The Root Cause of Exhaustion

We’ve been told for years to find our calm.
Slow down. Breathe. Be grateful. Keep it together. Forgive.

Especially as women, we’re taught that calm is the pinnacle of wellness — that if we can stay serene, keep our emotions tidy, not be “too much,” we’ll be safe. Loved. Accepted.

But here’s the truth: calm isn’t always regulated. Often, calm is a mask for survival that we are taught to endure.  It benefits someone else but not us.  Slowly we lose our passion, our health, our joy, our life.

The Nervous System Knows

Long before we ever learned to say “I’m fine,” our bodies learned an ancient strategy: survive by disappearing.

The dorsal vagal system — the oldest branch of the vagus nerve, more than 500 million years old — is our built-in play dead response. When the world feels unsafe, when there’s no way to fight or run, the body goes quiet.

Your heart slows down.
Your breath becomes shallow.
Your energy dims.
You don’t stop living, but you stop fully being here.

This is not weakness. It’s biology. It’s your body whispering the oldest truth it knows: If we can’t escape, we disappear.

When “Calm” Is Really Disconnection

What so many wellness spaces call “peace” is too often this ancient dorsal state.

The floaty feeling could be dissociation. 
A sense of being numb is called grounded.
The disconnect from our own bodies is labelled calm or centered.

This isn’t peace. It’s our nervous system playing dead so beautifully that even we start to believe it.

Invisible Emotional Work

Women, in particular, are conditioned to hold everything together — to regulate all the emotional around us while ignoring our own needs. We learn to make ourselves small and accommodating. To smile when we’re tired. To nod when we want to scream. And then we wonder why we feel so exhausted.

It’s not because we’re broken. It’s because we’ve spent years doing emotional work that isn’t ours to do. Managing other people’s discomfort. Folding ourselves into acceptable shapes.

This performance of calm is costly. It slowly disconnects us from the parts of ourselves that give us energy and desire.

Real Regulation Feels Different

True regulation isn’t about disappearing. It’s about being here fully— in your body, connected to your heartbeat, your sensations, your aliveness.  Real regulation means we can speak up when something is not right.  Making someone uncomfortable doesn’t stop us from doing what we need to do or saying no when we want to.

This is the territory of the ventral vagal system — our mammalian capacity to feel safe enough to connect, to stay curious, to remain engaged with life.

In this state:

• Energy flows instead of being rationed.

• Safety is felt, not performed.

• We can move, rest, and connect without betraying ourselves.

Aliveness Is Not the Same as Calm

Aliveness isn’t always soft. Sometimes it trembles. Sometimes it shakes. Sometimes it roars. But it’s real. And real is sustainable. Women are taught to not express anger and this is has a massive impact on our stress response.

When we allow ourselves to feel, to connect, to stop performing calm, something begins to shift. Our energy returns — not the brittle, borrowed kind that comes from pushing through, but a grounded current that can actually sustain us. That informs our desire, our curiousity, our intuition and our wisdom.

We begin to trust our bodies again.
We begin to belong to ourselves again.
And in that belonging, we find a safety that no obligation or performance could ever give us.

Coming Home

Exhaustion is not a personal flaw. It’s the body’s way of saying, I’ve been holding this together too long.

You don’t need to get better at being calm. You need to remember what it feels like to be alive. Regulation means being able to move between states of being.

This is where sustainable energy and true connection live — not in pretending to be safe, but in actually becoming safe enough to take up space, to feel, to come home to yourself.