What My Nervous System Needs Right Now

These last few months have been a lot. My current state reminds me of a moment from Hell House by Richard Matheson. (I love a good old-school horror novel.) The story follows a small group of people, each with their own beliefs, who are sent to investigate the most famously haunted house in the world. Florence Tanner, a psychic medium, is one of them. She’s deeply attuned to the energy in the house, and early on, the physicist in the group refers to her as a “live wire.” He says it with concern, viewing her emotional openness and receptivity as dangerous.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Her sensitivity, while powerful, does come at a cost.

That moment has always stayed with me.

All bodies are different. I tend to register things quickly, whether emotionally or somatically, it's just something I've learned to pay attention to. It’s just the way I’m wired. It also means when I don’t get enough space to come back to myself, I start to short-circuit. This looks like me being moody and easily overstimulated. It’s not about absorbing everything around me. It’s about what happens when I forget to pause and reset. I forget that being attuned doesn’t have to mean being exposed and endlessly open.

Lately, I’ve been receiving things too openly without being intentional about grounding myself. I imagine many of you have felt similarly. I find writing to be grounding, so here I am.

Here are some other things I use to place a protective cover over my personal wiring:

• Less noise - I'm an intellectualizer. I sift through information constantly, trying to soothe myself by understanding things. Most of the time, it helps—until it doesn’t. At some point, the volume of input becomes its own kind of stress. Some things are, especially right now, incomprehensible.

  
  

  I often joke that I can't be alone with my thoughts, so silence is hard for me. But when I reach that point of overload, I shift. I look for sound without commentary, without analysis. I put on music that's more rhythmic than lyrical. Sometimes it's a lo-fi track. Sometimes it’s the soundtrack from Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. Familiar, soft, repetitive. I look for something that I can feel without having to dissect and interpret.

  
  

• Warmth - I’ve noticed that there’s often a seasonal rhythm to my sessions. When the heat finally breaks, my cold-weather clients begin to open up. When the warmth returns, my warm-weather clients experience their own kind of breakthrough. It’s made me think about how we each relate to warmth in such different ways.

  
  

  I like to be cold so I can create the warmth to my liking. I can pull on cozy socks, layer on soft blankets, and build something comfortable around me. When I need to reset, it’s not just about comfort. It’s about safety. It’s about reminding my nervous system that it’s okay to settle in, that I don’t have to keep bracing for what comes next.

  
  

• Remembering -  There is something tethering when I reach back into the past for answers. When I have the cognitive space, I read history books or analyze my family tree. I have this quirk where I get lost in an experience and take for granted that it is never a wholly new thing. The history of people is long. The history of my people is long.

  
  

  Ancestral work can mean a lot of different things to many people.  For me, the act of remembering offers something quiet and steady. When I start to feel frayed, it helps me reconnect. It reminds me that I’m not the beginning or the end of the story.

  
  

  If I am ever lost, I just need to pick up a book and read. Decades ago, someone else has expressed in earnest something I spent days puzzling through and smoothing out. Nothing is truly new, and that is comforting. Others have had this experience. Now it is simply my turn.

  
  

I'm still learning the rhythm of my body and mind. It's a practice, like most things. I hope I have offered you ideas to soothe your own frayed wires. I don’t have a perfect system, but it moves through the seasons with me well enough. I try to notice when I’m unraveling and find small ways to knit myself back together. I hope you do too.