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This is for anyone who gets stressed when there's nothing to do.
The instructor's voice was calm. Measured. The kind of voice designed to make you exhale. And instead of relaxing, I felt... restless. Itchy. Like I needed to get up and do something. Anything.
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Her slow, measured pace was making me more activated, not less. In fact, I was starting to feel a low-grade panic attack. I opened and closed my phone. Looked at TMZ. Felt trapped. Felt awful.
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What was happening?!
When rest feels dangerous
I've worked with so many clients who describe a similar experience when they're confronted with opportunities to rest or be still.
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They're exhausted (genuinely, bone-tired), and the moment they finally lie down, their to-do list appears like an uninvited guest. Their body is horizontal but their brain is sprinting.
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Here's what I think is happening underneath that: our nervous systems have been trained by a culture that treats productivity as the optimal human state. Not presence. Not pleasure. Output.
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So when we stop producing, the system doesn't know what to do. An unfamiliar state reads as threat. And threat triggers the spiral.
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The longer I sat there in that Zoom class, the more my nervous system protested.
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The restlessness sharpened into agitation.
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The agitation pulled my thoughts toward work.
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And then the spiral really kicked in:
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Boredom โ Restlessness โ Agitation โ Thoughts about work โ Panic about my coaching pipeline โ Anxiety about what my editor thinks of my book proposal.
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All of that, from sitting quietly and listening to someone talk about nervous system regulation. Yep, that's what the course was about and no, the irony is not lost on me ๐ซ
What's happening in our bodies
When rest or stillness triggers panic, there's usually an association underneath it. For me, stillness is connected to the period in mid pandemic when I burned the F out. Financial scarcity. A version of myself I don't want to return to.
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So of course my system is on high alert โ it's trying to protect me from something it learned was dangerous.
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That's not dysfunction. That's your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.
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The work isn't to override it. The work is to stay in conversation with it.
A framework for when the spiral starts
Before you try to regulate, it helps to get oriented. Check the basics: How much coffee have you had? Are you hydrated? Have you eaten? Environmental inputs shape our baseline more than we realize.
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Then try to chart the spiral โ one thought leading to the next โ and ask yourself: what's the underlying story or belief here?
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Once you have some awareness of what's happening, this is the practice I come back to again and again, both for myself and with clients. It has four parts: Ground, Release, Imagine, Reframe.
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You can do all four in sequence, or just one depending on how much time you have. There's no wrong way to use it.
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Here's what it looked like for me that day.
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- Ground: Come back to your body and the present moment.
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โI pressed both feet into the floor and took five slow breaths, in for four counts, out for eight. With each exhale, I let my jaw soften. I wasn't trying to feel calm. I was just trying to feel here.
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- Release: Give the activation somewhere to go.
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โI stood up and started slow, bilateral movement, arms swinging gently opposite to my legs, like a casual walk in place. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to interrupt the loop my nervous system was running. Bilateral movement helps discharge the energy that's been building. You're not fixing anything. You're just moving it through.
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- Imagine: Offer your nervous system a new picture.
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โI closed my eyes and pictured the restless feeling as a quiet room I was standing outside of. I didn't have to go in. I just had to notice the room was there and that it wasn't dangerous. Just unfamiliar. I let that image be more real, for a moment, than the panic.
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- Reframe: Update the story.
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โThis is where I asked myself: what does this state represent to me? And I got honest: stillness, for me, has been associated with burnout, with losing momentum, with financial fear. My nervous system wasn't being irrational. It was connecting dots it had learned to connect a long time ago. So I offered it something different: You learned that stillness meant danger. That made sense then. Right now, I'm okay. This is just a slow Tuesday afternoon, not a crisis.
Not a magic fix. But enough to dial the panic down from a seven to a four, which is enough to stay curious instead of spiraling.
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The next day I tested something. Instead of my usual brisk walk - the kind where I'm moving fast enough that it still feels productive - I went slowly. I let my eyes land softly on pretty things around me. I didn't put in headphones.
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And I noticed I wasn't as bothered by the slowness as I'd expected to be.
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That's what expanding your window of tolerance actually looks like in practice. Not a dramatic breakthrough, just a quiet experiment that gives your nervous system new evidence. Oh. Slow doesn't have to mean stuck. Unhurried doesn't have to mean unsafe.
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One small experience at a time, you're updating the story your body has been telling.
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he goal was never to arrive at perfect calm. It was to stay in observational, non-judgmental conversation with myself and give my nervous system just enough evidence that it didn't have to be in charge of this moment.
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That, I think, is the whole practice. Not getting out of your head entirely. Just getting back into your body enough that your head has a little less to say.
Reply and tell me: What does rest bring up for you? I love hearing from you!
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Now go get paid.
x Claire
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P.S. Check out The Practice, my deck of cards that transforms negative self-talk into ultimate self-trust...in 30 days ๐ค
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