"Fine." (And Other Things Your Body Knows You're Lying About)

There's a word most of us reach for when someone asks how we're doing.

Fine.

It comes out before we've even checked whether it's true. Fine when we're exhausted. Fine when we're overwhelmed. Fine when something much more complicated is quietly happening underneath.

But even when our mouth says fine, our body often tells a different story.

Have you ever caught yourself mid-task — making a coffee, walking down the street — and realised your shoulders are up around your ears? Your jaw is clenched? Your eyebrows furrowed without you noticing?

Nothing triggered it. And yet — there it is.

Chronic tension, jaw clenching, disrupted sleep, a low hum of anxiety even when nothing is actually wrong — these are incredibly common, and they make complete sense. Your nervous system doesn't distinguish between a genuine threat and a lifetime of having had to hold yourself together. At some point, bracing became the default. And eventually, you stopped noticing it as tension. It just became you.

Why We Learn to Say Fine

The idea is simple but powerful: as children, we are very good at figuring out which feelings are safe to have around the people we depend on.

If being upset caused conflict. If needing something never really worked. If emotions felt like a burden — you learned, very sensibly, to put those feelings somewhere else. You learned to cope. To function. To say fine.

And that was genuinely adaptive. It helped you survive.

But there's a cost. When there's a consistent gap between how we truly feel and what we allow ourselves to express — that experience doesn't disappear. It goes somewhere.

Very often, it goes into the body.

The tight shoulders. The clenched jaw. The sense of bracing for something, even on a quiet afternoon when nothing is wrong.

"I've Just Got Used to It"

This comes up in therapy more than almost anything else. People describe physical tension in real detail — and when asked what emotion might be underneath, they say: I don't know. I've just always been like this.

That's not an absence of feeling. That's a well-practised disconnection from it.

The invitation in therapy is simply to get curious again. To notice the jaw. To let the body become a doorway rather than something to push through.

Worth Sitting With

• Do I say I'm fine without really checking?

• Do I carry tension that has no obvious cause?

• Do I find it hard to relax even when nothing is wrong?

If yes — that's not weakness. That's your body trying to get your attention in the only language it has.

I offer person-centred therapy in Putney, South West London, and online. Get in touch at gaiatherapy.uk