What the hell is a nervous poo, I hear you ask, equally grossed out and intrigued. In French, we use the expression, avoir un caca nerveux, a personal favourite, because it’s both accurate and definitely unapologetic. It’s not pretty, it’s smelly, and it’s best done in private. But it’s also essential. You cannot live without it. What our body ingests it needs to process. I believe it’s the same for our minds.
And yet, when it comes to emotions, many of us behave in a very constipated way.
We swallow things. We hold them in. We tell ourselves to calm down, be reasonable, get perspective, move on. We try to think our way through feelings that are not happening in the thinking part of the brain at all.
And then we wonder why we feel backed up, tense, brittle, overwhelmed, or suddenly undone by something that looks small from the outside.
Feelings are not thoughts. They are bodily processes.
This is the bit that changes everything.
Emotions are not ideas. They are physiological responses in the body. They exist to mobilise us, protect us, and help us respond to what’s happening. They rise, move, peak, and fall. Or at least, they are meant to.
When something goes in, something has to come out.
Just like food.
Some of what we take in is nourishing. Some of it is useful. And some of it is waste that the system needs to excrete. That applies to experiences, interactions, stress, disappointment, confusion, and old stuff that gets stirred up when life pokes us in the wrong place.
The problem is, where is our brain toilet?
So instead of processing and releasing, we ruminate. We replay. We loop. Or we leak it sideways into our bodies as tension, anxiety, shutdown, headaches, gut issues, or that constant sense of being on edge.
This isn’t a personal failing, we’ve simply not been taught to deal with feelings, especially the stinky ones.
Suppression is not regulation. It’s emotional constipation.
There is a big difference between regulating emotions and suppressing them.
Regulation means allowing a feeling to move through the body with enough safety and containment that it doesn’t overwhelm us or take over. Suppression is when we clamp down on that process. We tighten. We silence. We override. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way and try to skip straight to insight.
What happens then is very predictable.
The feeling doesn’t disappear. It gets stored. And it inevitably comes out later, louder, and usually at a deeply inconvenient moment.
A lot of people think they’re “bad at emotions” when actually they’re just severely backed up.
When in the history of the world has a brain responded to ‘calm down’ with a ‘why yes indeed, how very true, thank you’. You need somewhere for things to go.
Nervous poo is how overwhelm clears
Overwhelm often isn’t about one thing. It’s about accumulation.
Too much input. Too many demands. Too little space to process what’s been happening. Then something small tips the system over and suddenly the reaction feels disproportionate, confusing, or embarrassing.
We often think of this as having a meltdown, usually with a side helping of shame. But what’s really happening is backlog.
The nervous system is overloaded and needs to discharge what it’s carrying so it can clear some brain plate space. Nervous poo is that discharge. It’s the body being allowed to complete a process that’s been interrupted again and again.
Once something has moved through, perspective becomes possible. Not because you forced it, but because the system isn’t clogged anymore.
Processing versus dumping (this matters)
Here’s an important distinction. Processing is intentional. Dumping is indiscriminate.
Processing has containment. It has edges. It happens somewhere safe, with enough space that the feeling can move without overwhelming you or anyone else.
Dumping is what happens when there is nowhere safe to go. It spills out, often onto the people we love, at the worst possible moment.
Your friends are not brain toilets. Your partner is not an emotional sewer. And social media comment sections are absolutely not designed for nervous poo, no matter how tempting that feels at 11pm.
That doesn’t mean you have to do everything alone. It means choosing your containers carefully.
Where to have a safe nervous poo
A safe nervous poo space has a few key qualities.
It’s on your side. It doesn’t argue with your feelings or rush you to silver linings.
It’s contained. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, rather than endless looping.
And it doesn’t require someone else to carry the emotional load for you.
That might look like writing freely and then deleting it. Voice-noting into your phone and not sending it. Drawing, moving your body, swearing out loud in the car, crying without explaining why.
It might look like therapy, coaching, or another intentional container where the job is processing, not fixing.
And yes, sometimes it looks like talking things through somewhere that can hold intensity without judgement or consequences, like AI, so it doesn’t leak into the rest of your life.
The aim isn’t to never share. It’s to share with intention, rather than because the system is overloaded.
After digestion comes clarity
A lot of people are scared of letting themselves feel things because they worry it will never stop.
But emotions have a natural lifespan. What keeps them alive is resistance, suppression, and replaying them mentally without letting the body finish its part of the job.
When you let the nervous system excrete what it doesn’t need, the intensity often passes faster than expected. And in the space that follows, something softer tends to appear.
Clarity. Choice. A sense of self again.
You don’t get there by bypassing the body.
You get there by letting it do its job.
A final permission slip
If you take one thing from this, let it be this.
Needing to excrete emotions does not make you immature, unstable, or broken. It makes you human.
Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s over-efficient and trying to protect you with the tools it has.
Give it better tools.
Create places where feelings can move. Stop asking yourself to carry what was never meant to be stored.
Sometimes the most self-respecting thing you can do is say, excuse me for a moment, I need to go take care of business.
Katherine Mengardon 
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