Is It the Marriage, or Is It Your Pulse?

Every weekday I walk in from the commute sure that something is wrong between Parul and me. It is a kind of dread. She asks what the matter is. I say nothing is, and within ten minutes I have found something. The dishes. Her tone. Her mother’s visit.

By Saturday morning I cannot remember what the trouble was. We are happy at weekends. Am I inventing our problems from Monday to Friday?

Tejas, I do not think you are inventing them. I think you may be finding a cause for something that has already happened to you by the time you reach the door.

Feeling as a reading of the body

There is an old idea, from the psychologist William James, that we do not tremble because we are afraid. We are afraid because we tremble. The feeling follows the body.

In Surfing Uncertainty, Andy Clark calls this promising and far from adequate. The same pounding heart can be terror at one moment and delight at another. Something else must be settling which it is.

He reports a newer proposal, associated with the neuroscientist Anil Seth and the researcher Giovanni Pezzulo. Your brain is always monitoring the inside of the body: heartbeat, breath, the gut, the tension in the muscles. The technical word is interoception. An emotion, on this view, is the brain’s best explanation of what those signals mean, given where you are and what is in front of you.

The thief and the wind

Pezzulo offers a small story that Clark quotes. It is a windy night. You have gone to bed shaken, perhaps after a minor accident in the car or a horror film. A window squeaks. On any other night you would think “wind”. Tonight you think “someone is breaking in”, although there has not been a burglary in your town for years.

Why? Because your brain now has two things to explain. One is the squeak. The other is a racing heart. “Wind” accounts for the first and leaves the second hanging. “Intruder” accounts for both.

Clark picks out what he considers the crucial step. The brain treats news from inside the body as highly reliable. So the explanation that fits the body wins, even when it is unlikely.

What Clark is careful about

He calls this whole area tentative and preliminary, and I want to pass the caution on. The famous experiments from the 1960s, in which people injected with adrenaline read their arousal as anger or elation depending on the company, proved hard to repeat. He prefers later studies in which people were played a false version of their own heartbeat, and rated emotional pictures differently as a result.

The proposal is serious, then, and it is not settled.

Now the commute

This next step is my application. Clark does not write about traffic or marriages.

You spend ninety minutes in a state of low alarm. There are horns, a deadline you carried out of the office, a phone that keeps lighting up. You arrive with a fast pulse and a tight jaw, and your brain needs a reason for them. The road is behind you. The person in the kitchen is in front of you. She becomes the explanation, and the dishes become the evidence.

This would account for the weekends. It is the same marriage in a different body.

Change the evidence before you interpret it

If the feeling is partly a reading of the body, arguing with the reading is slow work. It may be quicker to change what is being read. Give the pulse time to come down before you ask yourself how the marriage is.

Clark’s only comment on treatment is a modest one. He says this way of thinking hints at future bridges to approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy and meditation. I would not claim more than that for it either.

One check remains. Sometimes the dread at the door is about the marriage. If it is still there on a rested Saturday, it deserves a different kind of attention.

If the dread is with you most of the day, or comes with a racing heart for no reason you can find, please see a doctor. A body that is always on alert is worth having looked at.