When you can't function · THE SKOOL HUB

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When you can't function

I woke up this morning convinced the builders had painted my living room the wrong colour. I wasn't even home, I was at my mum's, and somehow my brain had decided to panic about a wall I couldn't see. The colour was fine, by the way. Right colour the whole time.

But that set the tone for the entire morning. Hector was difficult the whole way to school, then I had to go to B&Q for a load of stuff, and suddenly every driver on the road was in my way and winding me up. I got home, tried to talk to my mum, found her irritating. Tried to work, couldn't concentrate. I was all over the place, pissed off, ragged, completely done with everything before it was even lunchtime.

And I want to say something about mornings like that, because I used to think they meant something was wrong with me.

When everything and everyone is irritating you, that's usually not a character flaw, it's a nervous system that's gone into activation. When your system is wound up like that, ordinary things, the traffic, your kid, your own mother, stop registering as normal and start registering as threats. Everything grates. That's not you being a horrible person, that's your physiology.

The bit that always catches me out is this. I kept trying to work through it. I had hours before I needed to collect Hector and I was sitting there thinking I don't have the brain capacity to do anything. But the capacity was there. I just couldn't reach it, because you cannot think clearly from inside that much activation. Forcing concentration out of a dysregulated system doesn't make you productive, it just makes you feel more incapable, and then you've got the original stress plus a fresh layer of I'm failing sitting on top of it.

So here's what I actually needed, and what I'm learning to reach for faster each time:

🌿 Stop trying to work first. It's not happening from here, and forcing it just digs the hole deeper.

🌿 Bring the system down before anything else. Get outside, move, breathe, cool off if it's hot, get out of the environment that's winding you up for twenty minutes.

🌿 Lower the bar for the day. Some days are about getting through, not getting ahead.

The work I "should" have done isn't the measure of the day. Regulating first, that's the actual productivity. You can't think your way out of dysregulation. You bring the body down, and then the brain comes back.

If your whole day can get hijacked by a morning like this, this is exactly what we work on inside my community, The Somatic Yoga Collective and you can join now on a free trial.

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When you can't function