Stop Shaking the Baby
Before I learned how to listen to my body's boundaries and needs, I mistook intensity for healing. I thought pushing myself to do more would yield better outcomes.
I over-exercised because I thought it would make me healthier and instead upset my hormone balance and exhausted my adrenal system. I attended multiple psychedelic experiences, not realizing that my already porous boundaries were becoming even more frayed. I traveled to retreats and classes, using my aptitude for learning as procrastination, keeping myself too busy to stop and feel.
It took me decades to realize that my high sensation seeking wasn't healing, but a sophisticated form of avoidance. Repeat experiences of pushing my edge desensitized my nervous system and made it even harder to listen to myself.
Intensity was the only time I felt awake and alive. I thought I was leaning in, but really, I was shaking the baby — and the baby was me. My nervous system needed softness and warmth, not my endless insistence on pushing the edge.
Our nervous systems weren't built for the intensity of modern life, with its barrage of world news and deficit of connected community.
We replace the slowness of social engagement and relationship building with high sensation seeking from adrenaline intensity and dopamine novelty. Trauma predisposes us to risk-taking behaviors, and unless we reverse course, we end up chasing the next deadline, marathon, or achievement without knowing quite why. Our nervous systems get stuck in an over-activated state, and we experience sleeplessness, high anxiety, and restlessness.
We mistakenly think this is normal, especially if we're surrounded by other high-sensation seekers or live in a fast-paced city.
What might seem harmless on the surface in fact negatively impacts our relationships with others, particularly our intimate partnerships.
When we're high sensation seeking in relationships, we might prioritize activities over connection. We chase our own experience, often at the expense of others — pushing ahead, oblivious of others' boundaries and preferences.
In intimate relationships, we might go outside spoken or unspoken agreements and engage in affairs — emotional or sexual transgressions that we hide from our partners. The thrill of the illicit becomes its own high sensation and it's easy to become trapped in sex addiction.
We might dismiss stability as "boring," "basic," or "vanilla," oblivious to the importance a strong relational foundation of trust and security has on long-term health and happiness.
When intensity isn't available, like during family visits or mundane adulting responsibilities, we might rebel and push against the people we love, creating conflict as a way to feed ourselves with the excitement we crave.
It's easy to use intensity as a way to avoid the vulnerability of intimacy, when high sensation seeking stands in for the slowness of shared sensual exploration and the joy of connection.
We easily move on to the "next new thing," instead of staying where we're planted and growing the roots and mycelial connections necessary to thrive.
We use high-sensation seeking as a coping strategy, to keep us from feeling what's underneath — often the wounds of emotional neglect, shattered relationships, and self-betrayal.
Stimulation becomes a distraction when external activity keeps us from feeling loneliness and overwhelm inside. If we experienced high adrenaline situations often enough in childhood, that kind of ongoing chaos feels familiar.
Paradoxically, intensity numbs us out and calms us down.
We decide, often unconsciously, that it's better to stay with the intensity we know, despite the cost. We don't know how to face the feelings inside, that threaten to engulf us when things get too calm or quiet.
When we use high sensation seeking as a mask for unresolved trauma, there's often a feeling of dread or impending doom that we must contend with. We feel neglected and alone, and emotional flashbacks from the past surge in. Of course it's easier to reach for distraction.
It takes conscious effort to learn how to down-regulate our nervous systems and to stop shaking the baby. As part of our healing, we need to choose to reset our baseline.
This requires facing what happens when we stop chasing intensity and learning to hold all aspects of our experience with maturity and wisdom.
Most people mistake a flashback for reality. They think that slowing down feels objectively awful, instead of recognizing that feeling as a hangover from the past to be digested and metabolized.
Once we learn how to navigate the layer of trauma that the body has been simultaneously carrying and running from, there's goodness waiting for us on the other side.
A down-regulated nervous system requires less input to feel both the rush of aliveness and the expansiveness of beauty and awe. A down-regulated nervous systems experiences relationships as joyful and peace as something to be savored, rather than resisted.
How to Heal Your Nervous System from High Intensity
1. Take this seriously.
If you've read this far, it's because what I'm sharing resonates with you. Whether you decide to take one step or many towards nervous system healing, this path will lead you to longevity and wellbeing in ways you can't yet imagine.
2. Taper off slowly.
High sensation seeking is addictive. Our nervous systems stay stuck "on" in a state of chronic over-activation, and it takes time to heal. Go slowly, taking small but meaningful steps in the direction of down-regulation each day.
3. Strengthen vagal tone.
Learning to work with the vagus nerve is the easiest shortcut to nervous system healing. Increasing vagal tone shortens relaxation response time and deepens whole-body relaxation. Gentle massage below your occipital ridge (at the base of your skull), slow belly breathing and humming all gently stimulate vagal tone.
4. Reconnect to the body-mind.
Strengthening the body-mind connection increases sensitivity and the felt sense. You won't need as strong a dose of excitement to feel the same outcome. The more you learn to navigate your felt sense — the language of the body's sensations and their location — the more you'll teach your nervous system that you can feel what's here without needing to distract yourself.
5. Build nourishing relationships.
Social engagement can feel slow or frustrating when we're healing from over-activation after high sensation seeking. Prioritize people you feel good around, without needing to do anything. Humor, storytelling, hosting, and playing games together are all ways to connect that engage our nervous systems without overriding our sensitivity.
If this sounds helpful, I encourage you to explore what nervous system healing and trauma resolution might look like for you. Reach out to me or another trauma specialist in your network who can work with you to heal this.
Life is full of goodness that's waiting to be claimed and experienced, without chasing. Only when we stop pushing ourselves can we open ourselves up to feeling it.
In the calm and the quiet, lives hope.
Now, go find it.
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Elie Losleben supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.