How many times have you tried to ‘calm the F down’ in the midst of a moment where it felt nearly impossible to be calm?
Shoulding on yourself for how you need to be more “regulated” or how you “should be better able to deal with this [anxiety, fear, shame, overwhelm etc.] by now…” This tendency to judge and power-over our feelings is something most of us find ourselves doing at one point or another. Oscillating between the actual anxiety and the shame about the anxiety, one feeling feeding the other, the inner tension growing so big we have no choice but to collapse under the weight of it.
In today’s wellness obsessed, self optimization oriented culture it’s easy to expect a lot of ourselves when it comes to being “regulated” that frankly, our bodies might not be ready for.
And lest we forget to mention the wildly terror filled times we’re living through– the forced famine in Gaza, immigrant families being split, imprisoned and killed on US soil, the supposed “land of the free.” Collective intensity is and has been high for a long while. If we’re present to all of reality, there is no denying that intensity is an inescapable part of this existence. It’s so. darn. appropriate. to have an intense nervous system response to intense collective conditions like these. Rushing to “calm” through this sort of intensity is a lot to ask, and actually not that helpful as it relates to collective change and healing.
What if that inner intensity you’re feeling doesn’t need to be ‘calmed down’? What if its actually asking to be met with equal intensity?
The intensity of nervous system activation doesn’t need you to calm it down, but it needs you to give it room to exist and so that it can tell you how it needs to be supported.
Intensity isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a gift of intelligence from the body pointing you towards a more emergent and real process of healing. Real as in, we’re not powering over ourselves to some egoic version of “healing” but rather letting the body lead the way towards what is good and right for us.
Let me explain.
Shifting from power-over to power-with dynamics of nervous system support & self care
The nervous system is highly nuanced, it’s not something to be powered over with shoulds and attempts at “fixing” your “dysregulation.” Your nervous system is already working (without conscious effort) on your behalf to help you move towards regulation. It’s wise! It doesn’t really need your interference. It needs your listening, respect and care; which we give by getting to know it and learning to meet and match its intensity with equally as intense care practices– typically in the form of following impulses for movement or action of some kind.
We can understand “intensity” in the nervous system as activation or mobilization into a threat response state (i.e. fight/flight/freeze/fixate). This mobilization is a natural and wise aspect of being human; these states are protective and have survival intelligence behind them, and instead of trying to “fix” ourselves out of them, our work is to meet the intensity of those threat responses where they’re at, so they can move us towards safety and thus be completed (rather than stored as accumulative stress or trauma in the body).
I want to acknowledge that OF COURSE no one wants to be in a stress state more than they have to be. It doesn’t feel good, and isn’t a sustainable state to be in for long periods of time. The idea of “calming down” is appealing because pain aversion is something we’re biologically wired for, so of course we want to move away from what doesn’t feel good towards something that does. How human of us. And…
When we try to rush towards “calm” from a place of internal intensity, we usually find it doesn’t work because we’re trying to bypass the naturally self-regulating intelligence of the body.
Nervous system intensity wants to be met and matched with an appropriate level of intensity.
Something I often teach clients is that “extreme” (or intense) stresses want to be met with extreme coping skills. This is how we can understand why someone might struggle with something like addiction or eating disorders. Extreme stress begets extreme coping skills to soothe and regulate. When an intense threat response is met with an equally intense safety-seeking behavior, our system perceives that there is enough safety to regulate back towards our zone of presence (i.e. calm), and naturally down regulates. Reaching for an intense/ extreme coping skill is merely our nervous system trying to do its best to move back into safety and presence, or more technically, a parasympathetic state.
If we can understand this need to meet and match our nervous system, we can begin to choose on purpose how we want to do that.
When we’re younger, we often don’t know how to meet the intensity in our nervous system, so our system defaults to what it does know or can reasonably do. This is how we might find ourselves developing patterns of behavior that at one point helped us soothe, but perhaps now are causing harm (substance use, relational patterns, self harm, shame and inner criticism etc.)
The work of shifting these patterns (and thus slowly supporting the nervous system towards new ways of meeting intensity), is to pause and be curious about what the body might want to happen.
We might ask ourselves, “Does my body want to move, make a sound, hit, push, yell, dance, hide, run with intensity? Is there some doable way I could follow that impulse right now? What happens inside my system when I do? What shifts do I notice? And what wants to happen next? And next?
When we ask ourselves these sorts of questions and listen for that gut-led, intuitive impulse, and follow that without too much analyzing or second guessing, we let our bodies emergently move us towards safety/ presence/ openness in it’s own timing. Following what feels wholesomely good is like following a trail of breadcrumbs– we find our way back to ourselves little bit by little bit, returning to that place of “home” inside.
Meeting a bear in the woods doesn’t require calm, it begs for your intensity.
