Your brain, the body budget keeper, keeps careful watch of vital resources: oxygen, water, salt, glucose, and other ingredients that keep you alive and well.

Your body budget fluctuates normally though the day as your brain anticipates your body’s needs and shifts around these resources accordingly: when you digest food, your stomach and intensities “borrow” resources from the muscles. When you run, the muscles take from the kidneys and liver.

Valued deposits to the budget come in the form of nutritious food, positive social contact, love and safety, movement and sleep.

The body spends big when it completes a physically demanding task or when it learns something new.

The budget tilts out of balance when when your brain estimates badly. The stress response is a perfect example of this happening quite regularly: when something psychologically meaningful happens (you hear footsteps behind you in the dark) and your stress response is activated, demanding physiological mechanisms ‘prepare’ you (fight or flight).

Occasionally there may be a big, unexpected expenditure: a serious infection, pulling an all-nighter, or experiencing a traumatic event. Othertimes, there might be longer term, persistent cases of low level withdrawals to the system, like being subjected to bullying, racism, sexism or living in an unsafe environment.

In the absence of enough nutritious repayment to the budget, debts can build over time. Your brain continues to (mis)predict that your body needs energy over and over and drives your budget into the red.

In the shorter term, a deficit will feel like exhaustion, anxiety, low mood, being charged/ on guard.

Stay overdrawn for too long, and the immune system gets involved in the roll of “debt collector” and you get sick. Chronically overtaxed body budgets set the stage for chronic illness.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that everything stops when you stop. Its can be really helpful to remember all the work going on behind the scenes when we rest.

This metaphor is taken from The Theory of Constructed Emotion, by Lisa Feldman Barrett.