Ep 146 Why You Can't Switch Off and What To Do About It

You're tired, but somehow also wired. Rest doesn't quite rest you. You can't seem to switch off.

This episode explains why, and it's genuinely not your fault. You have an ancient, beautifully designed scanning system doing its best in a modern world that almost never gives it the all clear it's waiting for, where an email could be wonderful, neutral or awful, and they all look exactly the same.

But here's the twist: the answer isn't only more calm. I share why a permanently calm nervous system isn't actually the goal… and what turns out to be far more useful. There's a lovely parallel with strength training, a confession about my own back-to-back aerobics years, and a gentler way of understanding yourself that changes things on its own.

If you're curious about this work and are not sure where to start... maybe take a look at the Embodied Strength Profile a next step you can trust.

Thanks for listening to Rooted In Presence

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
📱 Instagram: @carlykillencoach

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Transcript

0:46

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and, of course, founder of Still Space Hull, and this is episode 146. So this episode has come straight out of a conversation I had with a client this week, not for the first time, not with only this person, but we were talking about breathwork, and they were describing something I hear a lot, that they just couldn't switch off. The sense of being permanently on or a little wired or scanning for something to go wrong, maybe never quite able to land. So if that's you, if you struggle to switch off, if you're tired, but somehow always on the go, if rest doesn't seem to actually rest you, then I hope today's episode helps because I want to explain why this happens and, just as importantly, what can actually help. It's not just about calming down, although we will talk about that, but something perhaps more important, maybe more useful, that most conversations about our nervous system leave out entirely. So let's get going So let's start with how this system is actually built, because I think perhaps once you can understand this, you can maybe stop blaming yourself for it, and I think that's worth a lot without even changing anything. So we all have something running quietly underneath everything, a kind of scanning system. It's always on, it's always checking. It's our nervous system checking, am I safe, or is there something I need to respond to? And this is ancient. It's how we're built. It kept our ancestors alive. And crucially, it evolved for a very particular kind of world. In that world, there was real physical threats, but it was also legible. You could tell. You'd hear a rustle in the bushes, you'd hear the birds stop singing, and you'd wonder, oh, is that the wind or is there something with teeth behind there? And your system scans, it activates, it gets you ready, and then if it is just the wind, it gets the all clear and the birds start singing again. And that danger was real when it was there, and just as importantly, the absence was real when it wasn't, so your system could stand down It could activate when needed, but settle when safe. And this is actually why some people genuinely feel a lot calmer outdoors, out in nature. Just one of the reasons anyway. And I experience this myself, so do my clients. Because out there the threats are real ones, the weather, the terrain, the environment, but there is also real safety. When your system is scanning and finds nothing dangerous, it can believe the signal. It gets a real all clear, and then it can rest. So now we have a problem in our modern life because modern days don't play by those rules because so much of what comes at us now is so ambiguous. It's faceless, it doesn't announce whether it's safe or dangerous. And, well, a perfect example, which we got to talk about was emails. An email lands, and that could be something that contains wonderful news, it could be completely neutral, just admin, or it could be something very difficult or challenging. And the thing is, they all look exactly the same. Same little envelope. Okay, the subject line might give you a clue. Same notification, same ping. Your nervous system can't tell from that initial notification what kind of effect it's going to have. What are we opening? And when your system can't tell whether something is a threat or not, it does the safest thing it knows how to do. It's gonna hedge your bets. It's gonna treat everything as a potential threat just in case. If you don't know, it probably is the safer thing to do. Because being wrong about a real threat ancestrally was far more costly than being wrong about a false alarm. So now imagine a whole day of that, emails, messages, notifications, the news, a hundred plus small ambiguous inputs. None of them particularly clear or announcing themselves. All of them landing in the same kind of undifferentiated way. Your scanning system, your nervous system is going off all day long, and crucially, it almost never gets a clean all clear. There's no moment where it turns out the rustle was just the wind. There's no clear signal like we have with our birds singing to let us know everything is safe or them stopping to know that there might be a predator approaching. So it just keeps scanning, keeps hedging the bets, keeps you a little bit activated, not massively, but just enough all day long, but with no resolution. And that's actually what being unable to switch off actually is for most of the time. It's not a character flaw. It's not you being bad at relaxing. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do in an environment it was never designed for, that almost never gives it the all clear it's waiting for. Constant low-grade activation with nowhere to land. And if you listened last week, you'll hear a bit of an echo there. Those open loops we talk about, the undecided things running in the background, that is kind of a similar ongoing tax that we're constantly paying. That system never gets to close the loop, so it never gets to fully stand down. So where does breathwork come in with all of this? So this is where I want to say something that I really think is worth taking a moment with, but you decide for yourself. Or most conversations in breathwork, they tend to stop halfway. So the first thing breathwork can do, the part most people know about,, is to help you learn calm, to down-regulate, to find your own center and come back to it, to give yourself deliberately and internally the all clear that modern life keeps failing to provide. You get to teach your body that this is safe. You can land now And that's very real. It's very important, especially for a chronically switched-on system. And for a lot of you, if you're stuck in that permanently on state, learning to reliably find your center is really life-changing, and it's a foundation. You have to be able to come home to calm before you can do much else. However, it doesn't stop there. Because if all we do is learn to calm down, we've only done half the work. And I think the half version is where a lot of wellness advice leaves many people. And the thing is here, you don't actually want a nervous system that is permanently set to calm, And it might sound a bit strange given everything I've just said, but if you think about it, life does sometimes genuinely require you to respond, to act, to rise to something. A nervous system that can only ever be calm, that's lost its ability to activate, it's not healthy either. It's just sort of stuck at the other end of things. So what you actually want here is a nervous system with range, one that can activate when life genuinely calls for it, meet the moment, and then stand down again afterwards and re-regulate. Not stand down permanently, but stand down until a response is actually required. And that's not calm, that's something I believe to be better than calm. That's flexibility, responsiveness. That's what the range is. So this is why it matters so much for your ability to switch off and your unable to switch off problem. When your system trusts that it can meet a threat and recover from it, it doesn't need to be racing all the time. That constant hypervigilance gets to ease because the system isn't frightened of activation anymore. It knows it can rev up and come back down. So it stops holding itself in that permanent, exhausting state of readiness. And paradoxically, learning that you can activate safely is part of what lets you finally relax. So the way I work with people, once we've got that first part, once we can reliably find a center, feel regulated when they need to, is that we can very gently begin to introduce small amounts of activation on purpose in a controlled and manageable way. And then we come back to center, and then perhaps a little activation again, and back to center. We're teaching that body a new rhythm, that it can move up into activation and back down into calm deliberately, safely, without getting stuck at either end. And there are a couple of names for this. We have titration, which just means working in small, manageable doses rather than flooding the system. And we also have pendulation, which is that gentle swinging back and forth between a little activation and a, return to calm. So you don't need to remember those words, but that's the shape of it. Small doses back and forth, building that range So for those of you listeners that are familiar with the other work I do, the strength training, I have a familiar picture here for you. It can be a little bit like interval training, and if you think about doing a Couch to 5K, if you've ever done it, you don't go out one day and attempt to run a marathon. You might run for a bit, and you might walk for a bit, run then walk, and those little bouts of effort followed by recovery gently raise your tolerance over time. Your body learns it can handle the effort because it also gets the recovery, and that's exactly what we're doing with the nervous system. Small bouts of activation followed by genuine recovery, taking it slow and gentle, building your range and widening your tolerance So now you'll notice I'm not going to give you a particular technique to try right this moment. I'm not gonna tell you to breathe faster and deeper for a bit and then slower. These are some of the methods we can use, but it's not all of them. And I'd like to be honest about why, because, it's kind of important this part. 'Cause this work is very deeply individual. What creates helpful activation for one person might not do anything for another. So some good breathwork schools, including mine, teach things like open mouth breathing, deepening and quickening the breath to create activation, and how to come back, how to slow, how to manage the experience. And for some people, that works beautifully, but not everyone responds that way at all. In my experience, many people in particular respond far better to gentler approaches, where the activation might not come from breathing harder, but from breathing gently for longer with rests. And beyond the breath entirely, I've noticed some people are activated by music, others by silence. No two nervous systems are quite the same So rather than hand you a one-size-fits-all instruction that might not fit you 'cause this is just a podcast, what I actually do, and what I'd invite you to do with yourself, is to get curious. With my clients, I inquire, I check in, I ask, "What does activation feel like for you? What settles you? And we discover it together, and then