Why Calm Isn’t the Goal: Rethinking Nervous System Health

In this episode, we’re redefining what a “healthy” nervous system really means and why it’s not about being calm all the time.

Instead of forcing rest, we explore how your nervous system is designed to move, adapt, and support you and how true regulation comes from being able to move through different states, not stay stuck in one.

In This Episode:

• Why calm isn’t the goal
• The myth of “rest and digest” as the ideal state
• How your nervous system is working for you, not against you
• Why getting stuck (not stress itself) is the issue
• The importance of moving through states
• Increasing your capacity to hold more of life
• Letting yourself feel the full range of emotions

PODCAST INFO:
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Support & Connect
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Tao of Humaning. I'm your host, Dr. Christine, and I'm so thrilled that you decided to join us for today's conversation. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about nervous system health and maybe reimagining our relationship a bit with what it means to have a healthy nervous system. We hear I hear this conversation all the time now of regulating our nervous system, calming our nervous system, over-stimulated nervous systems. We're hearing a lot more conversation about this in the world, which I think is amazing. And I also think there's a tendency in a lot of circles to hear calm as kind of the gold standard or yeah, like the goal of nervous system health is to be calm and zen all of the time. And I think this is a misconception because I think there's this idea that we're supposed to or we should. In my family, we do not should on each other. That's a saying that we use, so I invite you to use that also. You do not have to should on yourself, um, or others. But there's a misconception that rest and digest is nervous system regulation, or it is a calm nervous system. And those are sort of maybe true, but there's so much more range, literally, to this conversation. And this is something that will kind of weave into the different conversations that we have here. Um in all of the years that I've studied Chinese medicine and women's health in particular, and emotional wellness, how we move through and interpret what's showing up in our lives and then digest those experiences has always been incredibly fascinating to me. I think um I think when it comes to nervous system health, one thing that I think is really important in, and this goes more broad to how I look at health and well-being also, like our relationship to our bodies. But but I think that we forget that our nervous systems are working for us. There's nothing wrong when we have a fight or flight response in our nervous system, in our body. And I think some of the conversations that are happening now are challenging because there is this like fight or flight is bad, rest and digest is good. And I I really it's not you're not talking about the same systems, so that's a bit of a misconception there, because fight or flight is our sympathetic nervous system when it's under perceived threat. That's a sympathetic nervous system response. And rest and digest is a parasympathetic nervous system response when we feel safety. If we were looking at the parasympathetic nervous system under threat, under perceived threat or real threat, the body goes to freeze. The nervous system will go to freeze. So looking at freeze versus fight or flight, those are again, there's nothing wrong with either one of those. It's simply information for you about how you're responding to a certain situation or moment, or how a loved one is responding to a certain situation or moment. I love learning about these tools and and understanding how our bodies and our emotions work, partially because it gives us this amazing sense of ourselves and understanding. Also to be able to like look at a loved one and be like, oh, like they're having a sympathetic nervous system response, like they're they're perceiving threat somewhere. They're in fight or flight. Okay, great. It's very different than like being like, oh, they're so angry or whatever labels we want to put on people, or like anyway, that's I digress. Um but looking at like what are we really comparing and is anything wrong? I think that our nervous systems are adaptive, and I think that they are supporting us and that they are giving us information. I think that compartmentalizing fight or flight as bad and rest and digest as the goal is not helpful. Um, for a lot of reasons. One is that you're comparing different systems, two is that calm is not the opposite of stress, and that freeze, if you're in a freeze state, it can also look like calm, but it's not actually giving you any other. I don't know. Like I think people sometimes look at freeze as calm, and that's not necessarily where you want to stay. Again, it's not that there's anything wrong. I think the missing part of a lot of the conversations that are happening right now, one is this comparing what are we really comparing? And then two is what do we really need? Right? Calm is great. It's lovely to feel calm, it's lovely to feel the safety side of the sympathetic system too, which is activation, motivation, movement. We need that. We need the rest, we need the calm, the rest side, we need the activation movement side, right? In um looking at what's needed, it's like we want to ultimately be able to move through any of these states and not get stuck. That's more of the goal, one of the goals, or goal, goal is not the right word here. Um useful tools, usefulness of these tools, under usefulness of learning about the nervous system, is being able to see when we're stuck and then help support ourselves into movement, right? The same thing that we talk about with acupuncture. That's what we're ultimately doing, is we're finding those areas that we're stuck, and we're providing what's needed to help encourage that movement again, right? So, same thing with the nervous system. We want to be able to experience freeze, for example, if we feel that's the perceived threat and that's the response that's needed. And then we want to be able to move from freeze into activation and movement, right? Um, not being able to move out of different situations is what's going to cause imbalances in the body, in the emotions, in our interactions with other people. You know, all of these different aspects start to play together when you start to see all of this