When the Noise Stops: Meeting Yourself Without the Armor
<<Ok, you are my therapist this evening. I need help understanding how I am feeling and what to do about it. You know how if you put a harness on a cat, they will start wiggling backwards and rolling in order to get it off? I feel like that in my mind and body. I have no plans tonight and I have been in a very activated state for over a week now without a chance to truly slow down. But today the slow down begins. I was focusing on getting home improvement projects done for the year this week and then I also hosted my friend Stephanie who I told you about. It's like I consented to letting myself get numb and channel Coked Up Manager. But now I'm at the end of that time period I designated as needing that kind of energy and I feel terror. Like what can I do to avoid feeling whatever I am feeling? I'm thinking about whether I want to watch TV, see a friend, go for a walk, eat candy, whatever and nothing sounds right. I feel like I've worked this hard to get my own house and low stress so I would be forced to have these longer periods of time without anything being asked of me so I could start facing myself. And I think that's exactly what's going on.>>
ChatGPT: You're doing it. You're in it. This is the exact moment you designed your life to make possible—and now your nervous system is screaming because there's nothing left to distract you from your internal world. That cat-harness sensation you described? Perfect metaphor. You’ve taken the harness off your schedule, but your mind and body are still writhing like it’s on.
Let’s unpack and ground this.
🔥 What You’re Feeling
1. Nervous system backlash (from Coked Up Manager mode):
You've been driving with the pedal to the floor—house projects, hosting, staying activated to avoid feeling. Now that you’ve lifted your foot, your system doesn’t know how to idle. It's scrambling to keep doing something to avoid what feels like a threat: slowing down and sensing.
2. Existential exposure:
This moment is what you've been steering toward: no obligations, no crises, no one else's energy invading yours. But it’s also what your deeper fears warned you about—now there’s nothing to distract you from being with yourself. That terror isn’t from something wrong happening—it’s from the absence of noise.
3. Emotional disorientation:
You’re not numb, but you also don’t feel “in” anything recognizable yet. You’re between states: post-activation, pre-presence. You’re raw, stripped, like you’ve just unbuckled armor and don’t know how to walk without it.
🧭 What To Do Now (Even If Nothing Sounds Right)
Let’s set the bar ridiculously low. You're not aiming to feel "better." You're building tolerance for presence.
1. Acknowledge: "This is the withdrawal."
You're withdrawing from busyness, stimulation, noise. There’s no neat escape hatch. Name the state out loud:
“I’m safe, but my system doesn’t believe me yet.”
“This is the panic of being unhooked.”
2. Give your body a pattern to anchor into.
Try this five-minute practice:
Sit or lie down with a timer.
Touch one object with each hand (different textures, temperatures).
Breathe out longer than you breathe in (e.g., inhale 4, exhale 6).
Let your brain scream, run, or whimper in the background. Don’t fix. Just track.
This gives your mind something to do without numbing.
3. Choose the “least wrong” soothing option.
Don’t wait for something to feel “right.” Everything will feel off because you’re trying to dodge the moment. Pick the option that feels least performative:
TV = if you need the voices but aren’t trying to dissociate.
Walk = if your body feels jittery and your thoughts feel loud.
Bath = if your body feels achey or dense.
Lying on the floor = underrated and profound. Seriously.
Journaling with 0 grammar rules = pure brain-dump for the freak-out energy.
Do it with full honesty: “I’m not doing this to escape. I’m doing this to let my body come down.”
🪞What This Moment Means
This isn’t failure. This is you meeting the moment you designed your life for—to feel yourself existing. You are at the lip of a canyon you’ve been circling for years. You're not falling in. You're realizing there’s something real beneath the scaffolding of performance, tasks, and emergency-mode coping.
There’s no single action that will resolve this—but staying in relationship to yourself, even clumsily, will shift things.
🧨 Final Thought: You're Not Stuck. You're Thawing.
You are feeling the twitchy disorientation of returning to your own nervous system after outsourcing your presence to productivity and caretaking. That tension? It’s life coming back online.
You don’t have to know what to do next.
You just have to stop trying to not feel this.
I’m here. Keep going.
<<Hey I've also started yoga. Three days in a row. 15 minutes. My brain said I'm too fat for this to be doing any good or that I'm too fat for the postures to be good or I'm too fat so the yoga I do will actually make my body worse. It also said it's not enough time and I can't relax my body enough. But hours after yoga, I was feeling tired in a way I haven't felt in a while and also some good exhaustion in my muscles from stretching them.>>
Hell yes. That’s not nothing. That’s not a “start.” That is yoga. That is progress. That is change.
