The Power of Doing Nothing: Letting Your Nervous System Lead

In this episode of Untamed Voices, we explore a simple but powerful practice: doing nothing.

We often believe we need to fix, manage, or control our internal state to feel better. But what if that effort is actually keeping us activated? This episode looks at how the nervous system responds not just to what we feel, but to how we relate to those feelings—and how removing the pressure to “fix” can create space for natural regulation.

We talk about the difference between awareness and interference, how the brain and body continue to process even in stillness, and why discomfort during this practice doesn’t mean it isn’t working. We also bring in important balance—recognizing that doing nothing is supportive when there is enough internal safety, but not always the right tool in highly dysregulated states.

This conversation invites us to step out of constant doing and into trust—allowing the body’s natural intelligence to return us to center without force.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Hi everybody, welcome back to my podcast. I hope your week has been wonderful. And if it hasn't, hang in there. I I hope some wonderfulness comes your way. So I tried something recently that on the surface kind of sounds like super simple and obvious, maybe. It's a meditation where you do nothing. My sister kind of recommended it to me, and I was like, okay, I guess I'll try it, right? And so I just went and I sat at this park and started listening to this, to this meditation. And at first it was a little uncomfortable, you know, because it keeps telling you, do nothing. Do nothing, you know. You think that thought that came by, just let it be, you know. When don't don't try to control this or that or whatever, you know. So throughout the the podcast, listening to it, I started feeling so much more at ease. And towards the end, I was just so relaxed. It's like somebody just like gave my nervous system a massage. It was great. I felt so calm that when my husband was talking to me afterwards, I he thought something was wrong with me. I was like, no, I'm just, I'm just really relaxed, you know. By the way, if you want to listen to this meditation, it's just if you type in do nothing meditation on on YouTube, it kind of pops up. It's it, I don't know who created it, but it's great. It almost sounds like a computerized voice, but I liked it. So this meditation where you do nothing, it's kind of like a no technique, no breath work, no visual visualization, no attempt to calm yourself down. It's just sitting. And to be honest, part of me expected it to be pointless because how could doing nothing possibly be as effective as all of the structured things that we're taught to do, right? But at the end, it was like I felt sharper, I felt calmer, I felt more grounded. I felt like something in my system reorganized itself, right? Without me trying to make it happen, which was really interesting. I've I've worked really hard my whole life to help my body calm with all my traumas, right? Because my body never learned on its own or was taught. And so over time, like all of the different therapies that I have done and learned were necessary, you know, and maybe I couldn't be at this point without them. But this was a little bit different. This was more, it was like, oh, hmm, my body knows what to do. That's interesting. It doesn't need my brain interference, you know? So the experience really stayed with me because it challenged something I think a lot of us have internalized: that in order to feel better, we have to do something. We have to fix it, shift it, regulate it, understand it, work through it, right? And those things do matter, they have their place. But there's another side to this that I don't think we maybe talk enough about or even have it in our awareness. Sometimes the constant effort to change your internal state is the very thing keeping your system activated. So slowing that down a bit, it's it just basically means like your nervous system is not just responding to what you feel, it's also responding to how you're relating to what you feel. So if there's anxiety in your body, for example, and your immediate response is, I need to get rid of this. Your system doesn't just register that anxiety, it also registers that something is wrong. It needs to be fixed, it's not allowed to be here. And that adds another layer of activation to it. So now it's not just the anxiety, it's anxiety plus pressure, anxiety plus monitoring, anxiety plus subtle rejection of your current state. And this is where doing nothing becomes really interesting. Because when you remove the layer of trying to fix, you change that whole relationship. I mean, you can apply this to partnerships as well, or even, you know, parenting. A lot of times we try to fix things with our kids, but maybe they don't need fixed, maybe they just need guidance and maybe they just need to be allowed to be, you know, to be allowed to make mistakes, to be allowed to just explore the world and us be there as their safety net, right? So anyway, applying it everywhere, right? Doing nothing is not the absence of awareness, it's the absence of interference. You're still aware of your thoughts, you're still aware of your body, you're still aware of what's happening internally, but you're not necessarily stepping in to manage it. You're not trying to slow your breathing or relax your muscles or redirect your mind. You're allowing your system to move, but without that supervision. For a lot of people, that