How to Tell if You’re Fine or Just Used to Chaos

I spent years saying “I’m fine” to people because I genuinely thought I was. “Hey, how are you doing?” was never a real question to me — just a greeting. I’m not about to unpack my life for someone walking by.

I know, I know — I share a lot on social media. But that’s different. That’s controlled. Intentional. On my terms.

Sharing my true feelings with a stranger isn’t high on my to-do list. Plus, I was fine, and my life had become normal. And that was the problem.

I didn’t start out enjoying therapy. I was reluctant, honestly. But by the fourth session, I tested the water and shared something real — and it was met with nothing but grace. From then on, I felt comfortable opening up a little more.

At the time, I was fresh out of grad school, back in Texas, and by all accounts outwardly doing great. I beamed about a new job search, dating, and staying active.

I was the perfect client. It was honestly refreshing just to hear myself talk about how well I was managing everything.

But the actual truth was —

• I was dead broke and on food stamps.
• I was dating, but I could only afford coffee, and I was low on excuses for why I couldn’t make lunch or dinner.
• I was back home in my childhood room. As if I never left.

But I was in therapy and I had to perform, so she also got — “I’m fine.”

(Isn’t it crazy how we will pay someone hundreds of dollars to lie? PS – they also see through it, so you’re better off saving some dollars by dropping the mask from jump.)

Then I slipped and said too much.

Me: “Yeah, and then you know I just drink with friends and stuff.”

She paused. “What do you mean by that — and stuff?”

“Oh, just drinking. Sometimes it helps you relax, you know.”

“Do you drink every day?”

“What? No! Of course not. That’d be crazy. Just when the weekend starts. Thursday through Saturday. Sometimes Sunday…but yeah it’s social…and yeah, I do drink by myself sometimes.”

“How much do you drink each week?”

“Not that much. Like three bottles of wine and two of those small 32oz bottles of vodka. But I don’t drink during the week so yeah.”

“Do you think that is a lot?”

But something about that particular question made me feel off-balance. How do you fake the funk with a “deer in headlights” look? Because my honest answer — the one I couldn’t say out loud — was that I had never actually asked myself that question.

Now, I was exposed for not having it altogether as I thought.  In fact, I was indeed the “perfect client” – the one who actually needs help even if I didn’t want to admit it. (Yeah – delusional.)

My drinking was as routine as OJ with breakfast.

Alcohol was the evidence. Me trying to justify it all?  Well, that sealed the truth –

I made my baseline chaos.

—

Whenever I discover something new about myself, I like to do a little research. Partly, I’m curious, and secondly, in a weird way, I kinda wanna know why I hold back so much.

So, of course, there are actual social psychology phenomena with actual names.  These problems don’t exist in our heads – they are real.  And that’s a good thing, because now we have a place to start.

This is the same psychological mechanism that I touched on last week.  It’s what makes a raise you worked very hard for feel ordinary after a few months.  And why chronic stress stops feeling like stress and just starts feeling ordinary like…a Tuesday.

In this week’s use of the term, it is about hiding and managing pain.

What was once a red flag has just become background noise.

For me, I had recalibrated around the wrong normal.

When I was younger, I walked with a limp. People constantly remarked on and teased me about it, but I didn’t care (that much); I thought it was normal.

I knew I limped, but it wasn’t as painful to walk on as it was about 2 months earlier, so I left it alone.  You know where I’m going with this?

Later, during a routine checkup with my doctor, he discovered I had broken a growth plate in my foot.  I had been walking on it for so long that it never healed properly.  And worse – I wasn’t even aware I was hurt.

So, this same mechanism that keeps us from being overwhelmed by joy also keeps us from recognizing when we’ve quietly adapted to carrying too much.

Our brains recalibrate. What was once a red flag becomes the baseline.

We keep “habitually line-stepping” the lines we set for ourselves.

Researchers describe this as a “hedonic treadmill” — you keep walking, but the emotional ground beneath you is always shifting back to neutral.

My body had adapted to it being broken. That’s what hedonic adaptation looks like in real life.

You stop noticing the limp because the limp becomes you.

Emotional avoidance is exactly what it sounds like: using behaviors, substances, or distractions to sidestep uncomfortable feelings rather than process them.  You know how we do…

Research consistently shows that men are nearly twice as likely as women to manage emotional distress with alcohol — not because we’re weaker, but because we were rarely given another language for what we’re carrying.

I don’t know too many men who would roll over in bed and say, “I’m going through it, and I don’t know what to do.”

It’s terrifying to be that exposed when you’re supposed to be the one holding it together.

Pillow talk is probably the most intimate we can ever be if we’re honest. It’s our underbelly.

That kind of vulnerability takes a lot of trust, which may take time. And yes, researchers even have a term for that, too — “the pillow talk gap.” It’s one of the reasons we can stay silent in distress for so long.

Like a soldier, trained to stay invisible to avoid capture.

But here’s what I learned about that. I wasn’t just trying to be invisible to the people around me. I was also being invisible to my true self. Suppressing.

It eventually bubbles over, and when it does, I hope grace and kindness find you.  Even more, if we don’t know how to manage our emotions, there’s a risk of expressing them to others in ways we’ll later regret.

This is wild. As a person of faith, I’ll pray hard and ask God to answer my prayers. I’m upset that He wouldn’t just help me.

But I never stopped to consider that maybe the answered prayers were the people I kept hiding from.

“I’m fine.”

