Stop saying you’re “Fine”

For as long as I can remember, if someone asked how I was, I told them I was fine.

It wasn’t true. I was anything but. “Functioning”, yes. “Fine”, no. [Read also; motionless.]

“Fine” is a remarkably efficient word. It does 3 things; It reassures the other person, ends the exchange, and lets you move on without inviting questions you don’t yet have the language, or perhaps the courage, to answer. People hear it, smile a polite smile, and accept it. You say it and both parties feel briefly relieved. Nothing else is required. Job well done. 

Over time, what starts as emotional competence, becomes emotional avoidance.

I couldn’t tell you when the internal shift happened for me, but I imagine it was at some point over the last few years. There’s no clear moment in my life where “fine” turned from convenience into camouflage, or vice versa, but I assume it was at some point during my “Lets Figure Out Who James Is” phase. “Fine” had arguably been doing more work than it should. It had begun to cover tiredness that wasn’t physical. Dissatisfaction that I couldn’t justify. A sense that my days were technically full, but strangely thin.

To be clear, this isn’t a piece about crisis or or a retelling of when my mental health was in the gutter, it’s about something softer and far more common. The soft perpetual crawl through life, that happens when nothing is wrong enough to force change, but nothing is right enough to feel truly alive. The way a life can narrow without calcify, and how easy it is to mistake that hardening for maturity.

And that’s how it happens.

With “fine.”

You learn early which truths complicate things. You don’t want to sound ungrateful. You don’t want to burden people. You don’t want to dramatise a feeling you don’t fully understand yourself. So you default to something socially acceptable. Something that doesn’t require follow-up. Something that keeps you moving.

“Fine” is elastic. It can stretch around sadness, frustration, resentment, boredom, and grief without naming any of them. It spares you the discomfort of accuracy. It spares other people from having to look too closely.

Over time, that avoidance becomes almost habitual. You stop checking in properly with yourself because the answer is already pre-labelled. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s “fine.” The internal conversation never progresses beyond the opening line.

For men especially, “fine” is often mistaken for strength. We’re taught early that emotional self-containment is competence. It’s how our Fathers and Grandfathers handled things. You don’t complain. You don’t burden others. You manage it. So when things start to feel off, when work is getting on top of you, when a relationship is feeling particularly trying, when you’re so stressed that one indifferent glance might cause World War 3, “fine” becomes the correct answer, not because it’s true, but because it’s safe. It signals control. It reassures the room that nothing is unravelling. But over time, that self-containment turns itself inward. What began as restraint becomes suppression, and suppression is corrosive. Ask your Grandfather. 

Human beings aren’t designed to be emotionally neutral. We’re built to register and process signals - unease, restlessness, tension, dissatisfaction, and to respond to them. Those signals are important, they’re guidance. But when you repeatedly override them with “fine,” your system adapts accordingly. 

It learns that honesty isn’t required and discomfort isn’t actionable.

Eventually, it stops raising its voice.

By the time the feeling becomes impossible to ignore, it’s no longer a gentle nudge. It’s a consequence. Complete burnout instead of boredom. Resentment instead of restlessness. Numbness instead of curiosity.

This is the moment where people often say, “I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything’s fine”

And they mean it.

A thought repeated enough times becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes belief. Belief becomes behaviour. Behaviour, repeated long enough, becomes who you think you are. You don’t just say you’re fine, you identify as someone who is fine.

Once that identity sets in, anything that contradicts it feels mildly threatening. Wanting more feels indulgent. Admitting dissatisfaction feels weak. Questioning your life feels irresponsible. So what do you do? You double down. You ignore your psyche screaming for change.

“Fine” has become dangerous.

Most “How are you?” questions are not actually questions, they’re social lubrication. A ritualised exchange designed to keep things moving along nicely. The expected answer is “fine,” not because anyone is invested in your inner life, but because the interaction itself is meant to remain intentionally weightless.

When you answer honestly, even mildly so, you break the script.

You feel it immediately. The half-second pause. The shift in body language. The flicker of surprise in the other person’s face. The person may laugh, not because anything is funny, but because laughter is a reflex when a moment becomes unscripted. 

“Oh. I was only asking.”

And they were.

