Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
A few days ago, my eight year old son and I were in the airport for Spring Break.
We have airport navigation down to a science. I traveled for work for years and he’s been on planes since he was six months old. We know the routine — boarding passes loaded, TSA cleared, grab the bags, find the gate. Simple.
We stopped at a convenience shop, which is our tradition. He always gets a bag of chips for the flight; his pick, his treat, his primary job in the whole operation.
But this time, as we stood staring at the wall of options, he was choosing chips with the speed and urgency of a continental drift.
Conversely, I was rushing us through the store like I was dismantling a bomb.
Scanning the exits. Clocking the crowd. Running the math on gates and boarding times in the back of my head, even though we had a full hour before our flight and were five gates away from where we needed to be.
He kept pondering his choices in his silly kiddo way. But, I didn’t laugh.
Instead I said in an irritated tone of voice, “Come on, kiddo. Just pick a bag.”
He looked up at me with that particular eight-year-old frankness that cuts right through everything.
“Sheesh, Mama. I’m just being silly. What happened to your joy?”
“Huh…”, I thought to myself. “What did happen to my joy?”
Because there was no reason not to be joyful in that moment. Nothing had happened. Nothing was wrong. We were safe, we had time, we were literally going on vacation.
But my nervous system had read the noise and the crowd and the controlled chaos of the airport and quietly declared a state of emergency.
Without me even being aware of it, I had reverted to surviving my life.
My son went back to picking his chips in peace while I took some deep breaths and reminded my nervous system there was no hidden danger inside the Nashville airport Hudson News.
Nervous System Rules
Has anything like this ever happened to you? Where you feel like you’re being hijacked by a mind or body that believes you’re in a war zone – when you’re not?
We like to think of ourselves as thinking beings that feel. But, in reality, we are feeling beings that occasionally think. Neurologically, physiologically, and relationally, there is one system that’s calling the shots in your life most of the time. The nervous system.
This remarkable piece of machinery – connected to every organ and every limb of your body – has one primary job: keeping you safe. It couldn’t give a flip about anyone else. Just you – your safety – your protection.
It has been doing this job since before you were born. It has clocked every experience, every thought, and every word you’ve ever heard – even the ones you don’t remember at all.
It does not take breaks, does not clock out, and does not particularly care whether its threat assessment is accurate. It’s job is to compare the present moment to its carefully cataloged bank of memories and identify potential threat.
And, it works so much faster than your thinking brain could ever hope to operate.
Speed, in fact, is the whole point.
Imagine you’re being chased by a lion. When a predator thinks you are its lunch, you don’t have time to think. You need to act.
So your nervous system bypasses the thinking brain entirely and goes straight to the body — flooding it with cortisol and adrenaline, narrowing your vision to the immediate threat, shutting down all non-essential functions – like digestion and reproduction – not to mention creativity, humor, and joy.
It labors tirelessly in service of one singular goal.
Survival.
But, you don’t have to be outrunning wild animals on the daily for the nervous system to flip into survival mode.
If your history contains violence, abuse, neglect, or other experiences that made you feel frightened, vulnerable, or unsafe – your nervous system is constantly scanning for similar threats and sounding the alarm to protect you.
Live in constant threat mode and it narrows something psychologists call your “window of tolerance”.
When your nervous system is regulated and responsive you are inside the window. You can think clearly, connect with other people, make good decisions, and feel your feelings without being overwhelmed by them. You are, in the truest sense, yourself.
Outside the window…not so much.
Push past the upper edge — through stress, threat, or excessive change — and your system mobilizes into a state of hyperarousal. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles tense, your jaw tightens, your vision narrows.
You become efficient and reactive and very, very fast. You also become, in that state, incapable of nuance, presence, or picking up on the social cues of your eight year old just trying to pick a snack.
Push past the lower edge — through chronic exhaustion, helplessness, or overwhelm — and your system collapses inward. This is the hypoarousal state. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.
Remember the webinar from last week’s article? An hour of my own voice, my own expertise — and I couldn’t remember a single word of it. That was a nervous system that had been running hyperaroused for so long it finally burned out & went offline – hypoarousal.
Most high-achievers who’ve been through hard things live almost permanently outside their window.
Bouncing between the two edges. Mobilized at work, shut down at home. Hyperaroused through the crisis, frozen in the aftermath. Managing the family crisis with skill and not being able to get off the couch for a few days to recover.
Ever been called dramatic growing up? Ever told you were too much? This is why.
You are not dramatic.
You are dysregulated.
The Four Corners of The Window
When you live outside your window of tolerance, your nervous system chooses one of four responses to help you navigate the perceived threat: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
You probably know fight and flight. Fight is the snapping, the defending, the going on offense before anyone can come after you.
Flight is the overworking, the overscheduling, the staying so busy there’s no room for anything uncomfortable to catch up with you.
Freeze is exactly what it sounds like. It looks like Sunday night dread that leaves you vegging away your life on the couch. A nervous system that can’t get out of freeze is a person in burnout.
Fawn is lesser known, but probably a strategy you’ve been employing since you were a kid. Fawn looks like saying yes before you realize you mean no. It’s the accommodating, the appeasing, the making yourself smaller so the people around you don’t get upset.
