Science and Spirituality | Body and Mind: Let the Tide Come In

I’ve been sitting with grief this weekend – not because I’m in a period of active grief, but because the residuals of years of it have been triggered to the surface, and I have allowed them to float there. There’s a difference between grief finding you and you choosing to meet it. This weekend I chose to meet it.

That choice led me back to old notes from my graduate school days, because something in me remembered studying the timespans for specific emotions. I was a psychology student once – perhaps it was an intuitive choice, considering life handed me a different kind of curriculum than the one of career – the caregiving kind, the loss kind, the surviving kind. The notes were still there, and so was the truth in them.

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“THE REAL LIFESPAN OF EVERY EMOTION INSIDE YOUR BODY”

That was the heading I’d written down at twenty-three years old. These were the notes underneath it:

1. Pure anger → 90 seconds, chemicals peak and clear if you stop feeding it with thought
2. Sudden fright → 2 to 3 minutes, adrenaline fires fast and body resets itself quickly
3. A wave of sadness → 4 to 6 minutes, moves through naturally only resistance makes it stay
4. Jealousy spike → 8 to 10 minutes, without a story to survive on it simply dies out
5. Raw shame → 10 to 15 minutes, heavy but dissolves faster when faced instead of hidden
6. Grief episode → 20 to 30 minutes, comes in tides and every tide eventually ends
7. Anxiety attack → 20 to 40 minutes, body cannot sustain that intensity it always drops
8. Heartbreak wave → 60 to 90 minutes, only when fully felt otherwise keeps returning
9. Deep loneliness → 2 to 4 hours, social pain hits the same place in brain as physical pain
10. Suppressed emotion → months to years, never felt never gone just buried deeper in body
11. Silent resentment → years if untouched, damages the one holding it far more than anyone else
12. Unresolved trauma → a lifetime, the body remembers everything the mind tried to forget

I read through it three times. I sat with it for a long moment – held it, really – and searched myself for the part of me who had first been given that knowledge. The twenty-three-year-old sitting in a classroom, writing it down… I tried to introduce her to the version of me who has since embodied it. The one who didn’t just study grief but lived inside it for years on end. They recognized each other, and became fast friends.

Then I thought about what had gotten me from there to here. What triggers had forced me – not just emotions, but me – to the surface throughout the years. For me it has always been nature, the arts (including writing itself), and people. These are the things that (and who) created enough safety, or inspiration, for something real to move through.

All but two of the people are gone now. But those two – I told them this was on my mind. Then I molded it all into this post, because what struck me most wasn’t that I’d written it down at twenty-three, or even that I’d remembered it. It was that most of us were never taught any of it at all.

Most of us were only ever taught to manage things. To perform okay. To say “I’m fine” on autopilot until we actually believed it, or at least stopped questioning it. We were taught that emotions are inconvenient, embarrassing, excessive. That feeling things too deeply is a character flaw rather than a built-in design feature of being human.

But our bodies never really get that memo.

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The Physical Side

The body keeps an honest record of everything our mouths agreed to leave behind. Suppressed emotion doesn’t disappear; it relocates. It shows up in your shoulders, your sleep, your reactions that feel disproportionate until you trace them back to something you never let yourself finish feeling. Unresolved trauma doesn’t fade with time alone. It waits, patient and specific, for the right trigger to surface it again.

This is why I have always been adamant about writing. About journaling. About going deep in conversations rather than skimming the surface of each other’s lives. It’s not because I enjoy pain or think suffering should be performed, but because I see it through a person’s skin, through their well painted masks, and I’ve observed and recorded the data of what happens when it isn’t processed.

I’ve lived some of it myself. More importantly, I’ve mindfully watched it quietly sometimes control, sometimes dismantle, people who deserved so much better than the silence and the secrets they kept. It kept them from healing to fullness, and sometimes it took their literal lives.

None of us can afford to keep pretending.

The tides of grief always end, but only if you let them move through. The anxiety attack always drops, but your body has to be allowed to complete the cycle. The heartbreak wave resolves, but only when it’s fully felt, not managed into submission.

Feeling is not weakness. It is the most efficient, and brave, and truly self-love building thing you can do.

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The Spiritual Side

We have a version of “I’m fine” in faith too. We call it performed praise. Gratitude on autopilot. Worship that skims the surface of a heart that’s actually drowning. We’ve been told so many blatant lies, sometimes by the very communities meant to hold us. The worst of those lies is that bringing our full emotional reality before God is somehow a lack of faith. That lament is complaining. That grief is ingratitude. That doubt should be kept quiet.

But the Psalms are almost entirely lament. There’s a whole book titled “Lamentations,” for goodness sake. The biblical model for prayer was never “pretend it’s okay.” It was bring it all, raw and unrefined, and let it be witnessed.

The psychological and the spiritual aren’t competing systems. Together they create a full circuit, and that circuit – whether it’s complete and flowing clean, or full of shorts and static – is either feeding or starving us.

Suppressed emotion creates spiritual distance. Shame that isn’t faced blocks prayer before it even forms. Resentment held in silence calcifies the heart in ways that no amount of Sunday attendance can soften. Unresolved trauma distorts the image of God Himself, making Him feel distant, punishing, or indifferent, not because He is, but because the wound speaking is louder than the truth.

On the other hand, genuine spiritual practice can help complete what emotion alone struggles to finish. Lament is the prayer that doesn’t perform. Confession is shame brought into light instead of buried. Surrender – real surrender, not spiritual bypassing – is the soul’s way of completing the cycle the body started.

They work together. They always have. The question is whether we’re letting them.

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Closing Thoughts

The longest items on that list – suppressed emotion, silent resentment, unresolved trauma – those aren’t longer because they’re more powerful. They’re longer because someone, perhaps even ourselves, kept interrupting the process. Because the feeling never got to finish. Because it was buried and demanded kept quiet, instead of held, witnessed, and eventually surrendered.

You don’t have to be a psychology student, or even a spiritual guru, to hold and use this knowledge. You just have to be willing to stop pretending you’re fine when you’re not – even if only in private, even if only on paper, even if only in the quiet space between you and God.

Let the tide come in. It will go back out. It always does. Let it take what haunts you with it… that is one of the necessary processes when healing truly begins.