In my last Substack (linked to at the bottom of this blog), I wrote about how surprised I was at how physical the experience of grief could be.
It wasn’t just the emotions that came with losing a loved one, but the sense that my body itself was involved in the whole process.
Another reader posted a comment sharing a fascinating piece about the metabolic cost of grief. It reminded me of a way of understanding grief, and change work more generally, through the idea of the brain as a prediction ‘engine’.
And it got me thinking about something I’ve observed for years, which is:
“Why is it that periods of significant change can sometimes leave us feeling so physically tired?”
Not just unwanted change, like losing a loved one.
Chosen change too, like a retreat, intensive coaching or changing an old pattern. Stepping into a different way of living. Even finally seeing something differently that we’ve struggled with for years.
We tend to think of these things as psychological or emotional work.
But what if they’re physical work too?
And I believe the answer to this question really matters because if we don’t understand what is going on, it’s incredibly easy to determine that something is going wrong.
Imagine - coming home from a coaching retreat and feeling so tired that you wonder if you have made things worse?
Or engaging with a healing modality during a period of illness, and then feeling really tired. The temptation is to think that you are deteriorating. But is that true? For clients I have worked with who have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in particular, the meaning given to tiredness can become particularly important. My own research (linked at the bottom of this blog) suggested that changing the way symptoms like this were understood and responded to could play a meaningful role in recovery.
So what’s going on here?
To understand we need to look at how the brain adapts to change.
You see, our brains don’t simply wait for reality to arrive and then respond to it. Based on everything we’ve experienced before, they’re continually predicting what comes next.
And the people closest to us become woven into those predictions. Things like, for example, where they’ll be, what they’ll say, what we’ll do together.
Even, and perhaps especially, who we are, our own identity, in relation to them.
When a loved one passes away, consciously we understand what has happened, but the brain has spent years, sometimes decades, learning a map of the world in which that person exists.
You come down in the morning and expect to see someone and hear that familiar:
“Good morning, John, how are you today?”
You imagine the conversation about dinner or an upcoming holiday and, for a fraction of a second, the old world seems alive. But then reality arrives again and you realise that world is gone.
This creates a prediction error. Again and again, the brain encounters a world that no longer matches the model it has spent years constructing. Over time, it has to re-learn its map of the world. And what’s more, that map could be vast if the person who has passed was tightly integrated within it.
Here’s the bit that is fascinating (to me anyway)!
This process is actually intensely physical. You probably didn’t realise, but the brain makes up only around 2% of our body weight, yet even at rest it accounts for roughly 20% of the body’s energy consumption. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change and reorganise itself in response to experience, involves real biological work, including changes in synaptic activity and connections, protein synthesis and the maintenance of the electrical and chemical processes that allow neurons to function.
Maintaining and updating our model of reality is actually an intensely biological business. In fact, I heard someone describe this in terms of skiing recently. It’s much easier to ski down existing tracks that have already been compacted and skied upon repeatedly. But creating new tracks when prediction errors occur? Well, that requires more effort.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it feels true to me, because when someone we love dies, potentially huge parts of the familiar map no longer lead where they used to. New tracks have to be made.
Here’s what it actually looks like when we update that map in the brain:
Making this connection is where this became about something more than grief for me, because grief isn’t the only time our internal model of reality has to change. Whether change is forced upon us, as in the case of someone passing away, or whether we consciously choose it, the brain is faced with something similar:
It has to do the physical work of updating the map.
And I’ve seen similar effects with clients becoming surprisingly tired and experiencing physical symptoms during more intensive periods of coaching and retreat work.
They sometimes want to sleep more. Their bodies seem to ask them to slow down. We often deliberately build rest into the process because of this. Historically, I’ve understood some of that through the lens of the nervous system. If someone has spent a long time mobilised or vigilant, it seems to me that beginning to feel safer gives the body more opportunity to rest and recover.
It’s similar to that familiar experience of finally taking a holiday after prolonged stress and immediately feeling exhausted or becoming unwell.
I still think there’s something in seeing things this way, but now I’m wondering whether there’s another piece.
Imagine you’ve spent thirty years learning:
This isn’t safe.
People like me can’t do that.
When this happens, I need to protect myself.
My body can’t cope with this.
This is just who I am.
Then having an insight doesn’t necessarily erase everything your brain has learned because those old ski tracks, those well-learned patterns, are still there - familiar, well-worn and easy to go down.
But the moment you begin embodying something different, there’s a mismatch. The brain predicts one thing. Your experience begins showing it another. Maybe insight creates the possibility of a different track. But repeatedly living from it is what begins to make it familiar, engaging the very real biological processes involved in neuroplasticity as the brain updates its existing patterns.
And this leaves me with an interesting question:
Could some of the tiredness I’ve repeatedly observed during intensive periods of change be related to the metabolic demands of that process?
There’s one group of people I’ve worked with where this becomes particularly interesting.
Some of you may know that I recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome myself, and later conducted peer-reviewed research to explore whether what I’d learned through my own recovery could help others too.
For someone who has experienced CFS, tiredness may not simply be ‘tiredness’. After years of illness, it can become part of the brain’s map of danger. It can be terrifying!
One of the things I explore with clients to help to reframe this is a concept called cytokine-induced sickness behaviour. This essentially describes a normal process whereby physical exertion can produce changes in immune signalling which can contribute to experiences of fatigue, aching, sleepiness and the desire to rest. This is true even in healthy people.
Someone might experience those sensations after a hard workout and think:
“That was a good workout!”
But someone whose brain has spent years associating tiredness with illness might experience similar sensations and think:
“I did too much. I’m crashing. I’m having a relapse.”
The initial interpretation can become automatic, based on years of previous experience. But it actually really matters because those different interpretations can lead to completely different responses and behaviours.
And this is where it gets interesting.
In this case, we’re not simply asking the brain to learn something new.
We’re asking it to experience something familiar without automatically reaching the same conclusion about what it means.
To learn that maybe tiredness doesn’t always mean relapse.
Activation doesn’t always mean danger.
An uncomfortable sensation doesn’t always mean something has gone wrong.
So when activity is safely increased and tiredness subsequently arises, there may be another opportunity for learning.
Not only - can we listen to the body without automatically making the sensation of tiredness evidence that the old prediction was right?
But also - can we leave room for the possibility that change itself might also be asking something of us physically?
Multiple prediction errors.
Multiple opportunities to update the map.
Of course, none of this means that every experience of tiredness is evidence that we’re ‘rewiring our brain’.
Bodies get tired for countless reasons, and physical symptoms deserve appropriate curiosity and care. But perhaps we don’t need to immediately assume that every uncomfortable sensation means something has gone wrong either.
After decades of watching people change, I’m increasingly curious about whether we’ve underestimated the physicality of transformation.
We sometimes talk about changing beliefs as though we’re editing sentences in a document. But I don’t think it is quite like that.
Perhaps insight is sometimes only the moment a new possibility becomes visible, but the rest of us - our expectations, nervous system, habitual responses and predictions about what happens next - may still have some catching up to do.
The old tracks may still be there.
But perhaps, experience by experience, we begin creating new tracks.
And maybe that’s why change sometimes asks more of us physically than we realise.
With love,
John x
Thank you Powerful and At Peace for the conversation in my last blog that inspired this. 🙏🏻❤️
To anyone who wants to read my last blog, you can find it here.
If you are up for a bit of academic reading, the link to my peer-reviewed research is here.
And a nod to my dear friend and collaborator on my CFS study Karen DiMarco for helping me understand the science behind Cytokine Induced Sickness Behaviour. Miss you Sistah! ❤️