I Wonder Why People Hibernate

So. This wonder is a day late b/c I was home with a sore throat yesterday and we don’t have the Internet at home. I’m feeling better today, but it was just one of those days where I knew I’d be miserable no matter where I was, so I decided to be miserable from my couch in my pajamas, watching horrible sitcoms on TBS (I couldn’t be bothered to get up and walk over to the DVD player).

I wonder if it’s our animal instincts that make us want to curl up and hide when we don’t feel well. I know it’s at least a cat instinct b/c whenever a meow-meow of mine is ill, first he yarfs in the most high-profile carpeted spot in the house, and then he caves it under our bed for hours. I’ve never been so sick I’ve gotten under the bed, but I’ve been in the bed on many a hungover morning or chest-cold-rattled day.

It’s not even that I have to be under the covers … just curled up into the smallest ball possible. Maybe it’s my attempt to keep all the misery sucked in tight. Being swaddled in a blanket, huddling around a cup of tea (which I only drink when I’m sick) so it steams up my glasses makes me feel better, even if only for a moment.

The same is true for emotional illness, too. My friend W said she spend the better part of a day this weekend curled up on her couch, wrapped in her grandma’s quilt, having a good cry. Everybody deserves a mental-health day, and some people choose to spend it celebrating good health and some people choose to spend it getting some not-so-good stuff out of their systems. But we all seem to do it similarly when we feel bad … hunker down and seek creature comforts until we feel normal-enough to unfold ourselves from our hidey-hole and stretch in the sun.

The worse my body (or heart or whatever) aches, the less human I feel, so I guess it’s only right to revert to one’s base nature when under the weather. What are your feeling-crappy rituals? Are the cerebral or physical? Why do you do what you do?