It’s what you learned to do when fighting or fleeing wasn’t safe and freezing wasn’t an option. You made yourself agreeable. You made yourself useful, indispensable even.
You made yourself okay so everyone else could be okay too.
Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so.
Here’s what’s important to understand about all four of these responses: they are not personality traits. They are not who you are.
They are strategies — brilliant, adaptive, life-saving strategies — that your nervous system developed in response to real threat. You didn’t just use them to survive – you figured a way out of the challenge you grew up in and built something amazing for yourself, you little overachiever.
The problem is not how you’ve leveraged these skills to build your success. The problem is that you never learned any other way to succeed.
Your nervous system has lived outside the window for so long, the window has gotten incredibly small. Which means, the percentage of your life you spend calm, connected, and at peace is almost none.
You are reacting instead of responding. Challenging instead of choosing. Surviving instead of living your life.
Your nervous system can no longer tell the difference between the genuine threat and a crowded airport. Between the house you grew up in and a newsstand in Terminal B. Between the chronic unpredictability of childhood and the controlled chaos of a Tuesday morning.
It learned what danger felt like. And sometimes busy airports feel like that. Crowds feel like that. Unpredictability, noise, loss of control — your nervous system flags all of it. It is doing its job. It just doesn’t know the job description changed.
Opening the Window
You cannot think your way out of a threat response.
The thinking brain — the prefrontal cortex, the part of you that knows you’re in an airport and not in danger — goes partially offline when your nervous system mobilizes.
It’s not available to talk you down in the moment, because the part of your system that’s running the show isn’t interested in conversation.
That’s why willpower doesn’t fix it. The vacation doesn’t fix it. Why the meditation app only makes a small dent.
In a battle between your nervous system and your mind – your nervous system will win every time. It’s supposed to. It’s trying to keep you alive.
But, when you’re chronically activated your nervous system isn’t keeping you alive – it’s keeping you in survival.
This is why so many high-achieving trauma survivors feel like they’ve done everything right and still can’t fully exhale. They have done everything right. The insight is real. The healing is real. The therapy, the books, the work — all of it is real and all of it matters.
But insight lives in the thinking brain. The brace lives in the body.
And your body is still bracing. It’s always, always bracing.
Your nervous system learned this skill through the experiences and relationships that it helped you survive. Which is wonderful news.
Because if your nervous system learned how to survive…it can be taught how to live.
Your nervous system learned what it knows through experience. Through repeated exposure to environments that required it to stay on alert. Through relationships and moments and years of data that trained it to read certain signals as dangerous.
Through neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to reorganize itself in response to new experiences – your nervous system can learn something new. Through the same mechanism — experience, safe relationships, repetition, new data — it can be taught that safety is real. That the crisis is over. And, that it is allowed, finally, to rest.
It’s not fast, and it is not linear, but it is very, very real.
When you curate your life to include moments of genuine safety, repeated often, your nervous system starts to build a new pattern. New evidence that contradicts the old story.
This is why community is so important for high achieving trauma survivors. Being in relationship with people who are regulated — who are safe, who don’t require you to manage or perform or brace — is not a luxury.
It is literally how nervous systems are retrained and healed.
Safety borrowed from someone else’s calm shows your own system how to produce it. Just like rocking a sleepy baby slows your heart rate – human beings are designed to co-regulate. To sync with each other. To connect.
This is why the work we do at Monarch is relational, not just informational. You can read every book ever written about the nervous system. You can understand every concept I’ve laid out in this piece.
And your body will still brace at the airport, because your body doesn’t learn from books. It learns from experience.
From safety, consistently applied, practiced over time. From someone looking at you — the way my son looked at me in that Hudson News — and asking a question simple enough to cut through the noise. Something to jolt you out of the past and into the reality of the present moment.
You need a bank of experiences that teach your nervous system that activity, chaos, busyness – or whatever your triggers are – doesn’t mean you’re unsafe.
Practice The Pause
So, this week, I want you to try a little nervous system regulation.
The next time you notice yourself operating outside your window of tolerance – rushing, snapping, going quiet, saying yes when you mean no – I want you to just pause.
Give yourself ten seconds of deep breaths – with your exhale longer than your inhale.
Don’t judge. Don’t fix. Don’t try to talk yourself out of the way your body is feeling.
Just notice it and breathe.
Remind yourself that your nervous system is your friend. Your body is scared and is trying to keep you safe. Be gentle. Be kind. Treat yourself like you would a child whose just awoken from a nightmare.
You’d never shame them for being upset. You’d hold them, and rock them, and help them learn that what they are afraid of isn’t real.
What happened to your joy? It’s still there. I promise it’s not out of reach. It’s just hunkered down waiting for the evidence to accumulate. Waiting for you to show it – that you’re finally, consistently, safe.
Monarch is coaching and community for high achievers who’ve been through hard things. We believe you deserve to enjoy your success instead of surviving it. And, we know that your best results don’t come from your survival skills – but from your whole, connected, authentic self. If this article taught you something — share it with someone who needs to hear it, too.
Subscribe to stay with me as we architect what comes after.
