Hi Reader,

Has anyone ever told you to calm down in the middle of a hard moment? Maybe your spouse or a colleague?

How'd it go?

Maybe it fired you up even more. Or made you grit your teeth and seethe, "I am calm!" 🙋🏻‍♀️

Being told to calm down — especially mid-meltdown, yours or theirs — makes you almost need to do the opposite. There's a special kind of rage reserved just for that phrase.

For most of my life, I thought this reflexive rage meant something was wrong with me. A well-adjusted person would hear "calm down" and ... do it, right? I couldn't, so I assumed I was too sensitive, too angry.

But that is not it at all.

Calm isn't a decision. It's a physiological state.

You can't think your way into it any more than you can think your way into being less hungry. Your body has to get there. Telling it to "just calm down" doesn't give it a way to do that. It's like yelling at your phone to charge faster. The instruction isn't wrong, exactly. It's just aimed at the wrong system (and possibly done in a less-than-effective way).

When you're triggered, a part of your brain responsible for logic and reasoning is less available, less accessible.

It's also why you can know all the right things to say to your kids and still not be able to do any of them in the heat of the moment.

For most of us, not knowing was never the problem. We don't need to read another parenting book, learn another script, try harder, or develop the willpower that everyone else seems to have.

The real problem is trying to solve a body problem with a thinking solution. I'll talk more about this in the coming weeks, like what it actually looks like to work with your body instead of around it. But for today, I just wanted to plant this: You don't have a parenting (or willpower, sensitivity, or anger) problem. You have a regulation problem. And regulation is something you can learn (just like the lines you learned to get your little ones to brush their teeth!)

Yours in trying this myself,