I Didn’t Need More Discipline In My Life Instead I Needed a Regulated Nervous System.

How forcing my life put me in fight-or-flight and made reality feel like a battlefield.

I used to joke that if I ate a cockroach first thing in the morning, nothing worse could happen to me that day.

It was funny to say, but impossible to do.
Like many affirmations, it was less about action and more about perspective.

We all have bad days. That is the balance of life.

But if you are not paying attention, the bad days stop feeling occasional and start feeling cyclical.
It begins in small ways.
Traffic delays. Technology glitches. Spilled coffee before something important.
Minor inconveniences that stack quietly.

By the end of the day, your nervous system is shot.
You tell yourself that if you can just make it to bed, tomorrow will be better.

Sometimes it isn’t.
Then the week isn’t any better.
Then you start looking forward to relief instead of living your days.

At some point, I began to notice something deeper than bad luck.

When Reality Starts to Feel Heavier

When stress lines up long enough, the events themselves matter less than how you experience them.
The outside world starts to feel sharper. More urgent. More confrontational.

It could easily be brushed off as a run of bad luck.
But another possibility quietly appeared.

What if the external world was not changing as dramatically as it felt?
What if my internal state was shaping how I was experiencing it?

Over time, I started to see a pattern. The outside world seemed to mirror what was happening inside of me.

Not in a mystical sense.
In a nervous system sense.

Building a Life — and Forcing It

For years, I wanted to build a life I dreamed about.
A life I had waited years for.

I bought the things I would need slowly and stored them away. Preparing for the day I would finally put myself first.

And then I did it.
I quit my job.

There were no detailed plans, just ideas and determination.
So I did what I believed disciplined people were supposed to do.

I created a schedule.
Then I made it stricter.
Then more structured.
Then nearly impossible.

There were not enough hours in the day to complete everything I assigned myself, even though I was no longer working.

I became a drill sergeant to my own life.

Every day was a checklist that was never fully finished.
And strangely, I was more stressed than I had ever been at my actual job.

I was forcing a way of life that my nervous system did not want.

The Burnout and the Mirror of Lack

Burnout did not arrive dramatically.
It crept in through exhaustion, financial pressure, and constant internal urgency.

I was not making money yet.
My savings were disappearing.
And my attention narrowed almost entirely to what was not working.

Lack.
Scarcity.
Pressure.

After a while, the mind begins to believe the thoughts it repeats the most.
Mine repeated fear.

I noticed the world started to show me how I lacked.
How much scarcity there was.
There was confrontation everywhere.

As Viktor Frankl wrote,

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

I had compressed that space completely through exhaustion and pressure. Everything felt immediate. Everything felt threatening.

Was reality actually becoming more hostile… or was I only able to perceive it through a nervous system already in survival mode?

Panic as a Signal, Not a Failure

Then the panic attacks started.

Not subtle ones.
Clear ones.

My nervous system had reached a point where it refused to be ignored.
It was letting me know in terms I could no longer override with discipline or willpower.

Fear set in quickly after that.

I began turning inward in a harsh way.
I believed I was failing.
Failing to build the life I wanted.
Failing financially.
Failing creatively.

My writing became forced, and I could feel it.
The words were there, but they were not true enough at my core.

As Bessel van der Kolk notes in The Body Keeps the Score,

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.”

I realized I did not feel safe inside the life structure I had created for myself. Even though nothing external was directly threatening me.

Was I actually failing… or was my nervous system rejecting the way I was trying to live?

Fighting for a Place in the World

That question revealed something deeper.

It wasn’t just about lack.
I was fighting to be seen.
Fighting to be taken seriously.
Fighting for every dollar.
Fighting to have a place in this world and to feel that I mattered.

I was almost fighting for every breath I took.

No wonder my system was on overload.

I had structured my life like a battlefield and then wondered why reality felt hostile.

Relaxing the System, Shifting the Mirror

Instead of pushing harder, I began doing something unfamiliar.
I practiced relaxing.

Not perfectly.
Not all at once.
Just intentionally.

I checked in with my body several times a day.
Were my shoulders relaxed?
How was my breathing?
Was I actually present?

At first, it wasn’t easy.
My instinct was still to force things.
To push.
To control outcomes.

But slowly, my body began to settle.

And something surprising happened.

Nothing external changed.
My responsibilities were the same.
My circumstances were still real.

But the world stopped feeling immediately dangerous.

A Softer Structure the Nervous System Could Support

I redesigned my system in a gentler way.

Instead of overwhelming to-do lists, I chose three minimum actions.
Each one only two minutes long.
Not as a productivity trick, but as a signal to my body that showing up did not equal threat.

My journaling shifted from dumping negativity into morning pages to becoming a space for reflection and encouragement.
My tarot practice changed from “What do I need to know to avoid danger?”
to “What energy do I want to lean into today?”

This subtle shift removed the sense of constant defense.

Within a few weeks, I noticed something unexpected.
I was calmer.
More present.
Less reactive in my daily interactions.

I stopped fighting people to make my view of reality work.
I let life be and observed where it naturally went.

Reality as a Mirror, Not an Enemy

And then I noticed the deepest mirror of all.

I had not failed at building the life I wanted.
I had built it in a way my nervous system could not support.

When my system was overloaded, reality mirrored scarcity, pressure, and confrontation.
When my system began to settle, reality felt more open, manageable, and even quietly interesting.

Carl Jung observed,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

What I had been calling lack, pressure, and confrontation may have been my internal state reflected back through an exhausted system.

The external world had not transformed overnight.
But my experience of it had.

Maybe reality was never the enemy.
Maybe it was reflecting the internal state I was living in.

Not as punishment.
Not as blame.
But as feedback.

And once my nervous system stopped living in constant fight,
the mirror finally stopped showing me a battlefield.