It’s bonkers to me how we can go our entire lives without realizing that, even when we think we’re feeling calm or having a good time, on the inside we can be buzzing, agitated, racing, distressed… “activated” is the more scientific term.

I’m speaking for myself, but I'd also guess that this is happening for most people most of the time, and most people also aren't realizing it. This is however especially relevant for anyone with a history of trauma or anxiety.

My personal journey to understand and overcome anxiety, to start feeling my feelings, to start tuning into my body and, at the more advanced level, to increase nervous system capacity and regulation has opened my eyes to just how INTENSE it is inside my body most of the time.

Activation is the nervous system being alert, active, energized - it is ON and prepared for action of some kind. It can feel like agitation, distress, intensity, vigilance, nervousness, anxiety, fear, stimulation or overstimulation.

It can come from joyful things, hard things, and busy environments, or it can just be our default state in entirely benign situations. But even when we aren't noticing it, I think it’s generally uncomfortable for the body. Even when we’re distracted, the discomfort kind of bleeds through and influences our behavior.

Which this is why a lot of us can't sit still or slow down or be alone or put our phone down for more than a couple seconds at a time.

One of the biggest revelations of my adult life - of this work - is that I’m pretty activated almost all of the time. I have been for many many years, and I never truly noticed it.

No matter what I’m doing, there’s just this low-level, subtle distress running in the background that gets much louder when I pay attention to it.

This is basically a low level fight/flight state or part of what can be meant by "nervous system dysregulation". Being stuck on "on" is one of the possible aspects of being "dysregulated".

And so much of my behavior is an instinctual attempt to get me to NOT LOOK AT IT. Don’t go there. It’s too much. It’s too hard. It’s dangerous. It’s wildly uncomfortable.

The work I’ve been doing for years now though, is in fact the work to LOOK AT IT. To be with it. And I really have come a long way in that skillset.

Now that I CAN see it so easily, it's wild to think that I never had that awareness before. It’s truly a sixth sense that we need to develop. And it's easy to see how it drives all of my most frustrating behaviors, most of my dissatisfaction, and a lot of my obsession with this field.

I wanted to share about this because I truly believe that developing this sense and knowing how to work with the body when it’s activated (and teach it to not be activated all the damn time) is one of the major keys to our global liberation as a species. That and overthrowing capitalism. But I also truly believe that this is going to be one of the requirements to doing that - to working together and building a new system.

There is massive potential to being tuned in to our nervous system states and being able to work with them (whether we’re stuck on high, stuck on low, or fluctuating uncontrollably between both). We can learn to access more predictability, more capacity to handle hard shit, more choices in any given moment and overall, more agency in our lives.

On the other hand, staying in the dark means we can also be puppeteered in our unconscious attempts to run away from the discomfort.

People who are in a constant, low-level state of distress in their bodies can also be people who bully others. People who pick up guns and head to schools and festivals. People who cheat on their partners. People who join hate groups. People who seek to punish “bad people” by making them suicidal. People who are suicidal. People who don’t start the band they’ve been dreaming of. People who don’t say yes to themselves.

The spectrum is broad and the experiences are vast here, but in simple terms, nervous system dysregulation robs us of live and can also turn us into destructive automatons.

It brings a new light to the idea of “feeling your feelings”. Learning to detect your state is something more than that, but it’s all part of the same project of self awareness that can lead to more regulation, balance, and self control if paired with the right practices.

And frankly, I think our world depends on more of us doing this work.