Edge Note: Why does chaos feel like home?

Notes from the Edge

Host Lisa Lacy explores why individuals accustomed to long-term crisis often find peace unsettling or even suspicious. She discusses how hyp

Key takeaways

• Hypervigilance often presents as highly valued traits like being 'prepared,' 'driven,' or 'caring.'
• The nervous system may interpret a lack of conflict as the 'silence before something happens' rather than true safety.

Main topics

• Trauma and hypervigilance
• Nervous system regulation

Notable quotes

Competence became armor and camouflage.

Conclusion

The episode provides a roadmap for moving from reactive survival to in

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the Edge. Speaker 1 (0:34) Have you ever noticed that when life gets finally quiet, you don't always relax? Sometimes you get restless. Welcome to Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Speaker 1 (0:52) Sometimes you get restless and check your phone. You replay a conversation. You scan the people around you. You start thinking about what could go wrong next. And sometimes if we are really willing to tell the truth, we may even create a little chaos because peace feels stranger than crisis ever did. That is what I want to talk about today. Why does chaos feel like home? Not because you love suffering. Not because you are dramatic. Not because you secretly want your life to fall apart. Sometimes chaos feels like home because your body learned the language of emergency long before it learned the language of safety. I know this one personally. I spent years being the person who could handle things. I built a career. I taught, led, traveled, carried responsibilities, solved everybody else's problems, managed people, managed emotions, met deadlines, handled crisis, kept moving. I became very good at walking into a room looking composed while a hundred things were happening behind the scenes. competence became armor and camouflage, productivity became a way to stay ahead of what might come next, being useful felt safe, being needed felt familiar, and familiar is powerful because our body does not always choose what is healthy. It often chooses what it knows. We talk about healing as though safety is automatically going to feel wonderful when it arrives. Like years of stress go away and we finally get a calm life and immediately say, thank you, I can relax now. Except sometimes you can't. Sometimes nothing is wrong and your body doesn't believe it. The house is quiet. Nobody is angry. The phone isn't ringing. There's no emergency to solve. And instead of feeling peaceful, you feel exposed. Your brain starts asking, what am I missing? What's about to happen? Who needs me? What did I forget? You think about that conversation from two days ago. That can be hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is way beyond worrying. It is your system staying intensely alert for a possible threat, sometimes before your conscious mind has even decided there is one. It can look like watching