What if Feeling Calm Isn't the Goal?

I might be dating myself, but do you remember when the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was everywhere and on every THING? Mugs, tea towels, posters, hats, T-shirts and more. You couldn’t walk through a gift shop without seeing some play on the slogan.

The original motivational poster was designed at the start of WWII to raise the morale of the British public in the event of air attacks. While millions of copies were printed, it wasn’t rolled out as a public campaign and was nearly forgotten until a copy was found at a bookstore in England in 2000. (If any of you are history buffs and I’ve gotten some of this wrong, apologies!)

The poster evoked a sense of self-reliance and fortitude in the face of adversity. A sense of resilience during tough times.

Which sounds great… in theory. That sentiment is somewhat misguided. Air raid sirens blaring, bombs falling. Just stay calm. Business as usual.

Why do I bring this up? Because calm is one of the things many of my clients crave when we start working together. They want calm. They want confidence. They want clarity.

‘I just want to feel calm’

Those of us who have experienced overwhelm firsthand CRAVE calm. It’s one of the most common things people say they want. It’s an antidote to the noise and to the sense that life is unmanageable and unsustainable.

Some relief from the hum.

I understand it completely. Because I’ve been there, and I wanted it just as much as they do.

AND, I want to say something that might sound strange coming from me.

Calm isn’t the goal.

What I did when I wanted calm

About a decade ago, I came out of a long stretch of anxiety. It wasn’t just a bad week. It was a prolonged episode… the kind that requires rearranging life.

During this time, and immediately after, I craved calm the way you crave water. I needed it.

So I built my whole life around getting it.

Daily meditation. Journaling every morning. Yoga, pranayama, the whole toolkit I already knew and loved. There’s a “peaceful piano” playlist on Spotify that I had playing on repeat. I am not exaggerating when I say I knew the track order.

And when I got into a car (a big trigger for me at that time), I would immediately grab my phone and start scrolling through social media. I didn’t read what I was looking at. I just needed my energy to be focused out there rather than on any possible discomfort in here.

And it worked, in the way that these things do. Calm is a lovely place to be. It’s safe.

But it was also an escape. Because underneath the yoga and the peaceful music was a body that was avoiding feeling ANYTHING.

For me, during that time, not calm felt dangerous. And I wanted to avoid danger. My nervous system had been dysregulated for so long that anything slightly activating (aka something that kicked up my fight-or-flight response) felt like it could topple me all over again.

Why? Because I didn’t trust that I could get out of that fight-or-flight state. If something rattled me, if I lost my footing, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to find my way back to steady. So the only safe strategy was to never lose it in the first place.

I did everything I could to 'Keep Calm and Carry On.'

I started making decisions that avoided discomfort. I controlled for the unknown wherever I could. I managed other people’s emotions so that their weather wouldn’t become my weather. Anything that might throw me off needed to be handled, smoothed, anticipated.

From the outside, it probably looked like wellness and growth. But on the inside, it was a small life that felt unsustainable and NOT enjoyable.

Building agility

I believe that the point of working with and supporting our nervous system isn’t about feeling calm through everything that comes at you. The point is to trust that when the stress comes, you can feel the discomfort AND know that you’ll be okay. The point is being agile.

That means recognizing a real stressor and mobilizing against it. It means letting your system work how it’s designed to. It also means recognizing what isn’t a threat, and staying engaged and present with your experience instead of bracing or shutting down.

Being able to distinguish between a real threat and a perceived one is everything. Yet it’s hard to tell them apart when you’ve built a life that avoids both.

Agility rests on trust. Inner trust that you have the resources to support yourself if and when stress starts to feel like too much.

That was the piece I was missing. I wasn’t chasing calm because calm is so wonderful. I was chasing it because I didn’t believe I could come back from anything else.

When you trust that you can come back, you stop needing to avoid the leaving.

Stress isn’t your enemy

The discourse has been changing, but we still talk about stress like it’s something to eliminate. And I agree, to a point. But remember that your stress response is a motivator and a protector. It’s what gets you out of bed for what matters, what sharpens you before the hard conversation, what moves you out of the way of oncoming traffic.

Your nervous system is meant to cycle up and down throughout the day. This is by design. When we focus on agility, we focus not on staying calm but on being able to come back to a place of calm, grounded presence when the threat has gone. It’s about being able to move out of your window of tolerance when something calls for it, and to find your way back in when it’s done.

How this shows up with my clients

When people come to me wanting calm, this is usually where we end up instead:

• Building awareness of how and why you react in the stressful moments of your day.

• Recognizing the protective value in your reactions and patterns. Seeing that the nervous system is doing a very important job.

• Understanding the stories you tell yourself that turn up the volume on your stress response, without judging or blaming yourself.

• Creating informed, personalized practices for moments when stress becomes chronic, and you’re stuck teetering towards overwhelm.

• Connecting to a bigger vision of the life you want, so that when your focus narrows to the thing in front of you, there’s still a tether to what’s possible.

So it’s not about staying calm. It’s about staying on the path of a life you choose, and seeing the discomfort of stress as simply something to notice and get curious about.

. . .

For what it’s worth, I still love that peaceful piano playlist. I still meditate and journal most mornings. These weren’t the problem. The problem was that I was holding onto them like life rafts, trying to save myself from the struggle of being alive, loving others, and exploring new things.

What used to feel like danger and impending failure now feels like information that I can work with. It’s still uncomfortable, but it doesn’t stop me the way it did in the past.

With love, Beth

PS. If you recognize yourself in my words… the managing, the protecting, the low hum of bracing… that’s often when a 90-minute Mapping Session is most supportive. We look at how stress shows up in your body and behavior patterns, what it’s been costing you, and how you might disrupt the cycle. You can find more information here.