Sometimes you should go to bed angry

Nothing good happens after two a.m., including me.

It was four a.m. and I was on the phone with my long-distance boyfriend, as I had been for the last six hours. I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen, explaining my point once more to someone who stopped being able to listen about three hours ago, but kept trying to anyway. At the time, unbelievably, I thought he wasn’t fighting for us.

The advice never to let the sun set on a fight comes from a good place. And I’m increasingly realizing that the entire self-help and therapy industry is on the pursuer’s side. Talk more, feel more, say more. Don’t leave things to fester. Work it out.

Were we still working it out at four a.m.? Or was I asking for potato chips?

What happens to the brain when you’re activated

When emotion is high and there’s a threat in the room (and if you’re in a fight, there’s a threat in the room), the prefrontal cortex goes offline. The part of the brain that governs logic, planning, and choice is no longer with us, and what’s left is emotional flooding and muscle memory. All we have access to is what we’ve done before. A brain in this this state cannot execute a new action, something that might change the outcome of the fight. At this point, we can only have the fight we’ve always had.

If we’re the sort of person for whom hyperactivating strategies (raise intensity, speak faster or louder, make the case again, plead for a new outcome) have worked in the past, those are the strategies available to us now. And they are very likely adding to our partner’s sense of threat.

If we’re the sort of person for whom deactivating strategies (distance from the moment, silence, shutting down, leaving the room, defensiveness) have been our go-to, those are now all we can do. And, once again, they’re sending danger signal after danger signal to the other person.

The conflict cycle always runs in response to threat. When we’re activated, our options for exiting the cycle are now very few.

What happens to the brain when you’re tired

The brain’s cleanup crew takes a break, and glutamate starts to accumulate, making the prefrontal cortex even less available to us. This makes us more likely to choose immediate rewards over long-term ones. We are no longer able to produce new effort, making our choices more impulsive.

Sensory gating fails and we can’t tell the difference between what’s important and not, making us prone to sensory overwhelm alongside emotional. When I was sitting on my kitchen floor that night, at that hour I could not have told you the difference between the refrigerator’s hum and what he had said an hour before.

We lose our filters and become less able to focus or calm our thoughts, and become more prone to automatic thoughts (like the interpretations we make about why our partner always does that thing).

The gas pedal (the sympathetic nervous system) is activated by the threat, the brake (parasympathetic) is activated by the fatigue, and we go into a state called co-activation, where we’re both amped up and shutting down at the same time.

Tired and activated is the least relational state we can be in

The hard thing (and the great thing) about being a couple therapist is that no matter who is talking, I kind of agree with them. Everyone has a good point. Everyone, at least in part, is right. I hear one side of a conflict from Partner A and I get annoyed on their behalf and I have a moment where I worry that I’m taking sides in the relationship, and that I’m going to be antagonistic towards the partner when I turn to them. Then I hear the other side, and invariably I am now Team Partner B.

Most of the time, the pursuing partner (hi) is the one trying desperately to get to resolution so rest feels possible. The withdrawing partner is the one who says let’s just go to sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow” is a threat too, if you rarely do return to the conversation, and it’s why I couldn’t put the phone down even when I knew nothing I said from then on was going to do any good. This fight feels like the last chance to be heard, because it often is.

I’m defecting from the self-help industry. On this one I am now firmly Team Withdrawer, because I’ve learned from my own experiences and those of my clients, and from How I Met Your Mother, that nothing good ever happens after two a.m.

Go to sleep. And try again tomorrow.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.