"Emotion Work"

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote an entire book about the extent to which humans busy themselves with their emotions. (Her book is called "The Managed Heart")

She calls these efforts "emotion work" or "emotion management," and she points out that emotional labor is genuinely hard work; it can drain your energies as surely as the physical labor of digging a ditch or the intellectual work of reading a difficult book.

The emotional work we do is designed to help us manage the way we wish we felt, the way we try to feel, the way we really feel, the way we show what we feel, the way we pay attention to, label, and make sense of what we feel.

Caregivers of a mentally ill relative often do a great deal of emotion work; seeking to manage the array of feelings and reactions that come up for them in the journey of care. Do you too?

Have you ever thought about emotion-management work AS work? Is it helpful to name this as work you've been doing? If you name this as a type of labor you're engaged in, does it help to explain why you are sometimes so fatigued? Would it be possible to take a vacation from emotion work? What would that feel like?

What toll has the work of emotion management taken on you as you ride the seesaw of emotions you checked above?