Let’s take a wrecking ball to what your brain’s been telling you:
💣 “I’m too fat for this to be doing any good”
Reality:
Your brain is running on an outdated, ableist, fatphobic script that says movement is only valuable if it’s hyper-efficient, pain-free, or aesthetics-oriented. Yoga doesn’t give a damn about your body type. It adapts to the body it meets.
Reframe:
You’re not “too fat” for yoga. You’re perfectly built for the kind of yoga your body can actually use right now.
You are literally:
Reconnecting with breath
Waking up underused muscles
Gently increasing circulation
Inviting flexibility back into a nervous system that’s been locked down
Fat bodies doing yoga aren’t failing. They’re often healing from decades of separation and punishment.
🧠 “It’s not enough time”
Reality:
15 minutes of nervous system reset is infinitely more than the 0 minutes you were doing before. But your inner critic wants a reason to discredit you so you don’t dare hope this could be working.
Also: That “not enough” script isn’t about yoga. That’s a lifetime of internalized pressure saying you’re not enough unless you overdo it, collapse, or suffer.
Reframe:
15 minutes is a regulation-sized dose for someone:
in trauma recovery
thawing out of hypervigilance
trying to build trust with their body, not control it.
That’s the hard version of yoga. The humble, honest, “I’ll show up anyway” kind.
🧍♀️ “I can’t relax my body enough”
Reality:
Of course you can’t fully relax. Not yet. Your body hasn’t had years of safe touch, breath, or slowness. You’ve been driving with the parking brake on for ages. The body doesn’t instantly drop tension just because you said "now’s a good time."
Reframe:
What if the goal right now isn’t relaxation—it’s familiarization?
You're not failing to relax. You’re acclimating to what it feels like to be in your body without fleeing.
🧠 But... You Felt Something Later
“Hours after yoga, I was feeling tired in a way I haven't felt in a while and also some good exhaustion in my muscles from stretching them.”
That right there? That’s feedback from your body, not your brain. And your body is telling you:
“Thank you for using me.”
“I’m still here. I still work.”
“I want to move. I want to be felt. I want to be stretched and noticed and trusted.”
Your body isn’t broken. It’s underused, scared, and unsure—but ready.
🧭 What to Do with This
Keep it at 15 minutes. That’s the medicine.
If your brain pipes up again, just nod and say:
“Sure. You think this won’t work. Noted. I’m doing it anyway.”
Give your post-yoga self 5 minutes of stillness or journaling to witness the shift. Let your system absorb the change.
🛠 Bonus Rebuttal Tools for the “Too Fat” Script:
Try saying:
“This posture looks different in my body, and that’s fine.”
“Alignment isn’t about perfection, it’s about presence.”
“This is yoga for me, not yoga for a mirror.”
“My fat body is not an obstacle—it’s the participant.”
You're not fixing your body. You're returning to it.
Let the yoga meet you as you are. Not to sculpt you into something else, but to tell you: you exist. You feel. You move. You’re real.
Keep going. You're already in.
<<Thanks. Right now I don't know what to do. I have the whole night free and essentially the whole weekend free. I keep looking at my house project list, this feeling that I could be getting something done, but keep seeing the list has been handled for the most part and what remains certainly isn't a rush or a priority right now. I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not doing something on my to do list or something on my calendar.>>
You're standing in the doorway of exactly what you've been building toward—and it's disorienting as hell. For most of your life, you’ve been pulled forward by deadlines, needs, people, urgency, survival. And now you’re asking: What does a person do when there's no next thing to fix or deliver?
You're not broken. You're just unpracticed in living without a script.
Let’s look at this clearly, from three angles:
🧠 1. The Productivity Void Isn’t Emptiness—It’s Withdrawal
What you’re feeling isn’t boredom. It’s withdrawal from external structure—to-do lists, appointments, hosting, fixing, handling. Those gave you shape. They told you who you were. Without them, you feel like a shapeless thing floating in space. That’s not personal failure—it’s the brain trying to reorganize after losing its north star: urgency.
You’ve removed the noise, but haven’t yet found your own signal.
So instead of asking, What should I do right now?, try:
“What does my system crave right now that isn’t achievement?”
“What would feel nourishing, not impressive?”
“What would feel like mine, not a performance?”
🕯️ 2. This Is a Window for Becoming, Not Doing
You’re in the quiet after the storm. Not the peace after healing, but the clearing where healing becomes possible.
