stephanie Nosco
After my first qigong class, I couldn’t believe how much calmer I felt. It was hard to make sense of. The movements were simple. It didn’t feel like I was doing much. And yet, somehow, I emerged more aligned.
That’s how reading Follow Your Tao feels. So maybe it’s no surprise that the author, Stephanie Nosco, is a qigong teacher in addition to being a psychotherapist. In this book, she blends personal reflections, teachings about the organs according to Chinese medicine, and self-help strategies in a calming yet clear way that echoes the dreamy illustrations and design that fill out this beautiful book.
There’s a lot to relate to in its pages. Sometimes to a fault, to a mild skeptic like me. Like the newspaper horoscope that’s expansive enough to be relatable to everyone, I saw myself in at least some of the symptoms associated with an imbalance in every body system. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But this horoscope effect is counterbalanced by the fact that the book itself is regulating to read. It’s not alarmist at all. Inside, you’ll find peaceful observations and insights that you can use as a stable base to step toward increased inner harmony.
Recommended for fans of complementary and alternative medicine, Chinese medicine, emotional well-being, and self-help.
*Thank you to Hachette Book Group for the advance review copy. See my disclosure statement for my policy on accepting books for review.
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