That awkwardness is precisely why people avoid truth. Honesty creates friction. It slows the brief interaction right down. It introduces reality into a space designed to keep things light and bouncy.. You can almost see the other person recalculating, deciding whether to engage or retreat.

Out of kindness, we learn to protect them.

And in doing so, we protect ourselves from discomfort.

When you say, calmly and without drama, “I’m a bit flat today,” or “I’m alright, but not especially present,” or “Honestly, I’ve been better,” something important happens. A subtle internal shift. 

Alignment.

For a moment, your internal state and your external expression match.

That shit matters.

Because telling the truth, even for a brief moment, even imperfectly, interrupts the loop, and brings your attention back online. It reminds your system that your inner signals are allowed to exist out in the world, not just in your head. 

You don’t need the other person to necessarily fix anything, or offer reassurance. You don’t even need them to care particularly deeply.

The act of naming what is present, is enough.

This is how “fine” loses its grip over us. Not through some grandiose confession, but through small, accurate moments of speech that restore continuity between what you feel and how you move through the world.

I’m not telling you to do this to be vulnerable.

I want you to be conscious.

And the more often you allow those moments, in conversation, in reflection, in how you narrate your own day, the harder it becomes to coast along in the ‘Realm Of Fine’. 

“Fine” won't necessarily cost you happiness or fulfilment - those are abstract. 

What it costs is timing.

“Fine” is the reason you don’t make the call, because you haven’t deemed it ‘urgent’ enough yet. You tell yourself you’ll revisit it when things are clearer, calmer, more settled. When you feel more certain.

“Fine” is the reason conversations get deferred. You sense something is off, in a relationship, in your work, in yourself  but you don’t want to introduce friction to the situation without a good enough reason. And “I’m not sure this is quite working” feels too vague to justify the disruption.

And so you wait.

Months pass. Sometimes years. The situation doesn’t improve, but it does harden. What was once flexible becomes fixed. What could have been adjusted, now requires explanation, fallout, and damage control.

This is the real danger of “fine” - it postpones agency until the cost of acting is higher than the cost of staying.

And by the time you finally admit something isn’t right, you’re no longer choosing freely. You’re reacting. You’re dealing with momentum you helped create by staying silent.

That’s why “fine” is so seductive. It lets you feel reasonable while time does the locking-in for you. We don’t notice the door closing because it shuts a millimetre at a time.

Now look, truth doesn’t belong everywhere. Not every “How are you?” deserves an honest answer, and not every space is built to hold one. Some conversations are transactional. Some people are asking out of habit, not care. Accuracy doesn’t mean indiscriminate disclosure. It means knowing where truth does its work. Sometimes that’s with a partner, a friend, a therapist, a coach, someone who can listen without fixing or recoiling. Other times it’s private. Written. Quiet. Just you, naming what’s going on, without performing it. The danger isn’t withholding truth from casual interactions. The danger is withholding it from yourself, or from the few people who could actually reflect it back without judgement.

Protocol

This is pattern interruption.

For the next fourteen days, treat the phrase “I’m fine” as a signal, not an answer.

Any time you hear yourself say it, either out loud or internally, take a pause. Do not correct it yet. Just register it. “Fine” is the marker that something has been skipped over. Your only job in that moment is to acknowledge that the reflex has fired.

Then ask one question, silently and immediately;

Is “fine” actually accurate — or is it simply convenient?

Not why. Not how you feel about it. Just whether it’s true.

If it is accurate, leave it alone. No further action required.

If it isn’t, replace it with one concrete sentence that names what’s present without explanation.

No need for a story, a justification, or a diagnosis.

Just a sentence.

“I’m tense and distracted today.”

“I’m functioning, but a bit flat.”

“I’m a bit irritated today”

You don’t need to elaborate, soften it, or make it palatable. This sentence is for you, not for the person you’re speaking to.

Jot it down (the notes app on your phone is perfect for protocol work). 

At the end of each week, look at what you wrote and ask a single follow-up question:

What am I consistently calling “fine” that clearly isn’t?

This is the information that you’re ignoring. 

The problem was never that you were falling apart, it was that you stopped listening. 

Fuck ‘fine’.

Take Care

- James