Have you ever experienced a situation in life where you FINALLY get to a place of relative safety/security - where life has settled down to the point where you can finally rest, recover and relax - and instead of feeling relief you feel a deep sense of dread?
For instance, have you ever planned a really lovely retreat for yourself only to find that when you get there and your schedule is clear, your mind starts to race about all the things you’re going to have to do when you get home, all the ways this vacation could go wrong, all the ways that you’re not ‘actually’ safe to rest?
Or you finally get to the weekend after several weeks of hard work and instead of being able to relax and enjoy your time off, instead you find yourself feeling deeply guilty? Like you don’t deserve the time, like you really should be accomplishing something and like so many others have it so much worse than you, leading you to feel like you’re being selfish and spoiled for having this time to yourself?
Have you ever noticed that when life suddenly gets calm after a prolonged period of stress, instead of feeling a sense of letting go and unwinding, you actually feel MORE stressed and MORE anxious than you did while the hard things were actually happening?
Have you ever witnessed in yourself that when life gets quiet for a day or two, your inner critic starts to get REALLY loud, coming up stronger than usual to let you know just how lazy you are, how it’s your fault that your relationships aren’t perfect, how messed up your body is, how you don’t have your life together and how you should be and could be doing SO much better in life?
If so, I want you to know that you’re not alone, and that there’s nothing wrong with you.
The reality is, there’s likely a very good reason why you find it hard to trust safety, why calm reads to your system as a threat, why your inner critic yells at you in times of peace and why slowing down feels like a dangerous thing to do.
Today we’re going to explore the likely causes of this ‘I can’t relax when it’s calm’ phenomenon, and what we can do to support ourselves in being able to rest when this kind of stress happens.
Stress Is Stress - Understanding The ROOTS Of Not Being Able To Relax
The first thing to understand about this seemingly perplexing response to calm is that it has its roots in a very logical, reasonable place.
If you have lived a life where, from your perception, there has been constant or near constant upheaval, stress, lack of safety and lack of rest, where you have been in a long-term state of stress and life feeling like no matter what you do something always springs up to challenge you - your body may now be stuck in a kind of perpetual ‘fight, flight, freeze and fawn’ state.
If you grew up in an environment where you never felt truly safe or protected by your caregivers, where you felt like at any time you could be yelled at, abandoned, shamed, abused or otherwise left to feel alone and unsupported - this again can train our systems to be on constant ‘alert’ mode.
If you have experienced chronic illness where you have continual flair ups that feel outside of your control, where just as you feel like you’re dealing with one issue another one pops up, where you can’t ever seem to find a place of ‘good’ but are always waiting for the next thing to go wrong, you’re likely now going to be stuck in a state of constant bracing.
If you’ve lived a life where you couldn’t predict how those around you were going to treat you from day to day, where you have faced food, work, housing or any other kind of insecurity, if you’ve lived a life where you were in constant fear around authority figures and how they may take your rights and freedoms away, if you grew up in a heavily religious environment where you were taught that many parts of your natural way of being were ‘sinful’ and that you needed to be constantly patrolling yourself or if you’ve experienced a work environment where you constantly felt under attack/surveillance or like you had to be perpetually putting on an act and competing to keep up - again all of these things can lead us into a state where we aren’t able to click into rest because our bodies believe that doing so will only leave us vulnerable.
You see, when we have experienced prolonged, perpetual stress in ANY form - whether that's mental stress, emotional stress, relationship stress, physical stress, spiritual stress or a combination of any of the above - our bodies and brains are going to ADAPT to this via shifting us into a state where we are constantly on alert and on guard.
We have to remember that just because we may not have been in a state of literally having to fear for our lives - our stress again may have come from having caregivers who were perpetually unavailable or who told us that we were the reason they weren’t happy, it could come from having a social circle that was continually antagonistic towards us and made us feel left out and abandoned, it could come from being in a work environment where we don’t feel welcomed or where we are always feeling like we may be being judged, it can come from growing up believing that we are bad/wrong/sinful at our very core and in our very nature - this doesn’t mean that the stress we have endured didn’t put us into a kind of ‘survival’ mode.
This is because to our bodies stress is stress. There isn’t a differentiation in how we physically and mentally adapt to perpetual stress for the physical variety - actually being in a situation where we are being beaten, where we don’t have food, where our freedoms and rights are being taken from us in some way - and the emotional/mental/relational/spiritual stress.
