Why are our brains hating comfort?

This is the first in a series of two parts that explores the reason for the feeling of threat to women payments with relationships shock History – and what your Nervous system In fact, he tries to protect you from it.

Understand why your body fights against the rest needs it

Before we start: take a moment, if you are ready, to notice what is happening in your body and you read the word “comfort”. Does your breath change? Do you conceal or release it? Is it hidden? anxiety Reduce in your chest, or maybe a wave of longing will be washed on you? Everything that arises – or not – is valuable information about the relationship of the nervous system with stillness.

For many women payments and aspirations with a history of relationship shocks, the concept of comfort can lead to a contradictory response in the body. Instead of feeling like a welcome comfort, stillness can feel threatening – like the land below it may suddenly give way. Your body, despite deep fatigue, resists the thing that seems to be more.

If you have found yourself unable to relax despite desperate fatigue, if you notice Spike when you have a moment at the end of yourself, or if you have felt exhausted after more leave before, you are not broken. Your nervous system does exactly what you learned to maintain your safety, especially in the environments in which the organization indicates danger by referring to the danger.

Roots of the resistance winds

Elena, former to treat My customer (name and selecting the details that have been changed for privacy), sitting in her office after her last patient from today, staring at her calendar. It is 7:30 pm, and she was in hospital since 5:00 am. Her body suffers from exhaustion, yet thinking about going home to an empty evening fills with mysterious and annoying anxiety.

“I must be Grateful To spend a break in the evening, right? “She asks me in our next session, and her shoulders are almost tense on her ears even while she was talking.” But instead of relief, I feel this … dread. What is the mistake with me? “

She grew up in the South Asian family, Elena’s father maintained accurate standards for academic performance while her mother runs the family with an indisputable anxiety Perfection. The young Elena learned early that stillness was not safe – it was just a deceptive calm before inevitable criticism.

Think about your psychological institution as concrete, armament iron, and support for packages behind your multi -storey home. Early relationships constitute this basis – determining its composition and stability and Steadfastness. When these relationships were distinguished by the inability to predict or threaten, your organization may have evolved with structure prejudice Towards vigilance instead of rest.

It is not that your organization is defective by its nature. It has evolved exactly as required in light of the conditions at the time.

For girls specifically, this basis is often formed through socialization that emphasizes success with the needs of others, often at their expense. From an early age, many girls learn that their value lies in the response of others to others – he has reached the “good girl”, the assistant, the person who notices and deals with discomfort to others before her.

In this context, the achievement often appears as an adaptive and a form Self -regulation. External verification, clear standards, and regulating demands for academic or professional success can provide a sense of control and safety that was missing in early relationships. productivity Don’t just become a goal but to survive – a way to regulate an unorganized nervous system.

When personal history meets social structures

Lucia, a Training A client of mines (name and defining the details that have been changed to privacy), runs a successful non -profit group that serves migrant communities, working in a deep contact with her own experience as a daughter of Mexican immigrants. From the outside, the growth of its institution appears to be impressive – diverse from three to 25 years of employees in only six years, with a budget under which command. Inside, Lucia works on the fumes, which were hunting in a network of internal and external expectations that feel impossible to move.

As an older daughter in her family, Lucia was the designated translator, the navigator and the emotional storage between her parents and American institutions since she was seven years old. Part of it learned that vigilance was not only useful – it was necessary for her family to stay and dignity. The comfort was not only available; It could not be conceived.

The individual nervous system, which is already prepared by the relationship of relationship to resist comfort, faces cultural and economic systems equivalent to exhaustion and equal human value with productive production. This creates a strong reinforcement cycle that you can feel impossible to break.

For women, these pressures are exacerbated by societal expectations sex Standards. The invisible work that is not proportional to women – emotional management, maintenance of relationships, and family coordination – creates a basis in which rest is difficult in terms of structurally. This work is fixed, uncomplicated, largely unknown, but is necessary for the work of both families and workplaces.

The ideal storm of internal and external pressure

What we are witnessing in women like Elena and Lucia is not individual failure or lack of will. It is the expected result of the complex interaction between:

• Early relationship experiences that followed the nervous system to connect stillness to weakness or danger
• Socialization between the sexes that confirmed the needs of others on self -care and the value of equality with Providing care capacity
• Cultural and economic systems that reward continuous and satisfactory productivity as laziness or indulgence in the self
• Professional environments that are expected to be highly performance and absorb to endlessly

This is not a matter of blame for any specific system or relationship. It comes to what appears to be a personal failure – the inability to rest despite fatigue – is actually a logical response to a very specific set of circumstances.

In Part 2 of this series, we will explore how the shock specifically affects the ability of the nervous system to rest, study the neurological biological mechanisms behind the resistance, and discover practical methods to gradually build to tolerate your body with stillness.