#85: Why "I Don't Know What I Want" Is a Nervous System Problem, and how to fix it.

I don't even know what I want anymore." If you've said that to yourself lately, it's likely your nervous system is maxed-out. 

In this episode, I'm getting into what happens when your body has spent years managing everyone, holding the family together, running the mental and emotional load nobody sees. Because when that happens there's no room left for your dreams to surface.

 I'll walk you through what it actually looks like to reset and regulate your nervous system so your dreams can find you again, starting with five quiet minutes. 

3 Key Takeaways:

• A maxed-out nervous system can't hear what you want.
• Dreams live in the margins, in the quiet, in the moments your body finally settles.
• Regulating your nervous system becomes how you take care of yourself in mid-life.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:23

Well, hello, hello, my friend. Welcome to another conversation on The Distracted Dreamer. I'm your host, Carlene, and I'm really happy that you found a few minutes for yourself to listen in today. First, I wanna make sure that you're not missing out on getting my new newsletter. It's called The Tuesday Letter, and it's delivered to your inbox free every week. And this is where I share the real stuff, the raw and the occasionally ridiculous parts of midlife with you, and this is stuff that I don't share anywhere else. So be sure to join me every Tuesday there. The link is in the show notes, or you can go to coachcarlene.com/newsletter, and I'll see you every Tuesday in your inbox. Okay. For today's conversation, I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it before you answer. When was the last time that you let yourself dream? I'm not talking about planning or problem-solving or thinking about what needs to happen next, but dream. If you had to answer right now, and that answer gave you pause, or you feel maybe a little sad, or maybe you realize you honestly can't remember the last time, then this is the episode for you. Because somewhere along the way, for a lot of women in this season, the dreaming, it just, it went quiet. And I don't think it's because you stopped wanting things. I think it's because you ran out of the kind of space where dreams can actually breathe You know, it's funny, when I think about, uh, where I was two years ago, we had just moved to Tennessee, and my husband wanted nothing more than to hang pictures and get the boxes unpacked and make it feel like home. And I remember telling him, "I need to live in it for a while. I can't just hang things up." And, uh, by the way, just two weeks ago, we finally hung our three daughters' senior pictures in the family room. Two years later, I finally did it. Because you can probably relate to this, every decision, it just felt like too much at the time. Even deciding what was for dinner created actual stress for me. We didn't live two miles from everything anymore. The grocery store, the takeout, all my go-to solutions in a pinch, they were just gone. And something as small as figuring out dinner, it left me completely overwhelmed. It's no wonder I couldn't figure out what was next for me, where I wanted to take my business, whether to burn it all down and start something else Or, and this is so unlike me, whether to do nothing at all. Nothing. I'm not a do nothing person. And there I was, not even able to hang pictures. What I've come to understand looking back on this is that it wasn't the dream that went quiet, it was me. I had been so busy adjusting and surviving and just getting through each day in a brand new place that there was really nothing left of me to show up for the dream. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about why the dream goes quiet and why forcing it back doesn't work. And we're also gonna talk about what it actually looks like to lay it down on purpose so it can find you again So if you've been feeling like the dreaming has gone quiet in your life, there's a good chance you've also been telling yourself a story about why. We always tell ourselves stories. And maybe your story goes something like, "I'm too busy," or, "I'll get back to it when things slow down." Or the one I hear most often is, "I don't even know what I want anymore." And that last one is the one that scares us the most, because if you don't know what you want, what does that mean about you? And I wanna reassure you, you didn't lose your dreams you just lost the bandwidth to hear them. Stop for a minute and think about what you've been carrying. I mean, the emotional weight, the worry that lives just underneath the surface of everything, all the years of being needed and being available, being the one who holds everything when everyone else just drops it. You spent decades managing everyone else's nervous system. No wonder yours gave out. You were the emotional infrastructure of everyone around you. When your baby cried, you regulated. When your teenager raged, you absorbed it. And when your husband was stressed, you tried to smooth it over. And when your kids had a broken heart, ugh, yours broke, too. And here's what was happening in your body the whole time. Every time you co-regulated someone else, your own nervous system was doing the work. Your heart rate increased, cortisol flooded your entire body, your muscles tensed, and these are thousands of micro responses every single day that happened to you for years. And then on top of it, you were also the frontal lobe for the entire family. You were managing everyone's schedules, Solving every problem, making thousands of decisions every day. And you know what? You did it all so well. So well that nobody noticed, even you You've been in it so long that you're not quite sure how to step out of it. But here's what I want you to know. Your body has been waiting for this window, because now the environment, it's shifted. The house is quieter, the demands on you have changed, and your body is taking the opening. What you're calling exhaustion is your body actually releasing decades of tension, and that requires you to be still and let it go, because that takes something out of you. And a lot of us can never really name it, because we're just too busy getting through the day. We don't have time to figure out what is happening to us. And here's what I really want you to understand about your dreams, is they don't live in that noise. You wanna know where dreams live? They live in the quiet. They live in the margins. In those moments when your nervous system finally settles enough that something deeper, like your dreams, can surface. So if your nervous system hasn't had a settled moment in years, and for a lot of women in midlife it hasn't, then the dream, it isn't gone, it's just been drowned out recently I was reminded of that when I was in a coaching session last week, and my client was describing something that I really want you to hear. She said she'd been feeling kinda just meh, you know, no