Beautifully Dysregulated

(8 minute read)

"It's great to see you living your best life."

I get this a lot. And every time, something in me wants to correct them. Not rudely. Just honestly.

Yeah, thanks, but if you knew, you'd know I was a fraud.

It’s because I don't think I'm doing anything particularly special. And even if I thought I was (which I probably should given the circumstances), I'd find a way to make it smaller. The congratulations arrive and I deflect, almost automatically. Not because pride feels bad exactly - more because of what I fear, or more accurately perhaps what I've been taught to believe it means about me. That it's dangerous. That letting it in might make me arrogant, complacent, someone I don't want to become. So I keep it small. The praise slides off. But then ironically, and paradoxically, I go looking for more of it anyway. Seemingly with the hope that this one - this like, this comment, this message - maybe this one will finally land. Knowing underneath that it more than likely won't.

Living your best life is a strange phrase when you're inside it. From the outside it sounds bright and chosen and free. From the inside, for me at least, it looks a lot more like hard work and loneliness and fighting the fear of failure every single day. It just doesn't look that way on a screen.

Earlier this week had been genuinely good. Not performed-good, just good. Writing, eating well, moving, meeting and connecting with new people, and hearing from ones back home that I have known for a long time. Feeling, for the first time in a while, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Joy. A beautiful kind of quiet, certain joy.

And I let that in. Fully. It was real, I knew it was real and so I didn't push it away.

And then I woke up one day.

Not to a crisis. Not to bad news. I just woke up peaceful after a good sleep, and good dreams. And then, somewhere between sleep and fully conscious, I went looking for how I felt, and found anxiety waiting there instead. The joy of the previous days just gone. Not gradually. Just absent. Like waking up to find the weather had completely changed overnight.

So I did what most of us do. I reached for my phone. Instagram. Facebook. TikTok. WhatsApp. I almost opened ChatGPT but caught myself. I know that pattern now. The way I hand my feelings to something external and call it research. The way I'm looking for someone, or something, to tell me I'm going to be fine. Thought about a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in almost three weeks at this point, and I wasn't going to start, but god, I wanted something.

What I was actually looking for, scrolling at whatever time it was in the morning, was proof. Proof I was enough. Proof I was going to make it. Proof, evidence, validation, and underneath it all? Certainty and significance.

I'd love to say I recognised this and pulled myself out of it immediately. But I scrolled anyway. At least for a bit until something inside me said, no. Come on. Let's move.

Looking back at everything I reached for that morning - my phone, scrolling, the almost-cigarette - none of it was about feeling what I was feeling or listening to what it was trying to tell me. It was about getting out from under it as fast as humanly possible. Some part of me knew that. I caught myself once or twice. But knowing things and doing things in the moment are different, and mostly, at first at least, I was just trying to find new ways to run away from what I was feeling without leaving the room.

And I don't think I'm unusual in this. We have somehow arrived at a place where feeling bad is a problem. Where uncomfortable emotions are a malfunction. Something to be fixed as quickly as possible. 

But have we forgotten that they have a purpose?

Grief tells you something mattered. Anger tells you a boundary was crossed. Loneliness tells you that you need connection. Shame tells you something you've done doesn't sit right with who you believe yourself to be. Guilt tells you that you've acted against your own values - though guilt, like shame, can sometimes tell lies, and that's worth knowing too. And anxiety - anxiety tells you something is at stake. Something that matters enough to protect. It's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Scanning for threat. Keeping you safe.

These aren't malfunctions. They are signals. They are your nervous system doing its job.

That doesn't mean every emotion should simply be left alone. Sometimes our nervous system really is carrying more than it was designed to. Trauma, chronic stress and burnout can leave us stuck in survival mode, and practices that help us regulate can be genuinely life-changing. I'm deeply grateful for many of them.

But regulation isn't the same as the absence of emotion. A healthy nervous system isn't one that never produces anxiety, sadness or anger. It's one that can experience those emotions, understand what they're pointing towards, and eventually return to balance without having to silence them first.

What I have noticed though, both in myself and in the wider wellness space, is how easy it is to start treating every uncomfortable emotion as evidence that something has gone wrong. If we're anxious, we assume we need to regulate. If we're overwhelmed, we look for the next tool. If we're sad, we reach for something that promises to shift our state.

