Not Every Email Deserves Access to Your Nervous System
On persistence, manufactured urgency and learning to stop mistaking emotional pressure for importance.
A message landed in my inbox this morning from someone who, for a long time, had the ability to completely change the emotional direction of my day.
The kind of person where you see the name first and your body reacts before your brain catches up properly. Tight chest. Knotted stomach. Adrenaline. That instant feeling that something uninvited has entered the room.
But weirdly, this time, I felt none of that.
I was at the office and Richard was out getting his car serviced. I read the message once, sat there for a minute and realised I was mostly just observing my own reaction because it felt so unfamiliar. Calm. Detached maybe. Not cold, just … clear.
I knew almost immediately what the email was. I mean, not the message itself necessarily, but the pattern underneath it. What it represented.
Some people have a way of treating boundaries like negotiations. Silence becomes something to push through rather than respect. No is interpreted as “not yet” instead of no. After enough years of dealing with certain personalities, you start recognising the rhythm of it long before anything dramatic actually happens.
The message itself was fairly benign on the surface, but both Richard and I instantly recognised it as an attempted reopening. A way back in. The start of a cycle we’ve lived through before and are not keen on repeating.
Years ago I would have responded immediately because I hate the feeling of unresolved tension. I think a lot of people do. There’s this instinct to smooth things over quickly, explain yourself properly, de-escalate and manage everyone’s emotions before things become uncomfortable.
Now I’m not so sure that instinct is always healthy because for me specifically, it overrides another instinct. The one that is telling me to run fast in the other direction.
Driving home afterwards I happened to be listening to The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker and it had landed almost perfectly on the chapter about persistence. One of those strange moments where life feels like it’s listening. Gently reinforcing something you already know somewhere underneath the self-doubt.
I began to realise how often we mistake persistence for importance. How many people create urgency simply because urgency gets attention. And how often I ignore my gut feeling.
Repeated contact.
Emotional hooks.
Forcing engagement.
Pushing past silence because eventually most people respond just to make the discomfort stop.
Years ago I would have interpreted that kind of persistence as sincerity. Or at least convinced myself I owed it more emotional energy than I actually did.
These days I’m much more interested in paying attention to what something feels like in my body rather than what someone is insisting with their words.
Because calm tells you things too.
And one of the strangest parts of today was realising that peace initially felt unfamiliar. Like I should be reacting harder. Perhaps I wasn’t taking it seriously enough because I wasn’t emotionally activated by it anymore.
But calm nervous systems make better decisions.
And silence is a boundary.
I think disengagement is sometimes the healthiest possible response and that’s what we chose.
Modern life has conditioned a lot of us to respond to whoever creates the most emotional noise, whether that’s in business, relationships, social media or just everyday life.
Everything feels urgent now.
Everyone demands access.
Everyone wants a response.
But not everything deserves one.
So from now on I’m focusing on paying very close attention to anything that tries to manufacture stress inside me. Most of the time, the healthiest thing I can do is simply not pick it up.
Not every email deserves access to your nervous system.
Richard and I spoke recently on Richly Told about manufactured stress, nervous systems and learning to stop reacting to every sense of urgency around us.
You can listen to the episode here: Ep 42: Stop Manufacturing Stress