Awareness Isn’t Enough

My face flushed. My pulse quickened. I could feel the energy rising from my solar plexus. Then I spoke. Direct. With force. Too much force. Whoever was on the receiving side of it didn’t know what hit them. A switch inside me had been flipped.

Early in my training, my fire served me well, for the most part. It helped me speak up and go after what I wanted. But as I moved deeper into my career and into leadership, that same fire sometimes became a liability. Increasingly, I found myself regretting what I had said or how I had behaved. I knew I was being reactive, but I didn’t know how to change it.

For years, I was aware of this pattern. And I heard people say, “Awareness is the first step.” But I could never seem to get beyond it.

I was at a loss about how to take the second step.

Viktor Frankl famously wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space.” But for years, I didn’t know how to find that space.

Why Awareness Isn’t Enough to Change Reactive Patterns

One of the first steps in my recovery from burnout was learning how to regulate my nervous system. Before that, I was often living in sympathetic overdrive—that state where you feel vigilant, alert, and ready to pounce. Now I recognize it in my body as a kind of buzzy energy.

It wasn’t until I experienced what it truly felt like to be calm and began living there more consistently that something shifted. I finally had more runway between a stimulus and a triggered reaction.

Before, it was as if I had been living on simmer. So, of course, it didn’t take much for me to boil.

Many women in medicine live there too; highly capable, deeply committed, and quietly operating with a nervous system that has learned to stay on alert.

When we are in a fight-or-flight state, our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning and high-level thinking, begins to go offline. That’s when the regrettable reaction slips out before we’ve had a chance to think.

When my nervous system was constantly simmering, there was simply no time to see what was happening before it was too late.

Now, when the first bubbles of a reaction begin to appear, I can see them.

That moment, the time between the first bubbles and the full boil, is the pause I could never access before calming my nervous system.

Medicine, and really the modern world, does a lot to pull us into sympathetic overdrive. Which means it often takes an equal and opposite effort to keep ourselves grounded in a calm, parasympathetic state.

For me, that means daily practices that support nervous system regulation: meditation, breathwork, mindfulness, EFT tapping, yoga.

I think of these practices like prophylaxis. They help prevent my nervous system from living on simmer.

But no matter how calm we become, life will still turn up the heat.

In those moments, we return to the same tools, breathing, grounding, tapping, to help turn the heat down and move through the moment without boiling over. And even if a reactive response does occur, these same practices can help the nervous system return to calm, and the prefrontal cortex come back online.

Creating the Space Between Trigger and Reaction

Once the nervous system settles, the pause between stimulus and response becomes available. And this is where the real magic begins.

In the past, if I had any awareness of what was happening, I would immediately become upset with myself. My inner dialogue sounded something like this: I should know better. Why does this still happen to me? I’ll never move past this.

That inner critic only amplified the problem, as resistance so often does. Instead of creating space, it tightened the spiral.

Things began to shift when I learned to turn toward what I was feeling and meet it with compassion. When I did that, something surprising happened. The reaction softened. I could become responsive rather than reactive.

Instead of criticism, my inner voice might say something like: I see that you’re upset. You’re frustrated that no one is listening to you. Of course that hurts. And then it asks a different kind of question: What do you need right now?

The real choice in these moments is whether to turn toward yourself with compassion or turn away from your feelings. Turning toward allows the emotion to move through you. It softens the intensity and creates space for a wiser response to emerge.

Learning to notice that you are triggered, recognize that your nervous system is in a reactive state, actively bring your parasympathetic system back online, and meet yourself with compassion is not easy. But with practice, it becomes possible. And over time, it becomes a new way of moving through the world.

When a Trigger Points to Something Older

After the moment has passed and you are back to calm, and your pre-frontal cortex is back in the saddle, it can be helpful to reflect on what was triggered. These reactions are rarely only about what is happening in front of us. Often they are echoes of something older.

Being triggered is a bit like someone poking a finger into an unhealed wound. Of course it hurts.

Sometimes the wound is tied to a specific experience from the past. Other times it’s more subtle—a sense that something essential was missing.

Turning Toward the Younger Part of Yourself

This is where another step of healing begins: turning toward that younger part of yourself with compassion. It may feel strange at first, but that wounded part of you often needs something very simple, reassurance.

She needs to hear that you are here now. That she is safe. That she is loved.

This kind of inner work takes practice. But it is possible. And it changes everything about how you move through difficult moments.

Reflection

So I’ll leave you with a few questions for reflection:

Where in your life are you living at a simmer?
Where might you pause long enough to notice the first bubbles rising?
And where could you turn toward yourself with curiosity, compassion, and care?