I know this because I do it too.

Journalling, running, yoga, meditation, breathwork - they've all helped me at different times. They are valuable practices, and I wouldn't want to be without them. But I've also caught myself reaching for them before I've even asked what the feeling is trying to tell me.

There's a difference between using a practice to help you move through an emotion and using it to avoid having one in the first place.

One is care. The other is avoidance with a wellness aesthetic.

But perhaps sometimes the most regulated thing we can do isn't to instantly calm ourselves down. Maybe it's to stay present long enough to discover why we became activated in the first place. 

I want to pause here, because I notice something happening as I write this.

There is a part of me that wants to soften this point. To add a disclaimer. To say - I'm not better than anyone, I struggle with this too, please don't think I'm judging you. And all of that is true. I am human. I find it difficult to sit with uncomfortable emotions just like everyone else. That morning with my phone is proof enough of that.

But that urge to soften - that's exactly what I'm writing about. The discomfort of saying something that might not land well, and the almost automatic reach for the exit. So I'm going to do what I'm asking you to do. I'm going to sit with it. Leave the opinion where it is. And trust that you can do the same.

And that, it turns out, is exactly what I'm asking all of us to explore. 

A regulated nervous system doesn't mean feeling calm all the time. It means having the capacity to experience the full range of human emotions without becoming stuck in them. To feel them, learn from them, and return to yourself afterwards. And it's important to know that when we suppress an emotion, rather than process it, it doesn't just disappear. It goes underground. The body still holds it. We just lose access to what it was trying to tell us.

When I finally stopped scrolling that morning and actually sat with it, it wasn't complicated and it wasn't catastrophic.

It was just: you have made a lot of changes. You have ambition. You have put a lot on the line. Time, money, relationships. You care and it matters, of course it matters. Of course you're scared. That doesn’t feel like a malfunction. It feels part of becoming. 

When I started writing this, I thought I was only talking about the difficult feelings or specifically the ones we label bad. But when I look back at the opening of this piece, I realise it is about fighting any feeling we find difficult or uncomfortable. 

The joy I felt that week I let in completely. But pride? Pride I couldn't touch. Not because it hurt, but because of what I'd decided it meant about me. And anxiety just arrived, uninvited, seemingly at first with no story attached to it at all.

Pride specifically interests me because it seems that it is not just me. In my coaching work I hear people voice this more often than not. The discomfort of letting praise land. I watch them squirm in their seats, visibly uncomfortable. The inability to just let it be true. 

So how much of what we call uncomfortable is actually the feeling itself? And how much is the meaning we've wrapped around it?

I don't think I know the answer to that. But I think the question is worth sitting with because it changes things. It means the ‘problem’ isn't always the emotion. Sometimes it's the verdict we've already handed down about what that emotion means, what it makes us.

Pride means arrogance. Anxiety means we are broken. Sadness means weakness. And so we push them away before they've had a chance to tell us anything different.

And crying? Crying won't change anything. Except that it might. Except that it always does.

All feelings move - that's what they do, if we let them. The good ones don't stay forever, we know that even when we pretend otherwise. And the uncomfortable ones don't either. But every time we shut one down before it's finished, we lose whatever it came to tell us. And it was always going to be something true. Something about what we care about, what we're afraid of, what we need. Something worth knowing. 

During the events of that ordinary morning - when anxiety hadn't just come knocking, it had let itself back in - I was reminded of this. The reaching, the scrolling, then eventually catching myself and stopping to listen. And when I did, it softened. Underneath it was something true. That this matters to me, that I am scared sometimes, and that I was going to keep going anyway. Just maybe a little slower and with an extra dose of compassion and care on days like that. 

And so that is what I'd invite you to do. Not a solution. Not a fix. Just this - feel what arrives. Sit with it. Ask what it's trying to say, and stay open to the answer being different from the one you expected.

When feelings arrive like they did on that ordinary morning uninvited, unexpected, they know something. They are pointing at something real. Something that matters.

And the pride you deflected last week? That knew something too.

You don't have to beat any of it into silence to survive it.

You just have to let it finish its sentence.