When Calm Feels Uncomfortable

Week 2 · The Difference between Familiar & Safe

After awareness comes a strange and often unsettling moment.

You notice the pattern.
You understand it intellectually.
You may even step back from it—just a little.

And instead of relief, you feel… off.

Restless.
Uneasy.
Flat.
Bored.
Disconnected.

This is often the point where people decide something must be wrong.

They’ll say things like:

• “I don’t feel better yet.”

• “This feels empty.”

• “I think I preferred how things were before I noticed all this.”

• “Maybe I’m overthinking it.”

When Awareness Disrupts Familiar Patterns

But what’s happening here isn’t regression.
It’s not failure.
And it’s not a sign that awareness “isn’t working.”

It’s your nervous system encountering unfamiliar safety.

The Nervous System Doesn’t Seek Peace — It Seeks Predictability

One of the most misunderstood truths about the nervous system is this:

It is not organized around comfort.
It is organized around prediction.

Your nervous system’s primary job is not to make you happy.
It’s to keep you alive by anticipating what comes next - to protect you from perceived danger. 

And it does that by learning patterns early—long before you have language, logic, or conscious choice.

If intensity was part of your early environment, your body learned to expect intensity.
If inconsistency was present, your system learned to stay alert.
If emotional chaos was intertwined with connection, your nervous system adapted accordingly.

Over time, these patterns stop feeling alarming.
They start to feel familiar.

And familiarity, to the nervous system, often reads as safety.

This is why some people unconsciously feel more at ease inside conflict than calm.

Why steadiness can feel suspicious. 

Why consistency can feel boring, heavy, or even wrong.

Not because something is missing - but because something new is present. 

So when calm enters the picture—real calm, not numbness or shutdown—it doesn’t always register as relief.

It registers as uncertainty.

Why Calm Can Feel Wrong at First

When people begin to step out of old patterns, they often expect a sense of peace to follow immediately.

Instead, they describe:

• a low-grade anxiety

• a sense of emptiness

• a desire to stir something up

• a fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop

• an impulse to test the connection or destabilize the moment

• a pull toward familiar dynamics, even if it hurts

Sometimes this shows up internally.

Sometimes it shows up interpersonally. 

People may unknowingly provoke conflict, question stability, or create distance—not because they don’t want safety, but because safety feels unfamiliar in their body.

This doesn’t mean calm is bad for you.

It means calm is new to you.

Your nervous system doesn’t yet recognize it as safe, because it hasn’t had enough exposure to it.

In environments where chaos was the norm, calm wasn’t practiced—it was absent.
So when it appears later in life, it can feel unfamiliar, hollow, awkward, destabilizing, or even threatening.

Not because something is wrong with you, but because your body hasn’t learned how to be there yet. Your body, your nervous system, hasn’t learned how to allow calm to be present in your life.

Why This Is Often Where We Turn Back

This moment—when calm feels uncomfortable—is where many people abandon growth without realizing it.

They return to old dynamics.
They re-enter familiar relationships.
They recreate emotional intensity.
They mistake activation for aliveness.

And they do it not because they want pain—but because pain feels legible.

The nervous system knows what to do there.

Calm, on the other hand, asks the body to slow down, to orient differently, to release vigilance.

For some, that release feels unsafe.
For others, it feels undeserved.
For many, it feels temporary—as if something bad must follow.

So instead of staying, the system looks for movement… movement towards the familiar, which is where self-sabotaging behaviors might start to arise. 

Discomfort in Calm Is Not a Sign of Failure

This is the part I want to say clearly:

Feeling uneasy in moments of peace does not mean you are doing something wrong.

It often means you are doing something new.

There is a difference between discomfort that signals danger and discomfort that signals unfamiliarity.

One requires protection.
The other requires patience.

When people misinterpret this distinction, they often push themselves - or others - back into what’s familiar simply to relieve the unease.

But the unease itself is not the problem.

It’s information.

Regulation Is Not the Absence of Discomfort

Another misconception worth correcting:

Regulation does not mean you feel calm all the time.

Regulation means you can stay present with what you’re feeling without immediately reacting to it.

It means:

• allowing quiet without filling it

• tolerating boredom without creating drama

• noticing restlessness without needing to fix it

• sitting with stillness without labeling it as wrong

That capacity develops slowly.

And it only develops if you let your nervous system experience calm long enough to learn that nothing bad happens there.

Your Body Isn’t Rejecting Safety — It’s Learning It

When calm feels uncomfortable, many people internalize it as a personal defect.

They’ll say:

• “I don’t know how to relax.”

• “I’m bad at peace.”

• “Something must be wrong with me.”

But this isn’t a personality flaw.

It’s just a learning curve.

Your nervous system is encountering a state it hasn’t practiced yet.

And like any new skill, it feels awkward before it feels natural.

You wouldn’t expect to feel graceful the first time you tried to speak a new language or play a new instrument, right?

Well, safety is no different.

What This Week Is (and Isn’t) About

Week 2 is not about convincing yourself to like calm.
It’s not about performing regulation.
It’s not about fixing the discomfort.

It’s about noticing what happens when things slow down.

What thoughts appear when there’s less noise?
What urges surface when nothing demands your attention?
What sensations show up when intensity is absent?

You don’t need to judge any of it.
You don’t need to change it.
You don’t need to interpret it.

Just noticing is enough.

Because noticing builds tolerance.
And tolerance builds capacity.
And capacity is what eventually makes calm feel safe.

Staying When We Want to Leave

There will be moments this week where you’ll want to return to what’s familiar—not because it’s good for you, but because it’s known.

That impulse doesn’t need to be resisted aggressively.
It just needs to be seen.

Sometimes the most meaningful choice isn’t choosing something different—it’s choosing not to immediately abandon yourself when things feel unfamiliar.

That’s not passive.
That’s practice.

Closing Reflection

If calm feels uncomfortable right now, let that be information—not a verdict.

Your nervous system doesn’t need to be forced into peace.
It needs time to recognize it.

This week isn’t about becoming serene.
It’s about staying present long enough for something new to register.

That, too, is choosing differently.

Written by Alexandria Lanza, LPC, LCADC, ATR-BC, ACS

Founder, Jaded Hearts – Center for Healing