longer motivated to do the job that she used to love. At home, she was perfectly content to stay in and watch Netflix instead of going out with friends, and nothing felt particularly wrong, but nothing felt right either. And then she said something that really stopped me, and she said, "But the strange thing is, I don't know what I want instead." And I could just hear the discomfort in her voice when she said it, like not knowing was its own kind of failure. And I told her, "Hey, it's okay not to know. It's okay to take pause. You don't have to force figuring out what's next." And then I said the thing I want to say to you right now. That pressure to figure it out, it might be exactly what's getting in the way. So here's what we tend to do once we realize the dreaming has gone quiet. We go looking for it. We take the quiz, or we read the book, we make the vision board, or we sign up for the workshop about finding our purpose, and we sit there with our pen and our pretty little journal, and we wait for something to happen. We wait to feel something. And when nothing comes, or if something comes and it feels flat or like we borrowed it, like it's someone else's dream, then we decide that something is really wrong with us. You're trying to think your way back to something that lives below the thinking. A dream doesn't respond to a schedule or a to-do list. It surfaces when the pressure is off. So when you sit down and try to force the dream, when you put yourself in performance mode and demand an answer from yourself, you are doing the exact opposite of what creates the conditions for dreaming. You're adding pressure to a nervous system that is already completely maxed out, and a maxed out nervous system doesn't dream. It's just trying to survive. So if you've been talking to AI to find your passion or taking quiz after quiz, trying to figure out what you're meant to do, I understand. I've been there, and the fact that nothing has landed yet, it doesn't mean that the answer isn't there. It means you're trying to find it in the wrong place, because you can't think your way back to a dream. You have to feel your way there. And you know what? Feelings need space. They need quiet. They need a nervous system that isn't bracing for the next thing So what do you do? Well, you lay it down. And this isn't about giving up on the dream. It's setting down the search for it. Laying it down is a deliberate choice to stop searching so that the dream can find you. There's a difference between a dream that's gone and a dream that's waiting, and the way you move from searching to receiving it is by creating the conditions where something can finally surface. And those conditions look a lot like, well, less noise and less pressure and more space. So your nervous system, it has a gear that we almost never talk about. You've heard of fight or flight. It's that activated state where everything feels urgent and your body is running on adrenaline, and most of us live there way more than we realize, especially in this season of life. But there's another gear, the one where your body finally releases all of it, where the thinking brain, it quiets down enough that something else, something more creative or more instinctive, something more you, it gets to come forward. That's where dreams live, and you don't get there by trying harder. You get there by slowing down. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Slow down? I can barely hold it together as it is. I just want you to picture five minutes that are actually yours, just five minutes. Maybe that's a morning cup of coffee that you drink while you're sitting down without your phone and without planning the day in your head, or maybe it's a walk where you don't listen to anything. Don't listen to a podcast. Don't listen to me. Don't listen to music. Just you and whatever you hear out there, the birds, the leaves, the wind, whatever it is. Or maybe it's just sitting outside for 10 minutes doing nothing Just take in the scenery. Or what about if you do some deep breathing? Just tune into your breath, just notice how you're breathing, nothing else. And if you do the deep breathing, you wanna know what happens? This stimulates your vagus nerve, and your vagus nerve calms your entire nervous system. There's a reason yogis have been doing this for thousands of years, because it works. And here's something else that you can do in those five minutes. Stretch, just stretch, and use your breath while you do it, and let your body release what it's been holding onto. You don't need a yoga mat or a class or leggings. You can do all of this standing in the kitchen waiting for water to boil. You can do this on the couch while watching TV. You don't need more time, you just need a little more intention. Because your nervous system has been in overdrive for years, and it's not gonna settle with one calm cup of coffee or one stretch. Your nervous system got here through thousands of micro-moments over many years, and it's going to take just as many micro-moments of calming it to get it settled. So the good news is it can happen faster than you think. When you do these things consistently, the reset, it builds. So stretch when you wake up every morning and before you go to bed at night. A few deep breaths every time you transition from one task to the next. Choose to unplug instead of reaching for more information and scrolling. And here's the thing I love about this is these same practices are what keep your nervous system settled once you've reset it to its healthy baseline. This isn't a phase. This is just how you take care of yourself now. This is about a body that finally gets to settle. Do it consistently, and something very calming and very freeing happens, and then your dreams will start to surface on their own if the dreaming has gone quiet in your life, and your nervous system is all amped up, I'm giving you permission to lay down the dream. Because laying something down is sometimes the only way to find it again. The dream isn't gone. It's just waiting for a quieter moment, and the most productive thing you can do right now might be to stop looking. Create a little space. Give your nervous system a chance to settle, And trust that whatever is meant to surface will surface for you, because it, it will If this landed for you today, I'd love to hear about it. You can text me directly at the link in the show notes. And if you know someone who needs to hear this, who's been pushing herself to figure it all out and she's coming up empty, share this episode with her. Sometimes the most generous thing we can do for someone that we love is just hand them permission to rest And I want to remind you to please take care of yourself. And that means finding five minutes throughout your day To calm your nervous system so that your dreams can find you again I will be here next week to welcoming you back to our next conversation. Bye for now

Carlene 16:33

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.