we work with what's actually true for you rather than what the manual says should be true. And this is why the real depth of this work happens one-to-one or in a live group at least where there's room to check in and review as we go. It's not really a follow-along-at-home thing, although there's things you can do, but if you really want to work with this, we need to be able to respond to what's there. So especially if you're someone who needs to approach activation slowly and carefully, this deserves to be held properly at your own pace by someone who pays attention and knows how to read the cues and work with you. So that's exactly the kind of care that I like to build into my work. So of course, I can't talk about this without talking about strength 'cause there's an amazing parallel, and it sort of delights me to find these little things. So when we don't feel strong enough to meet life's challenges, what do we do? Do you know? Well, quite often we'll brace. We'll hold ourselves carefully. We'll tense against everything just in case, just in case we get hurt. And bracing all the time is exhausting. It makes everything feel like hard work, and over time, it can actually lead to more aches, more pains, even injuries. It's just the physical version of hypervigilance, a body that doesn't trust that it's strong enough, so it never lets go. Don't know if you can relate to that. I know plenty of people that can 'cause this is what they talk to me about. But when you build genuine strength, something changes. You can stop bracing because you can trust that you can meet the load when it comes. You can be soft, relaxed, at ease precisely because you know you can activate that strength the moment it's needed. So strength doesn't need to make you rigid. I mean, if it's done well, it actually helps you relax. And the bit I find most lovely, and what I find connects all of this, strength training itself is a practice exactly in this rhythm, the activation and recovery. When we train with progressive overload, the rest between sets is not a break from the work, it is the work. You lift, you exert, you activate, and then you rest, and you come back down before you do it all again. That downregulation between efforts is essential. Without the rest, you can't get stronger. You just get more depleted. The quality of your movements reduces. Which brings me to a little confession about my own journey. But I didn't always understand this. For years, my fitness was really aerobic-based. Classes back to back sometimes. I'd do one, and then I'd go straight to the next class, just trying to burn more calories. And it helped my fitness a little because I was active, but it left me utterly exhausted and really hungry. And honestly, it did almost nothing for my strength. It was all activation and no recovery, all effort without any landing, and which when I say it out loud now sounds like an awful lot like a nervous system state we've been describing this whole episode. And then I learned to lift weights, and I remember in those very first sessions, the first few sessions I did by myself actually, without my personal trainer standing there, I noticed something I hadn't expected, the quiet between the sets. That pause on the rest. The deliberate rest where you've just exerted and now you simply wait and recover again before it's time to pick the weight back up. And I loved it. That quiet is genuinely part of what got me hooked on strength training. It wasn't just the lifting, it was the rhythm of it, the exertion and the rest, the activation and the return. I didn't really know this at the time, but my body was learning without me even having the language for it yet, exactly the thing I now help other people with. That you can rev up, that you can come back down, and the coming back down is not optional. It's where the good stuff happens. The same with running, not that I'm much of a runner these days, but when I finally approach it sensibly, I didn't try and run a marathon from nothing. I ran a bit, walked a bit, did the intervals, and let my tolerance build up gently over time. Effort, recovery, doing it all again. Turns out my body was being taught the same lesson everywhere I looked. I just didn't realize back then that it was a nervous system lesson as much as a fitness one. So let's bring this to a close then. Main points I'd like to bring back around. So if you can't switch off, you are not broken, and you are not doing rest wrong. You have a beautifully well-designed ancient system doing its best in a modern world that rarely gives it the all clear it's been waiting for, and that's not your fault. The answer isn't only to learn how to calm down, though that is a wonderful place to begin. The deeper answer is to build that range, to teach your system gently, in small doses, and at your own pace, that it can rise to meet what genuinely needs meeting, and then come back down again, so that it stops bracing against everything because it finally trusts that you can handle something when something actually arrives A nervous system with range doesn't have to scan all the time, and a system that isn't scanning all the time is one that can finally actually be here, present in your real life, which as ever is what all of this is really for. So that deeper work, the titration, the pendulation, the finding of your own particular activation, your own particular calm, is exactly what I do with people one-to-one, in person, and online, and in my small live groups. So if you'd like to explore what it might be like to build that kind of range in your own system, come and find me. You'll find me at stillspacehull.com and at carlykillen.com, with all the details are in the show notes But until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember, you already have everything you need