feels really familiar because we've been taught, directly or indirectly, that if we're not actively managing ourselves, things are gonna just spiral. And sometimes initially, it does feel like that. It does feel like it's going to spiral. Thoughts get louder, your body feels more restless, emotions you didn't realize were there start to rise. And that's the part will pee where people often just stop because it feels like it's not working. But hear me out. What if that's not dysregulation? What if that's uninterrupted expression? If your system has been holding tension, suppressing, suppressing emotion, or constantly being redirected, the moment you stop interfering, of course things will move. Because that's their natural order. That's the natural thing that they want to do. They don't want interference. Us, you know, trapping things in our body, trapping trauma in our body, for example, it's kind of like a thing that we do, but it's not actually meant to be. What we're supposed to do is move through it like animals do. You know, we're supposed to shake it off and continue forward. But we develop these ideas that maybe not even ideas, they're not conscious, they just they just happen that we need to, you know, put it in a box and shove it away, right? You know, that's how to deal with it. Well, no, it's not. It never works. It always comes back because shoving away and not dealing with it means that we're storing it somewhere. It's not out there, it's somewhere in our bodies, right? So the idea of feelings, even, is that we're supposed to just feel them and and let them flow, you know, let ourselves have that moment. But, you know, just for example, like the crying, you know, my my go-to for for emotions has always been crying. And I have had to hold back tears so many times because I was around unsafe people who didn't see that as, oh, she's just feeling her feelings, you know. They would see it as, oh my God, you're weak. You know, you can't handle this. Well, no, I wasn't weak. I've never been weak. I've always been strong. But my body needed to do something to move through it, and I was stopped, right? And so what do I do with it? I hold it back and I store it, you know, save it for another day, but then that net that other day never comes, right? So, or it does come in the most unexpected moments, right? So the ideal is actually just allowing, allowing yourself to feel, you know, in it's interesting because in counseling, they they strongly discourage, like when they're teaching you, they strongly discourage you of having emotions. They, you know, and and it's it's understandable. I 100% agree with it, you know. Well, 99% agree with it, 99% of the time. And, you know, you're you're supposed to be neutral and you're supposed to be the grounding space for the other person. And yes, absolutely you do. But there come a few times where, and I have noticed this about myself, there have been a few times where I have felt that maybe I just empathize with the person so much, and maybe it brings up something of my own that typically I can say, I can, I can work with and say, all right, you know, I see you and I'll come back to you. I'll come back to you next time. But there are there's a rare occasion where I will feel these emotions bubble up, and there's no redirecting them in the moment. And so what I'll typically do is I'll let my client know, you know, I'm having some unexpected emotions. Just give me one second, and I breathe and I let myself feel it for a second, and then it flows. And and in while I'm doing that, I am still connecting to my client and still saying, what you're experiencing matters, and it matters and it and it hits me deep. It doesn't mean that I can't handle it. It's just that I also have feelings, right? And allowing myself to do that, number one, it it enriches and it enriches the therapeutic experience. Sometimes I'm not saying go out and do this all the time, right? You know, if you're a therapist or, you know, maybe if if you are a client somewhere, you know, and you're listening to this, recognize that if your therapist is constantly crying and being really emotional, uh, that might not be that might not be really helpful for you, right? You know, but every once in a while, depending on the situation, depending on what's happening, you can also, as a therapist, be an example to your client as far as this emotion is arising and it's not, it's not okay with with the technique that I usually use. And so I'm going to just give it some space for just one moment while I still connect with you. And as soon as it passes, I'm back on board, right? And it's it's so rich because it takes attunement to yourself and to the other person and makes those experiences real and validates those moments, right? When so, so yeah, so moving things is really important. Moving things through your body and being allowed to move those things through your body is really important. Our body knows how to process things. We interfere with it. We interfere with that process, right? And a lot of it has to do with society and you know, knowing when the right time is. So it's it's kind of like this this like opening a door that's been held shut for a long time when you're when you're able to move this stuff through. There's gonna be pressure behind it and it's just gonna come through, right? If you stay with it without trying to organize it, you know, you you leave the you leave the door open even if it's hard. If you stay with it without trying to organize it, something begins to happen underneath that initial