Your Nervous System Isn’t Here to Tell You The Truth (But Here’s What IS)
Your nervous system doesn’t exist to tell you what’s correct or what’s good for you.
It exists to preserve continuity between yourself and the world, to reduce overwhelm and make it possible to organize a physical experience on this sensory planet.
That ^ coherence is the only thing that gives you the impression of having an experience at all.
It gives you a reference point, a baseline you can orient from. That baseline is not inherently true. It simply organizes your awareness enough for you to act from a stable point.
The brain and nervous system work together to protect us from overwhelm and confusion. They funnel reality through filters and systems in the body that allow us to function.
To express and share the contents of this reduced awareness, humans have invented and endlessly elaborated on symbolic systems and philosophies.
These show up as language, social factors, and neurological constraints or filters.
Neurological constraints are one way we systematically distort and delete entire portions of the real world. For example, our vision system can only detect a narrow range of light and color. Our auditory system can only detect certain sound frequencies. Anything outside those ranges still exists. In fact, many other creatures can detect much of what we can’t. Dogs can hear and smell things we cannot. Insects see faster moving objects slower than we do.
The truth is: if we absorbed everything all at once, we would have no way to organize reality or make sense of life on this planet. We wouldn’t be able to function.
Socially, we organize in ways that help us belong to a larger system that includes others.
A massive part of this is language.
Language lets us name and order what we perceive with our senses.
Language is ultimately how we develop better memories to pull from too.
Language is also a factor in how we experience the world individually. It can be a limitation and it can be a freedom. Some languages, for example, only have a few words to describe colors, while others have many words. Some have limited words for emotions, others have entire vocabularies.
The words available to us shape the very edges of what we think we know.
This means we live with layers:
We have the biological layer that automatically organizes the world through our sensory systems.
We have the social and individual layers that help us interact, label, and interpret.
Beyond those is the most elusive layer: our inner being, the deepest part of us. The inexplainable yet agreed upon idea of consciousness. This is why it’s so difficult to explain something like love. Love is an internal knowing, expressed outwardly and matched to language only as best as we can.
Side note: We often assume animals or insects are less intelligent because they don’t communicate the way we do. But what if true intelligence comes before expression? A beetle may not label a tree or debate resource strategies with its colony, but it is still a living being, organized by the same kinds of knowings we all share. Language and expression do not make us the sole carriers of sentience. If we were stripped of language and had to simply EXIST, my guess is we’d still be highly intelligent and perhaps even more cohesive with one another.
When we struggle to experience the world in ways that feel good or purposeful, it isn’t proof that we are broken or that the world is broken. It simply means there are gaps between what is biologically filtered and what we are intellectually doing to metabolize that experience.
For example, I once believed the only logical and correct life path was college, a 9 to 5 job, climbing the professional ladder, a couple of short vacations a year, and endless suffering in between. That was the language and representation I had absorbed. It was the only structure I had access to. As I grew older, traveled, met more people, and consumed more media, my map of what life could look like expanded. Books, conversations, podcasts, and courses gave me new ways of interpreting and new options to choose from. My baseline shifted.
Now I maintain my baseline (the reference point from which I build upon) while also pulling in more possibilities. I integrate by weaving new options into the old foundation.
Becoming aware of my filtering nature gives me more say over how I filter. Instead of operating as a machine designed only to survive without overwhelm, I now work with my biological systems. I use their purpose of survival, preservation, and order, and I direct them toward a path that feels abundant, aware, flexible, and full of choice.
One of the ways I used to struggle with my natural biology, my brain, and my logical limitations was by not experiencing my emotions in a well-rounded way. Postpartum anxiety is a clear example. I often had what people call “intrusive thoughts” about possible misfortunes that could happen to my daughter. My brain would create quick, repetitive, elaborate visuals of her drowning, burning, being kidnapped, or falling. When this happened, my body responded physiologically, which was uncomfortable.
In the past, I would have treated these thoughts and feelings as truth, or as evidence of a disorder. I was once diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I have since undiagnosed myself and stopped taking medications.
I have re-educated my brain, nervous system, language, and social structures to function in a way that actually works for me. This is not to say that diagnosis or medication are wrong. They just weren’t right or empowering for me.
Now, when I have catastrophic thoughts, I recognize them and validate them:
“These thoughts are normal. Countless women experience the same ones. I am not unique.”
I appreciate them:
“This is my brain trying to comprehend the importance of my role as a mother, scanning for possible dangers so I can do my job of keeping my daughter safe.”
Then I pull in my awareness and I pilot my mind with inention:
“I know for a fact that my daughter is safe right now. I have what it takes to maintain that safety in this moment.”
I deliberately feed my mind new images of us running by the pond, picking flowers, laughing.
I appreciate the anxiety for doing its job, then let it dissolve.
What remains is my conscious enjoyment of life.
