Are you Driven . . . Or Dysregulated?

For many years, I considered myself a driven person--self-motivated, persevering, ambitious. I was always thinking about my work and my customers and initiating new projects and ideas. I would wake up thinking about work and go to sleep with the next day on my mind. Now my sleep was often disrupted and I had chronic neck and back pain, but I chalked this up to "stress" and kept it moving. Besides, I was experiencing the external rewards of my drive, so why would I question it?

Then, a few years ago, I began a form of body-based trauma therapy called somatic experiencing. This is a type of therapy that "cultivates an awareness of bodily sensations, and teaches people to feel safe in their bodies while exploring thoughts, emotions, and memories." Through this therapy, I began to be more aware of when my nervous system was dysregulated (moving into the fight/flight/freeze zone) and to really feel what this dysregulation felt like in my body. I was also able to expand my ability to hold on to regulation or to return more quickly to regulation when something happened that might trigger the fight/flight response.

The more work I did, the more I discovered that what I had considered to be my "drive," was really anxiety disguised as ambition. I could see that often I was feeling a sort of agitation and urgency in my body that was PUSHING me and I was just trying to stay one step ahead of this sense that I might be overwhelmed at any minute. The fuel for my days was that fight/flight energy and if I felt my energy waning, I would often unconsciously reach for that anxious buzz to get myself "motivated." I was driven, yes, but in the way a car is driven--by someone (or something) else. And where this subconscious urgency and dysregulated nervous system drove me was straight into burnout.

As I became more regulated, I was able to feel the toll that years of chronic dysregulation had taken on me, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I could truly feel the exhaustion, and for a time, there was a sort of internal collapse as I worked my way through this. I couldn't find my "drive" or ambition, couldn't get myself "motivated," because I now recognized that what I'd felt as motivation was actually urgency and anxiety. But without this fuel to drive me, how would I get anything done? How could I create from a place of ease and regulation rather than from a sense of toxic worry and uneasiness?

For me, it's been a search for vitality, for a connection to life force that feels both inspiring and rejuvenating. It's embracing slowness and recognizing that often that need for speed is a sign that urgency is showing up again. I pay attention to when I feel tight and contracted, because this can be a sign that I'm dysregulated. I also pay attention to when I feel more open and expansive and try to find this place in myself as much as possible because my best decisions and most life-affirming conversations tend to happen in this space.

This process has been about inviting a different type of anxiety into my life, one where I finally surrender to the idea that I cannot (and should not) try to control everything around me because while life is uncertain, when I'm able to engage from a place of more regulation, I also have the capacity to meet its demands.

I'm sharing this because I am having many conversations with people--particularly women--who are high achieving, ambitious, DRIVEN. They are also exhausted and overwhelmed. Having been there myself, I'm wondering more and more if what we consider to be ambition and drive is actually nervous system dysregulation.

The epidemic of burnout we're experiencing is one clue that this may be true; chronic dysregulation can ultimately overwhelm our physical, mental, and emotional capacities. I also notice how many people I talk with have a sense of urgency about them. There are so many things they "should" be doing and when you listen underneath, you can hear how it feels like they're being chased by a million expectations and they're just trying to keep their heads above water. This sense of being in danger is what triggers our fight or flight responses, so it's not a stretch to consider that when someone feels chased by the world's demands that they might be caught in nervous system dysregulation.

I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences of their drive. Does it feel like it's coming from an expansive, open place of possibility or does it feel like urgency and anxious contracted energy pushing you? Is it something that inspires and rejuvenates or is it ultimately exhausting and overwhelming?