It’s all the same to our bodies and our nervous systems are going to respond to all kinds of stress in the exact same way.
Also we have to remember that a lot of what causes us stress in our bodies and these adaptations to stress are how we PERCEIVE what we are going through.
So again, in real reality it could be that our caregivers weren’t going to ACTUALLY abandon us and leave us to fend for ourselves, it may be that our social circle wasn’t as unsafe as we thought they were but rather we were making their words and actions mean more than they actually did, that our job situation was more secure than we thought and so on - but if we perceived something different, if we really FELT that we were not ok, that we were not going to be ok and that what we were facing was unsafe - our bodies were going to respond to our PERCEPTION of the situation, not the situation itself.
What this means is, no matter the kind of stress we have experienced and no matter the actual REALITY of what we were going through - if we were perceiving that we were unsafe over a long period of time or if we were objectively unsafe on any level for a long period of time - this was going to cause an eventual ‘trauma’ response in us, putting us in a state of hypervigilance and bracing.
When this happens, the body and the nervous system adapt to what it believes is a life of perpetual threat by making sure that we NEVER relax or let our guard down. It shifts us into a state of always being in a state of alertness - so that we can pick up on and react to any threat that may be coming our way as quickly as possible.
Our brains and bodies are going to shift AWAY from allowing for us to be in that ‘rest and digest’ state, away from being able to see the world from a more expanded view, away from being able to think critically or even to question our own perceptions of what may be happening - because all of this lowers our ‘react and respond’ capacity.
Being in a state of perpetual stress triggers a trauma response that puts us into ‘fear’ mode, driving us to become hyper sensitive to the movements, words and actions of others, hyper sensitive to any changes in our environment, causing us to think of the worst case scenario and to be in a state of perpetual anxiety and expecting the worst and it shifts us into states where we are going to be deeply dependent upon coping mechanisms like fawning, numbing out, self sabotage, hyper-action and focus and again it will shift us into a state where feeling safe enough to question our perceptions, to change our behaviors or to notice our patterns and shift them is going to be nearly impossible.
THIS is how the body and the nervous system react and respond to prolonged stress.
So when we finally DO get into a state of safety, we aren’t going to feel safe.
No Threat = Feeling Disempowered
Rather, we’re going to feel even MORE unsafe usually, because when there’s no obvious and apparent threat - this is when our bodies are going to be in the deepest panic mode of all.
When there appears to be relative safety in our environment after a long period of stress or perceived stress - our bodies are going to interpret this state as us ‘lying in wait.’
It’s not going to assume that we are finally, actually safe.
It’s not going to trust that we can now relax and surrender because we’ve reached a state of actual security.
Rather, it’s going to be ‘stuck’ in that state of expecting something terrible to happen, and in times of peace there is going to be a sense of impending doom looming over us at all times - keeping us alert and on our toes so that we don’t miss the attack when it happens.
When things are calm, we may notice that our bodies have an even HARDER time finding moments of peace and relaxation than they did when scary or hard things were actually happening.
In other words, we may find that we actually have an easier time finding moments of joy, moments of rest and moments of relaxation in the MIDDLE of chaos than we do when we are in circumstances that are truly calm.
This is because during the chaos, we know what we are up against. During the chaos we are aware of the threat that’s happening, and usually we are able to find steps and tools to help us work through the challenge - and this is going to make us feel empowered and it’s going to give us a sense of relative safety within what’s happening.
Whereas when nothing is happening, this is going to feel to the body like we are totally powerless - we know deep down that something terrible is going to happen, we are stuck in that state of stress and fear - but we don’t know WHAT the problem is going to be and what we are going to have to do about it. We’re just stuck. Waiting.
This again is where we are going to notice that all of our ‘worst case scenario’ thoughts come up to try to help us ‘get out ahead’ of whatever threat may be coming down the pike at us.
That impending doom feeling isn’t something wrong with you, and the voices in your head coming up with all the worst case scenarios isn’t you just being paranoid - it’s you trying to keep yourself safe from the threat your body is now 100% SURE is going to happen based on the past where you never felt safe.
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Alright, we’re going to take a pause here and come back next week for the rest of this post!
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