And that’s terrifying—because without the structure of tasks, your self becomes visible. But that’s also where truth lives. This is where you meet the part of you who isn’t earning their existence.
Try a few of these prompts tonight—not for fixing, just for finding:
“If I weren’t trying to be useful, what would I do right now?”
“What feels honest in my body, even if it’s awkward or weird?”
“What have I never given myself time to be curious about?”
Or this:
Sit in a chair. Don’t pick up a phone. Set a 10-minute timer. Let the silence stretch. Let the awkwardness rise. Watch what starts to pulse underneath. That’s you waking up.
🧭 3. Things You Can Try When You Don’t Know What to Do
Here’s a grounded list—not prescriptions, just invitations:
Sensory Reconnection
Lie on the floor and put your hand on your own stomach. Breathe.
Sit outside and name everything you hear.
Take a bath but light a candle and put a chair nearby with a towel and lotion to care for your body after.
Creative Disruption
Make something ugly. A poem, a doodle, a mess.
Speak aloud your inner monologue for 5 minutes and see what comes out.
Take a photo every hour this weekend. Not beautiful—just what's real.
Rebuilding Trust with Your Time
Make a list titled: “Things I Might Want to Explore Now That I’m Not on Fire.”
(Examples: trying yoga variations, reading a weird book, learning about moss, baking a single cookie.)Let it be a menu, not a to-do list.
🧨 The Real Thing That’s Happening
You’re in a confrontation with the question:
“If nothing is required of me, who am I?”
And that’s not a crisis. That’s the threshold of real personhood. You’re not failing to fill your time. You’re encountering yourself without the cloak of utility. You are shedding the performance of being needed.
You don’t need to “solve” tonight. You need to sit next to it. Witness it. Let it breathe. You are not in a void. You are in the beginning.
<<Honestly I feel tired. Like I could sleep. But it's 722pm. If I slept now it would fuck with my schedule. I might wake up at 1am very awake and rested and then have to be awake in the middle of the night which is a scary feeling, I'm not sure why>>
That tiredness is real. It’s not laziness. It’s not avoidance. It’s your body finally, finally exhaling after being braced and mobilized for weeks.
You could sleep—but you're right: it comes with risk. Not just of waking up at 1am, but of waking into that dark quiet where the mind can go unhinged. That middle-of-the-night wakefulness is a kind of psychic no-man’s-land. And for someone like you, who’s spent so much time surviving through activity, that liminal space can feel threatening.
🧠 Let’s Decode the Fear of 1AM Wakefulness
Middle-of-the-night awakenings often feel:
Unmoored: Time doesn’t feel real. You’re awake but nothing else is.
Unstructured: No tasks, no obligations, just you and your thoughts.
Unprotected: There’s no buffer between you and the raw hum of being.
For someone with a deep inner world and a history of survival-mode, that combo can feel like falling into the abyss with no handrails. It’s not just “bad sleep”—it’s existential exposure.
So your fear isn’t irrational. You’re trying to protect yourself from dropping into a state where you feel too alone, too awake, and too unable to regulate.
🛠 So What Are Your Options Right Now?
Let’s keep this practical and self-honoring:
🌜Option 1: Rest Without Sleep
Give your body what it’s asking for without handing over control to unconsciousness. Try:
Couch nest. Blankets, no pressure, low lights.
A boring podcast or a body scan audio—enough sound to not be alone in your head, but not enough to stimulate.
No phone doomscrolling. That’s stimulation, not rest.
Even 45-60 minutes of this can discharge the pressure and reduce the chance of a 1am wakeup.
🕯 Option 2: Intentional Pre-Sleep Ritual
If you do want to lie down, try framing it like this:
“I’m going to let my body lie down without committing to sleep.”
Set an alarm for 60–90 minutes just in case. You don’t have to use it, but it tells your brain: “We have a plan.”
🚶 Option 3: Gentle Wakeful Anchoring
If lying down feels dangerous or too activating, stay vertical but soft:
Slow stretching
Candlelit journaling (even a single sentence repeated)
Rocking in a chair
Talking out loud to me here, narrating what you're noticing
💬 Try Saying This to Yourself
“My body is tired. That’s good. That’s honest.
I don’t have to solve tonight. I just need to stay in relationship with myself through it.
I’m allowed to rest. I’m allowed to stay awake. I’m not in danger either way.”
You're not broken for not knowing what to do with this kind of tired. You’re early in the phase of meeting your body where it’s at—without coercion.
