This Summer, I Learned an Important Lesson About Stress

I don’t quite know what to make of this summer.

I spent most of June in a storage unit, most of July recovering from an appendectomy, and—most recently—nine full days of August with a pretty darn bad bout of COVID. While everyone else was busy having a Brat summer, I’ve been having a BRAT diet summer (with a side of the “burned out girl” aesthetic).

My mental and physical health have been pretty bad these last few months, so with the end of the season on the horizon, I decided to carve out some much needed me-time and spend three days at Miraval—the only place I could think of that might help me feel better.

The resort, which is nestled within the Catalina mountains about an hour outside of Tuscon, is a luxury wellness retreat that offers all kinds of holistic treatments and experiences. You can get a chakra balancing massage, attend lectures on intuitive eating and journaling, climb a 50-foot pole and zip line down for the sake of self growth, have your energy cleansed by an intuitive medium… you get the gist.

I arrived at the property the Sunday after a wild wedding in Park City Utah, and almost immediately burst into tears—which was a completely bizarre response, given that I’d just touched down at heaven on earth. For almost a full day, I kinda sorta couldn’t stop crying, but in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I wasn’t upset at all, but through meditations, massages, and breath work, the tears just sort of… flowed out of me.

Eventually, it stopped, and I never really understood what was happening—until I found myself in a stress management class at the very end of my trip.

The class, which is led by Michelle Fraley, a holistic life coach, is all about learning techniques to restore your nervous system from chronic stress.

But before we could learn how to fix the issue, Michelle wanted us to understand just how damaging it really was. To begin, she handed out a worksheet that listed a dozen symptoms of chronic stress—like difficulty focusing, irritability, and emotional eating. And I realized that for the past year (maybe even longer?) I had been experiencing every single one of them.