Is your nervous system feeling a little fried?

​The alarm goes off and shatters our sleep. Our heart is racing. The dissonance puts our nerves on high alert.
 
But it is just the alarm …
 
That we set …
 
To help us wake up.
 
Just like the alarm wakes us from our slumber, the dissonance in our world is asking us to wake us from sleepwalking through life. The tensions in us highlight the inconsistency between our beliefs and our actions.
 
And our nervous systems are taking the brunt of it.
 
If we’re going to survive, much less thrive, we need to get better at calming and supporting our nervous system, because the energy is going to continue to flow fast and hot this year.
 
I recently read an account of stress-induced anaphylaxis. Yep. Stress-induced life-threatening immune reaction. It led me down the rabbit hole of learning and also caused me to take a good look at some of my own responses.
 
Because, in recent weeks, I’ve had (1) a weird physical reaction to an email; (2) feeling stressed and rushing.about.really.really.fast with all the things I had to do; (3) painful stiffening in my body as I tried to ignore sounds that were grating my nerves; and (4) shrinking my boundaries to avoid taking up space where I belonged.
 
These are all stress responses. You’ll have your own versions. However, I think we can all relate to the second one.
 
As I was rushing around thinking, “this is all so stressful”, I heard a voice inside me ask, “Is it really stressful? Or is it simply the way you are thinking about them?”
 
Um. Well. Hmm. Actually, not any one of them was overly complicated. Not one of them was super serious. Most I’m pretty good at. And some of them I actually enjoy doing.
 
So why was I so stressed?
 
Because we’re in a culture of stress, wearing stress like a badge of honor. My mindset was swimming in the energy soup of collective stress because I was just going along with the flow.
 
“Wake up” said that little voice inside me. “Notice. Is the stress in you or outside of you? Do you need or want to carry it?”
 
That’s what this energy is asking us to do. Wake up, notice, and choose our response.