If You've Been Waking Up Angry, Your Nervous System Might Be Trying to Tell You Something

Maybe you have a number for it by now, three hours, sometimes four. "It" being the window after you wake up where you already know not to trust yourself around the people you love . You have learned, through too many mornings of evidence, that something in you comes online before you do, and it does not care that your daughter is five years old and just wants to say good morning, and it does not care that your partner hasn't done anything wrong, and it especially does not care that somewhere underneath all of it, you are a person who is warm and patient and nothing like the version of yourself that shows up before ten a.m.

Some of you wake up and the rage is just there, fully formed, before a single thing has happened to justify it. Your blood is already at boiling point, your jaw is already tight, your body has already started bracing for a fight that hasn't started yet. Some of you find out later what you did, or how you acted later on after the rage has left, but a lot of the time you can't even remember what happened.

Then there is the grief underneath all of it, right? The quiet, private grief of knowing that you used to be different, or at least it felt that way; that you used to wake up patient, or someone people wanted to be around in the morning. You are not asking for much, just to be able to say good morning to your loved ones without losing it and to stop feeling like a stranger inside your own body the first few hours of the day. Anger is one of the most judged emotions we carry, but I want to offer you something different, and that is the possibility that your anger is not evidence that something is wrong with you, and that anger is necessary and a gift that we can work with. What is actually happening in those first hours of the morning has very little to do with who you are, and everything to do with what your nervous system has been carrying.

Your brain has an alarm system that triggers stress responses (fight, flight freeze, or fawn) called the amygdala (I call this your survivor brain). The only job it has is to scan for threat and respond with said stress response before the prefrontal cortex (I call this your thriving brain; it is your executive function hub) has even had a chance to weigh in. It is fast on purpose; it was designed that way because, in the context of human survival, a slow response to danger was a deadly one. The problem is that when your baseline stress has been elevated for long periods of time, your alarm system is starting from a place that is already activated before your eyes have opened, and the cortisol that naturally surges in the morning to help you wake up and face the day hits a system that is already running hot. So instead of feeling energized in the morning, you feel like something is about to go wrong, and the smallest thing confirms it.

Anger was never meant to be the villain in this story. Every emotion you have exists for a reason, and anger is no exception. Your nervous system is actually doing exactly what an overloaded nervous system is supposed to do! At its core, anger is a protector, and it arises when something you value feels threatened, when a boundary has been crossed, or when your nervous system is registering that something in your life is asking more of you than you have the capacity to give right now, and it is trying (in the only language it has available in the moment) to get your attention.

The trouble is that most of us were never taught to listen to anger that way. We were taught to manage it, to breathe through it, to count to ten, or to apologize for it, and so it never gets to tell you what it actually came to say. When anger (or, really any emotion that has been labled as "bad") is not met with curiosity, but rather with shame and suppression, it does not go anywhere. It accumulates instead and runs underneath everything, looking for a place to surface, and very often that place turns out to be six in the morning before you have had a chance to register anything else.

There is another misconception that gets handed out like common sense and repeated so often that most of us have internalized it as a personal failing when it does not work, and that is the idea that you should "think before you speak" when you are activated. When your amygdala has taken the wheel and your nervous system is in full protection mode, the prefrontal cortex is literally offline. You cannot think your way out of a stress response any more than you could solve a math problem while drowning. The capacity is simply not there, and every time you have tried and fallen short was because you were handed the wrong tool for the job.

Instead of thinking before you speak, I'll invite you to regulate before you speak, because regulating will help you think clearly.

Regulation means giving your nervous system something it can actually work with in that moment; something that bypasses the thinking brain entirely and speaks directly to the body, because the body is where the activation lives. When you feel that morning surge beginning, before it has run its course, reach for one of these first:

The physiological sigh is one of the most powerful tools available to you in real time: two sharp inhales through the nose followed by one long slow exhale through the mouth, repeated a few times. It offloads the carbon dioxide buildup that is keeping your heart rate elevated and your system in alarm, and it is the fastest known way to begin bringing the body out of a stress response.

Cold water on your face or wrists activates the "mammalian dive reflex": a hard-wired biological response that slows heart rate almost immediately, and it works even when nothing else feels like it can reach you.

If you have the space to move, shake your hands, your arms, your whole body if you can. Don't worry about looking silly! This is what mammals do instinctively after a threat has passed, and it is how the nervous system was designed to discharge adrenaline and signal to itself that the danger is over. We were taught to suppress that impulse. You are allowed to unlearn that.

One of the other most powerful things you can do, when you are ready, is to get a little bit curious about your emotions rather than afraid of them. In the middle of the storm is not the time, but when you have regulated, you can begin to ask some honest questions:

• What have I been tolerating that I do not actually have the capacity for?

• Where in my life have I been saying yes when every part of me wanted to say no?

• What have I been carrying alone that was never meant to be carried alone?

• What do I need that I have not allowed myself to ask for?

These are the questions your anger has been trying to walk you toward.

The work toward something different for you began the moment you decided to keep reading rather than keep wondering what is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you, and something has been trying to get your attention for a very long time, and you are finally in a position to hear it.

Emotions that go unnamed tend to stay loud. I have a free Feel Wheel Activity that can help you start identifying the layers beneath the anger, because what looks like rage on the surface is almost never the whole story. You can access that and more by visiting my mental wellness freebies page.

If you are ready to go deeper to understand your nervous system, work through what has been accumulating, and actually build the capacity to regulate before the morning gets away from you, I would love to work with you!

You can learn more by reading the FAQ's here.

You can book a free hour with me to get clarity around what the support of a life coach looks like by visiting my calendar here. 

Remember that you are inspiring, you are loved, keep going! I am cheering you on!

XOXO, Coach Coop