So we keep it and find ways to medicate.

• An obsession to work out.
• Gambling.
• Clubbing.
• Sex.
• Drinking.

The substance or the behavior changes, but the function is the same — distance yourself from what you’re actually feeling long enough that it stops feeling urgent.

Medicating is medicating.

The tricky thing is that it does work in the short term.  A few drinks genuinely reduces cortisol and knocks the stress off.  Staying busy genuinely quiets anxious thoughts.  Overworking genuinely creates a sense of control.

None of it resolves anything though.

Feelings don’t get processed, they get stored. And stored feelings have a way of compounding quietly until something cracks them open.

For me it was seven words from a therapist. For someone else, it might be something entirely else. But something always asks the question eventually.

I didn’t have to do much digging here — I have an honorary doctorate in it. High-functioning depression is much easier to understand than Persistent Depressive Disorder.

It’s what it looks like when someone carries the weight of the world on their shoulders, and no one around would know.

For me, high-functioning depression is the loudest, most resounding quiet scream.

Unlike major depression, which can make just doing daily things hard, high-functioning depression operates in the background like the Energizer bunny.</p&gt;

You still show up to

work.</p>

You still work

<p>out.</p>You still make p

lans.

As men, we are significantly underdiagnosed here because we perform wellness so effectively. Research shows that men are conditioned to demonstrate competence, especially when struggling.

(Also when: you don’t know what the hell you are doing but you still double down on some nonsense because you want to seem like you have a plan…not that I’ve been there.)

So, can you think of the type of behavior that would make high-functioning depression particularly invisible in male populations? Yes, our behavior.

Even crazier — the better we are at functioning like everything is ok, the easier we are to miss when deep down we want to be seen and heard.

We just don’t want it used against us (note: I really hope partners out there get this point about men).

We become proof to everyone around us — as we lie to ourselves — that everything is fine.

Faking the funk is what happens when “I’m fine” stops being a white lie or common greeting and starts being a lifestyle.

Erving Goffman studied impression management among men. He found that our need to appear capable and in control isn’t just about fulfilling societal norms. It’s deeper and more obvious if we’re honest with ourselves.

This is about proving it to ourselves.

It’s as if we are not content if we don’t believe this about ourselves. Ok, I’ll admit it first. I’ve been guilty of continuing to make a bad decision — like refusing to stop and ask for directions — to prove it to myself (and of course the nagging passenger in the seat beside me).

And pretty soon, at least it is for me, we start feeling like darn impostors in the very places where we should feel comfortable.  But, our desire to appear “cool” — to protect our own ego — keeps us on the hamster wheel of delusion (because bruh, you are clearly not ok).

We don’t just hide our struggles from others; we often hide them from ourselves.

That’s what I was doing in that therapy session. I believed “I was so fine” so much that I was straight-up lying to my therapist.

I’d constructed such a convincing story about myself in my head about how well I was managing everything that technically, I was the first person to sell and buy that lie.

I was the perfect client, remember? I wondered how long I had been faking it. And for my ego, I wondered who else around me already knew.

The hardest part about faking the funk isn’t the performance. It’s the moment you realize the people you’ve been performing for the longest is yourself.

That’s the funkiest.

The tricky thing about adapting to “chaos” is that it’s invisible and subtle by design. Otherwise, you’d recognize it as a problem.

But no — we start moving our baseline gradually and quietly, justifying it. Then our brains present every new baseline as our new normal.

Here are four signs you might be functioning under more than you realize:

1. You can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely light. Not happy in a moment, but actually unburdened.

If you have to think hard to remember that feeling, that’s worth paying attention to. My friend remarked recently, “I wish I cared less.” Perfect expression for this feeling.

2. You use something consistently to “come down” or chill out. Alcohol, doom scrolling, trolling, food, overworking — the substance or behavior matters less than the pattern. If you need it to feel okay, that’s emotional avoidance, not relaxation. I can admit that I enjoy my share of 420. It makes me feel good, focused, and relaxed. It’s a treat. But I can always tell when I may be hypomanic (BP2) because I smoke often, several times a day, and rationalize that “it’s the only thing that calms me down.” But really, it’s the strongest thing to distract me from myself. Get it?

3. You perform “coolness” really well. You flash a smile and can explain how you’re “fine” clearly and confidently. But there’s always that one person who is too curious for your own good and asks how you actually feel. Not how things are going. But how you feel. And you’re stumped. That gap is worth exploring.

4. The bar for what you’ll tolerate keeps moving. What would have bothered you two years or even two weeks ago doesn’t register anymore. That might mean growth — or it might mean you adapted so quickly you didn’t even notice. The difference is whether you processed it or just absorbed it.

Sometimes the first step to reclaiming your “functioning” is reclaiming your environment. Whether that’s talking to a professional or simply organizing your kitchen so you can breathe when you meal prep, don’t ignore the noise.

As a reminder, NONE of this is a diagnosis. I hope it encourages you to start asking yourself the question my therapist asked me — the one I couldn’t answer. What’s your question?

Our bodies don’t know the difference between “I’m managing stress well” and “I’ve just stopped feeling it.” Both can look the same from the outside. And as we already know, both feel the same on the inside after long enough.

So the question isn’t whether you’re functioning. It’s whether you’re actually fine — or just used to chaos.

Did this resonate? Comment or share your thoughts with me at info@fitmencook.com if you’ve been treading water lately.  Let’s discuss and get through this together.