wave, right? Your system starts to settle on its own. Not because you made it, but because you stopped preventing it, right? So when you hear a really sad song and you're having feelings and you allow yourself to just sing with it or be with that song and allow yourself to just feel everything that's coming, your system automatically will reset itself. That's allowing yourself to do what it what you need to do without trying to control it and trusting yourself to know what to do and how to do it, right? So there's actually research that supports parts of this. When we look at the brain in states of wakeful rest, what's often called the default mode network, we see that the brain is actively processing, integrating, and reorganizing information when we're not task focused. So even when you feel like you're doing nothing, your brain is not doing nothing. It's integrating, it's sorting, it's recalibrating. And the nervous system works in a similar way. Regulation is not something you always have to force. It's something that can emerge when conditions allow it, right? So when you allow it. And this doesn't mean that doing nothing is always the answer. Okay. We are a little more complicated than that, right? So if someone is in a highly dysregulated state, so severe panic, intense trauma activation, dissociation, doing nothing can actually feel overwhelming. Just like when somebody is having a panic attack, their system is too dysregulated. And if they continue to allow themselves to have that panic attack and there's no interference with it, that can lead to some, you know, even medical conditions. You know, it might land you in the hospital, right? So for things like that, you do need some interference and guidance and redirection. But when you find that internal safety and you know that you can trust your system, that's what I'm talking about. That's that's where it's golden and that's where this works, okay? And a lot of times, you know, clients that come come to me are typically searching for help with trauma because trauma really dysregulates and throws you off. And a lot of times the way to work with trauma is you need another person to help you regulate and understand and build that safety net within you. Understand that there is a safety net within you, you know, and help you see that, help you find that so that you can come back to things like this, right? So I do want to add some balance with all of this. Doing nothing is powerful, but it's not about abandoning yourself. There's a difference between I'm not interfering and I'm leaving myself alone in something I don't have the capacity to hold. So for some people, doing nothing might need to be titrated. Maybe it's 30 seconds, maybe it's two minutes, maybe it's sitting and doing nothing but with a hand on your chest, or sitting next to somebody and holding their hand. Not to change anything, but to stay connected. Because the goal here isn't to push yourself into stillness, it's to remove unnecessary effort while staying present. And I think this is where the real shift happens. When I did this, the biggest thing I noticed wasn't just that I felt calmer, it was that I didn't create the calm. Which is such like when I say that, I didn't create the calm. I'm telling you, my body feels so relieved with that, you know, because there's so many areas of my life that I have to be responsible. And this is one of the areas that maybe I don't always have to be. You know, maybe I can allow my body to be, my body to do what it does. So it really does change something deeper because now it's not I know how to calm myself down if I use the right tools. It's more my system knows how to come back to center when I stop overriding it. It's a really different kind of trust, especially if you're someone who has spent a lot of your life feeling like you have to manage yourself, manage your emotions, manage other people, manage the environment, stay ahead of things. Doing nothing interrupts that pattern. It creates a space where you're not required to perform regulation. You're not required to be better, you're not required to change your state. Oh, even saying that my body is just like, yes, please. You're not allowed, you're not allowed, you are allowed to be exactly where you are, to be exactly who you are, and see what your system does with that. For a lot of people, that's where something softens, not because you forced it, but because it was finally given space. So if you try this, I want you to expect that it might feel uncomfortable at first. Your mind might resist it, your body might feel unsettled. You might feel the urge to get up, check your phone, or do something more, you know, quote unquote, productive. That doesn't mean it's not working. That means you're stepping out of a lifelong pattern of doing. And maybe the most powerful part of this practice is not what happens during it, but what it teaches you about yourself. That you're not as fragile as you were taught to believe, that your system is not as broken as it might feel sometimes, that underneath all the managing, there is a natural intelligence in your body, just like there is a nature that allows and knows how to return to balance. Right? There is a knowing within us, a natural intelligence that knows exactly what to do and how to help us. We just gotta let it. And sometimes doing nothing is exactly what allows everything to shift. So that's what I'll leave with you today, sending all my love out there, and I really hope you have a beautiful week. I will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening.