Email sender's remorse - the WORST time to send an email
Today is already shaping up to be ‘one of those days’. You feel like going back to bed and the day has only just begun.
The wi-fi technician arrived early so you had to skip your morning routine.
Your mum has already called twice because she can’t work out how to get her groceries delivered.
Your kids apparently can’t make a bowl of cereal on their own and still haven’t worked out that Daddy also has the power to make food appear on the table.
And the dog keeps looking wistfully over at his leash hanging on its hook on the wall.
You need to wash your hair because, let’s face it, it’s gross, but you can’t be bothered because you’ll never get to work if you do it now. So, you grumpily turn on your laptop and start to work, but you can’t drown out the nagging voice telling you that you still haven’t eaten breakfast. You know you should eat, but it just feels like another thing on a long list of things you should have done.
So, you ignore the rumble in your belly and keep on typing.
A smile starts to spread tentatively across your face as you feel the flow activate within you, but it’s abruptly turned into a frown by the ping of an annoying email. It’s that client – you know the one – wanting to confirm for the umpteenth time when their next appointment is. Never mind the plethora of automated reminders designed to keep their panic from popping up.
You start to feel a bit panicky yourself and wonder if panic is contagious. It must be, if your body suddenly becomes tense without explanation. A sudden urge erupts, a need to create a boundary against this impertinent interruption. You’re past the ‘nice to be needed’ phase of your life and very much in the midst of the ‘why can’t anyone do anything for themselves?’ phase.
Grumbling, you type the email, feeling your jaw tightening and teeth clenching as your fingers bash out your message. ‘At least my keyboard doesn’t have a sulk when it doesn’t get its way’, you mutter, recalling your latest interaction with your teenage daughter. You find yourself replaying that conversation in your head and wondering what you could have said without making things worse. You said nothing, of course. You just held it in. It’s easier that way.
Coming back into the moment, you bash the keys a little harder. Your laptop doesn’t protest as you huff and puff your way through typing the email. You race through to the finish and let out a sigh – not of relief, because you don’t feel any relief at all. Your body is still super tense with the pent-up energy you thought would be discharged by completing the email. You HAVE TO send the email RIGHT NOW.
So, you hit ‘Send’ and expect the intensity in your body to release. You really, really need to relieve some of the pressure so you can breathe. But after you send the email and get the all-too-short endorphin rush, you find yourself reading it over and over again, not realising that you’re waiting for some kind of resolution.
“What am I waiting for?”
You think you’re waiting for a reply, but what you’re actually waiting for is the release of enough pent-up energy, so you feel able to move on.
When your survival physiology switches on, your logical brain switches off – it’s a biological fact.
The part of your brain that is capable of thinking, assessing, analysing, and making logical decisions is ‘offline’. There is no ‘space’ in your nervous system for sensible decision-making because it is full of energy mobilizing you to take action and protect yourself.
Without your logical brain, you’re reflexively acting from your instinctual animal brain. The only thing your animal brain can focus on coming back to a state of equilibrium. Because if the intensity inside escalates instead of deactivates, from the point of view of your dysregulated nervous system, it could become a survival concern and trigger a biologically pre-programmed cascade of automatic nervous system responses to protect you.
Most people confuse ‘nervous system responses’ with the emotions they’re experiencing. The thing is, a nervous system response is actually a sensation in your body which microseconds later creates an emotional response, which then reaches your mind for interpretation. A true nervous system response could feel like:
your heart racing wildly
your blood draining from your face
your breath catching
moving your hand distractedly
your feet moving on their own
After the seventeenth time reading your email, you realise there’s a typo. You didn’t see it before but it’s blatantly obvious now. Because enough time has passed to give your nervous system a chance to calm down, your brain starts to clear and you can see what was missing during your frenzied attempt to dispel the energy. Reading and re-reading is a natural reflex to fill the time your body needs for your nervous system to come back to balance and re-regulate.
“But why couldn’t I just chill out and reply later?”
Good question. You wanted to make a boundary but because the very idea of doing that causes all sorts of uncomfortable sensations in your body (which you may not even be aware of), your pre-programmed physiological response is to sort the situation out as quickly as possible. This means you don’t have to keep feeling those icky sensations that are starting to appeal to your inner critic, which is now kindly pointing out all the mistakes you made in your email and reminding your unconscious that it’s selfish to make boundaries.
This cycle of ‘sensation-rumination-blame’ (and eventually ‘shame’) can cause you to feel very stuck, yet put you in hyperdrive because you’ve generated enough energy in your body through your reaction to the email to make you feel like can (survival response) and even need to (mind’s interpretation) get out of your predicament. It’s like pressing the brake and accelerator at the same time – you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re not actually getting anywhere. This causes a heap of unnecessary and unhelpful tasks to appear on your to-do list, so you feel like you’re taking some action in your business (but you’re inadvertently de-prioritising what would actually help your business).
“So, what was really happening?”
The reason you HAD to send that email is a nervous system capacity issue. Giving yourself time for reading, reviewing, and considering your email – even coming back to it with a calm mind – wasn’t possible in the moment because your nervous system had no extra space. It felt an urgent need to create some space. Without space, you can’t process or integrate your experiences. Even ordinary, everyday, every moment experiences can’t be processed or integrated, let alone traumatic ones.
There are some simple things you can do to start creating space and training the nervous system:
Breathe with your body so that your body can feel your presence
Breathe into your body to connect with your inner experience and become aware of the sensations within your body
Ensure you start your inner connection with the sensations that feel more comfortable (at least neutral) and easier to be with
Techniques like these help to expand your nervous system capacity by supporting you to stay present with the emotional and/or physiological charge throughout the entire cycle of ‘activation and deactivation’ so you can make contact with and process the trauma bound up with the sensations you’re feeling. If you can do that, you can meet your current experience and not have past traumatic experiences flood your system and affect your ability to respond to the present situation.
Final Words (TL;DR)
It’s important to understand that not having enough capacity might be caused by trauma, but it doesn’t have to be. Trauma or no, when you find yourself responding in unusual (for you) ways, it means your nervous system is too full to process and you are dealing with nervous system dysregulation. The knock-on effect of being too full is that you can’t stay present to the activation in your nervous system. Unless you create some space in your nervous system, you won’t be able to confidently and consistently take level-headed and aligned actions in your business.
Read more about your nervous system here
Free Resource
It's not always easy to differentiate working with emotions vs. working with the nervous system. Translating your body's experience into something your mind understands doesn't need foreign language skills, but an aptitude for music or maths.
That's because your nervous system is not linear like your left brain, it sees connections everywhere.
I've created a free Vocabulary of Sensations sheet to help guide your understanding and process.