in a bigger way. It's like we need the full range of all of our nervous system. There's not a part of our nervous system that's bad. It's all adaptive and working for us. And, you know, we can have some other conversations about that. I'd love to bring in some other um resources and have some conversations around that, I think would be really fun. But being able to increase our capacity to hold more of life. And I've seen this over the years in my work in traditional Chinese medicine, also my work in more of the Taoist and spiritual communities is like what you know, we're not doing this work again to be calm and zen all the time. We're doing it to be able to hold more of life and to be able to move with what's showing up, right? It's the same as nervous system work. It's like we want more capacity, we want more range, we want to be able to move with life and what's showing up for us. I hope that's making sense. We want to be able to ultimately complete these cycles. So, what happens a lot of times is we get frozen or we get to fight or flight, and then we get stuck. And then that expression never gets to fully flow, it never gets to be completed. And so then there's almost I think of it sometimes almost as like, you know, when you leave a tab open on your computer, not that I do that, but it's like it's still taking some energy and some of those things that I don't know the terms of, but like RAM memory things. Um, it's still draw, it's still pulling attention, right? Is how I think of it. Still pulling attention of my computer, right? We do the same thing when we don't complete these cycles in our lives of our nervous system, when we stop the flow of things, or you know, when we feel like, oh, I'm not supposed to feel angry or I'm not supposed to feel sad or whatever it is, and we suppress that, we're still keeping, and it's not like that goes away unless you have an intentional clearing system, which we could also talk about in another episode. But having some kind of dedicated clearing system for your emotional hygiene is so good. Um, but being able to move through these cycles. And I think when I first heard um I learned with Kimberly Ann Johnson, she has a great book called Um Call of the Wild, and then she teaches classes and things on nervous systems. She's you know, one of the kind of OGs of nervous system health. And specifically, she coined this term of the female nervous system and relating it to, you know, estrogen being more of a connecting um hormone. So women are more likely to be affected by changes or stressors in our social circles or our communities than men are, and part of that is how we're wired. And I really found that interesting because in traditional Chinese medicine, you know, we have these different cycles, um, Western medicine too, you know, the cycles that a woman goes through in her physiology every month sets up a different level of energy and a different um, I think of it really as like we have different capacities for how we can show up and like what's really going well. Like if you schedule um speaking things or whatnot, like during your ovulation, or if you do like pitches or marketing stuff, like near a woman's ovulation time, she's gonna be naturally more magnetic because that's the energy of ovulation, right? Whereas after, well gosh, we'll do a class about that too, or an episode about teacher hat is usually like, oh, classes. Um, but yeah, we can have an episode where I talk more about the different phases of a woman's cycle and how that plays into energy and what's um useful and what's harder, I guess, at each phase. But starting to understand that women are, women in particular are cyclical. And actually, I'm gonna take that back. People, humans are cyclical, and female physiology and male physiology have different cycles. So men cycle, men are more solar, they cycle in a 24-hour um range, and women cycle more is more lunar, and so we cycle in roughly a 28-day cycle. And but having those natural ebbs and flows is something that is actually consistent with the males and females. That's a human, that's something that we have the same. And again, being able to honor this and have space for all of the range, right? So the activation is needed and the calm is needed, right? Calm is not always gonna be the right response for you, and that's okay. And I think having giving yourself permission to feel the full range of your humanness is such a gift. And when you can do it in a way that is giving voice to something that has needed a voice or is asking for a voice, it moves through us a lot more quickly than when we try to make it look a certain way or sound a certain way or whatever it is, right? When we allow these different responses to show up, we can receive the data and the information and our our bodies are set up to know what to do. And that's the most incredible part is like when we get out of the way, when we get our like conscious overthinking minds out of the way, our bodies, our nervous systems will naturally regulate. They'll move from rest and digest into that activation and movement, and then they'll cycle back into rest and then go back into movement. And the length of time might be a little bit different depending on where you are in your life, but the the cyclical nature will be there, right? And it's uh it's really about looking at where is where are your resources most useful. And I think having having a space where you can feel that that permission and that allowing is really pretty incredible. I think allowing ourselves to be more and more human is such a gift because we forget sometimes and we think we put unrealistic expectations on ourselves and on the people around us to show up in these weird constructed perfect ways that are not actually perfect. So this is your invitation today. If you were feeling like rest and digest, calm and zen is not working for you at the moment, try some movement, try some activation, try shifting from that calm zen into movement, and then vice versa, and start allowing yourself to have those cycles a little bit more. But if you're feeling like calm is not attainable in certain areas of your life, maybe that's okay. Maybe there's nothing wrong. Maybe it's just not a calm rest and digest moment in that part of your life. That's okay. So for today, if this has resonated and if parts of it are interesting and useful, I hope that you carry those with you. And the parts that aren't, just leave them behind and then just let things simmer and see what takes bloom later on.