I remember being part of an anonymous online forum for postpartum moms where we could share vulnerabilities and open conversations with one another. I shared about my intrusive thoughts and explained exactly what I’ve just explained here, how I metabolized them in an empowering way that dissolved them. I’ll never forget someone commenting, “This is postpartum anxiety. It’s not normal. You should get help.” I was blown away. I had just expressed that I was not experiencing my anxiety in a negative way, that I was using it constructively, and someone was telling me that the emotions themselves weren’t normal. I ended up leaving that forum and never returning because I simply didn’t have the capacity to tolerate people defending the narrative that it’s wrong or abnormal to be a human with a range of thoughts and emotions.
By believing negative emotions are inherently bad or “not normal,” how could anyone possibly exist in a functional way? Our so-called negative emotions provide vital insights and create space for our awareness to step forward and expand. It overwhelms me to imagine how many people are told their natural thoughts and emotions are not normal, and how many then add that to the growing list of “problems” with their being.
I use a similar process of understanding and being aware with my body.
Living in this part of the world means being immersed in technology and social structures that shape how I experience myself. I sometimes forget my awareness and start comparing my body, or I comply with external standards, or I rebel against them.
These are the natural pushes and pulls of being a social animal.
My old options were limited to complying in ways that hurt my health or rebelling in ways that shortened my longevity. As I’ve grown more aware, I’ve added more options.
I can say, “I want to comply because inclusion feels good. Fitting in is a natural biological, social drive.” At the same time, “I want to rebel because I believe in social change and creating new standards.” I may not always get the balance right, but I aim to get it right for me.
I ask myself: what actually feels good? What makes this physical experience meaningful and impactful for me?
There is absolutely a specific way I prefer to feel in my body (strong, capable, mobile) and there are absolutely societal demands that both support and condemn certain body types. I get subtle criticism for being more muscular than what is currently our baseline expectation of “feminine.” I have also perceived criticism for being thin and for being overweight. For example, my business as a personal trainer was at an all time low when I was at my heaviest. Is this a reflection of the the women who buy from me, and their deeper programming, or was it my energy at the time or something else entirely? I will never know. I don’t need to. But I have reflected a lot on how complex it can be to spend time wanting to “figure it all out.” (I can’t figure it out, so I let this one go).
The only way to “win” is to hold personal duality + responsibility with my awareness and land wherever feels best for ME and the life I’m happily choosing to live (this works very well).
Family relationships bring in even more complexity to this eco-system of biological filters, instincts, and awareness skills.
For me, one family member in particular has been the source of deep emotional responses. I’ve learned to hold multiple, equally true perspectives about them. When I feel triggered, I use my awareness to step above my filters and notice. My old baseline was always fear, angst, anger, and hurt. Those still exist, but they are no longer the entire experience. With awareness, I now hold:
Empathy: this person has a whole history I don’t know. Their internal structures may be limited by their life experience. Their expression is coming out the only way it knows how.
Grief: I am sad. I continue to grieve what I wish the relationship could have been. That is valid and honest.
Perspective: I can have my preferences, but the world doesn’t have to cater to them. I can choose to suffer and fight, or I can accept, feel my grief, and move forward.
Gratitude: I do have great memories with this person. I can reference them whenever I want. There is love between us.
Practice: I run “reps” in my mind, imagining the moments I’m most triggered and rehearsing new responses. Over time I’ve shifted from being angry and overwhelmed to finding lightness and even humor. This choice has positively impacted me and, indirectly, them too.
In more complex situations like this, my processes keep shifting as I grow, expand my choices, and integrate.
This is how I experience the idea of “balance.”
Not a perfect harmony, but a lived coherence between the biological, the social, the emotional, and the spiritual. I am in tune with the layers of my being, and I have fun piloting them all.
It is my firm belief that as long as we reject parts of ourselves, we suffer.
When we think our thoughts, emotions, social constructs, biological filters, and language options are inherently wrong or disordered or even correct and rigid, we suffer. Or we aid in the suffering of others.
When we accept all parts and navigate them as natural, fluid by-products of being biological machines WITH highly intelligent awareness, we thrive. AKA: we’re all flawed, limited, and new to this specific life cycle we’re in AND we are all capable of learning more, becoming aware, creating an array of options, accepting duality, and working WITH our biological systems.
I have spent a lot of time trying to articulate all of this ^ in journals and blog posts and podcast episodes. This post is an example of how I have a deeper KNOWING inside of myself that language limits. As I learn more and better ways to distill this knowledge with my words in a way I can share, I get closer and closer to explaining it and teaching it in powerful ways.
I’m proud of my journey to this place of duality, awareness, depth, and peace. It’s much nicer than the suffering I experienced when I was depressed, anxious, medicated, limited, rigid, and physically ill. I used to tell stories to confirm and enhance my suffering. Now I look for ways to ADD to my stories, allowing myself new language and behavior options. Giving myself (and others) perspective, agency, choice.
We are biological machines hosting an illusive, unique, highly intelligent consciousness.
It is a wildly profound privilege to understand this and live accordingly.
