There’s a moment I see again and again in coaching.

Someone gives you feedback, sends a text, gives you a look or a comment that lands just a bit sideways. And suddenly it’s like being punched in the chest – a feeling of tightness, a whoosh of shame, anger, panic, collapse, or all three.

And almost immediately after that comes the second wave:
Why am I like this? I should be able to handle this.
I know I know better.

Here’s the thing I want to say very clearly: that hit to the chest is not your brain ‘overreacting’. It’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Humans are wired to scan for danger. If there’s even a whiff of threat, rejection, humiliation, or loss of belonging, the nervous system fires first, and the thinking brain goes offline second. That’s not you being dramatic, it’s biology.

When people say things like ‘just think it through’ or ‘try to be more rational’, they’re asking you to use a system that is temporarily unavailable. You cannot think your way out of a nervous system state driven by survival.

Emotions aren’t problems to be solved. Emotions are active physical reactions. They exist to move us, to signal and to protect. They surge, peak, and if we let them, they pass. Most emotional responses have a natural lifespan of around twenty minutes.

What makes them feel endless is not the emotion itself. It’s the echo. When something hits our nervous system hard, we’re no longer just in the present. We’re in two timelines at once. There’s now, and there’s then.

Then might be an old workplace, a critical parent, a relationship where speaking up wasn’t safe. A moment when feedback really did cost you something. Your body doesn’t care that this situation is different. It recognises the pattern and reacts as if it’s happening again.

So the work is not to argue with yourself, or to explain harder. It’s not to find the perfect reframe in the heat of the moment. The work is to come back into now.

That’s why grounding practices exist. Not because they’re fashionable, but because they are the right tool for this particular job: to orient your nervous system to the present and restore a sense of safety.

Touch works because your body reads it as reassurance. Sensory input works because it anchors you here. Movement works because agency is the opposite of helplessness.

But here’s the part that often brings the biggest sigh of relief: there is no direct neuronal pathway from thinking into regulation. You cannot logic your amygdala into calm. That wiring simply does not exist.

The alarm lives in the nervous system. The part that helps regulate it is the part of us associated with presence and awareness. That’s why practices that involve the body, the breath, or the senses work.

Once your system has settled, the thinking brain can come back online. That’s when reflection can kick in, when you can decide what’s yours to take on, what belongs to someone else, and what can be left where it landed. Until then, being kind to your nervous system is not indulgent, it’s efficient.

If you’ve ever wondered why you react so strongly, why feedback sticks like glue, or why conflict can knock the wind out of you, this isn’t because you’re doing life wrong.

It’s because your system is protective, highly attuned and very good at its job.

The invitation isn’t to shut it down. It’s to learn how to listen, soothe, and then choose what to do next.

That’s regulation in action. it’s not about control or suppression. Just coming back into now, with a bit more understanding and a lot less self-blame.

And the energy we save by not beating ourselves up about natural reaction, we can redeploy in more useful ways. Win win!!