Let me offer a real life (albeit admittedly basic) example of why following our impulses is so important:
If you were faced with a bear in the woods, your nervous system would cue you to fight or, more likely, flee quickly. That intensity of activation is so appropriate and life saving– the quick intense movement of that fleeing action, followed by resting back into safety once it’s available, cues the nervous system to re-regulate back into safety/ parasympathetic. Imagine if instead of fighting or fleeing in this case, you tries to just immediately calm down? In this example, immediate calm would equal certain death. So how appropriate to respond to the threat by fighting/fleeing to get to safety, so that then you can settle again when its actually safe enough to do so.
This sort of “completion” of our threat responses is what we’re all after when it comes to meeting our everyday life stressors, but trouble comes in when:
* The intensity of the threat continues for long periods without adequate opportunities to truly return to safety.
* The threats we’re facing aren’t actually able to be met in real time with an appropriate physical response.
Re: point number two, modern tech has given us access to so much information, some sooo so good, some very intense and horrifying. We’re faced with a lot of intensity via our screens (social media, urgent emails, bills to be paid, quickly changing schedules that need to be adapted to etc.) but we’re not actually moving our bodies to meet the threat. We’re using our minds to think and problem solve our way to safety but the body never gets the chance to recognize physiologically that the threat has been dealt with. So we end up with an accumulation of threat response energy inside, and that energy needs somewhere to go and move.
You might worry about adding chaos to chaos, effectively creating more dysregulation, and I completely understand this fear as that’s not what we’re after. The aim is not to add activation to an already maxed out nervous system, it’s to add spaces for that activation to be discharged. The key here is that we’re not consuming more intensity (introducing more stress or sensory input; e.g. doom-scrolling or drinking caffeine when we’re already at the high end of our stress tolerance capacity), we are expending the energy of activation outward, giving it a place to go. Big stress input requires big stress output. An exhale that matches the inhale.
Meeting fight & flight with appropriately intense movement
Movement is one of the best tools we have for meeting the intensity of our threat responses; it lets the body express our threat response appropriately, making space for that shift towards safety to come after. Most of us (myself included, though I’m always practicing) don’t get nearly enough movement, especially movement that includes appropriate intensity to give that fight/flight energy an opportunity to move through us. Intentionally building in small, doable moments of intense movement that match the intensity of your nervous system is key in being able to not just “find calm” but to truly living into the full range of what it is to be you.
When I say small and doable, I mean it. Things like: pushing against a wall, pushups or planks on the floor, a short fast jog or power walk, a vigorous few minutes on the trampoline, 5 mins of body weight exercises, chopping wood, breaking sticks, raking leaves, hitting or squeezing a pillow, singing robustly to loud music… all of these are micro ways we can meet the intensity of activation, honoring the body’s need to express a fight or flight response, rather than trying to bypass it straight to “calm.”
I want to be clear that this sort of action is not about “fixing” or eliminating feelings of stress. Think of that as more of a likely perk. We’re not grasping for relief, and it may likely come when we learn how to meet our intensity well. These intensive movement practices are less about “regulating” and more about honoring your animate body’s primordial need to complete the very natural fight/flight responses we’re wired for. Engaging your intensity with space, curiosity and care is about stepping into your full expression of Self, welcoming the range of your human experience and all of the many different parts of you with love and embrace.
And so it becomes less about using “tools” of exercise to calm down, and more about really being with all that it is to be you. A shift from “doing to” our nervous system, to being with and supporting our system towards completing a threat response.
To summarize, we can think of meeting our intensity with consciousness, compassion, curiosity and care.
* Consciousness, in that we are directing attention towards what is already happening inside, and how the body wants to organically move with that intensity.
* Compassion, in that we are aware of our intensity without judgement or shame; we forgive ourselves and meet our intensity with love and generous assumptions.
* Curiosity, in that we slow down and ask questions about what’s going on inside, what we might need, what impulse is naturally arising from the body to support us in meeting that need, and what shifts inside when we follow that.
* Care, in that we do make the space and create the conditions necessary for us to move towards wellbeing, because ultimately we are the only ones who can take responsibility for our wellbeing. We center into our agency and move with loving intention towards care and support. Over and over again.
Honoring our intensity by meeting and matching it becomes a portal to presence; a way for us to broaden our capacity to be with ourselves and all of reality. Because life isn’t about being calm or easy or pleasant all the time; life is filled with complexity and polarities. Joy and grief, dark and light, expansion contraction, birth death. Instead of trying to skip past the parts that come with big intensity of emotion and/or nervous system response, what if instead we learned how to welcome all of it? What if instead of being something to overcome, your intensity was an important part of what makes you so miraculous, interesting, good and beautiful?
In my experience, life gets wider and fuller when we learn to trust that no matter what intensity life throws our way, our bodies already know how to lead us through, if only we can pause, listen and honor what’s already unfolding inside, and trust that our intensity isn’t actually a problem at all.
Resources for more depth & support:
* My free ‘Feel your Feelings’ Toolkit
* More info about 1:1 somatic support with me
* Get my AWAKE workshop, on demand
* Find me on Instagram
Get full access to Can I be with that? at somaticcoaching.substack.com/subscribe
