Wired, Restless, and Stuck in Your Head? Here's Why

Sensitive nervous systems feel stress and overwhelm more intensely than most — but many of us try to think, talk, or “logic” our way out of it without realizing our body isn’t listening that way.

In this episode, we explore what happens inside highly attuned, intuitive nervous systems when your body is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn — and why insight alone often fails to calm a pent-up, restless system.

You’ll learn:
✨ Why your body prioritizes protection over relaxation — and what that means for your stress and energy
✨ The science of bottom-up regulation: why your hands can calm your nervous system faster than your brain
✨ How art, movement, and creative expression release tension and signal safety to the vagus nerve
✨ How to choose the right kind of creative practice for your nervous system right now
✨ Simple ways to use drawing, painting, clay, dance, or messy, playful art as regulation tools

If you’ve ever felt wired, restless, or “stuck in your head” — you’re not imagining it.
Your nervous system is trying to tell you something.
This episode will show you how to work with your body’s natural signals instead of forcing calm through willpower.

✨ For deeper nervous system regulation & creative inner work:
Explore BodyScan sample sessions and other offerings at bodywhisperhealing.com/services

Check out more from Amanda:
Website: https://bodywhisperhealing.com

Instagram: /amanda.g.smith
Facebook: /body.whisper.healing
LinkedIn: /amanda-ritchie-smith
Pinterest: https://pin.it/1hpo4iKvD

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to discover how your high-performance mindset might be keeping your nervous system in overdrive: https://gutsychickquiz.com

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Watch Cosmic Body Shenanigans Podcast on YouTube!

Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your type A, high achieving mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Feeling wired, restless, and unable to calm down
• 3:45 Why insight, talking, and journaling don’t regulate the body
• 7:20 Bottom-up regulation and why your hands matter
• 11:01 Safety vs calm and how the nervous system chooses protection
• 15:10 Using art and drawing to read nervous system signals
• 24:10 What’s happening neurologically when you create
• 30:10 Choosing the right kind of art for your stress state

Transcript

0:00

Have you ever felt completely pent up, wired, restless, maybe overthinking everything, but you don't know how to relax without spilling your guts to someone or doom scrolling, journaling, or trying to think your way out of it on a loop? Some stress doesn't live in language. It lives in your nervous system and no amount of insight or talking can regulate a body. that doesn't feel safe yet. In this episode, I'm going to explain what's happening neurologically when your body can't chill out. Why insight doesn't create regulation and how there's an easy way to shift your nervous system into rest digest without words, without interpretation and without emotional processing. Doesn't that sound nice? By the end, you'll understand why using your hands, not your brain, is one of the fastest ways to signal safety to your nervous system and why this works even if you don't consider yourself creative. So what's happening in your body when you can't calm down? Nothing is quote unquote wrong when you can't calm down. Your system is doing its job. First, the brain is prioritizing safety over calm. The nervous system is detecting threat uncertainty. Real, anticipated, remembered, all of those things can exist at the same time. And this comes from chronic stress. It comes from emotional load. It comes from unprocessed experiences. And it comes from environmental or relational pressure. The body chooses protection over relaxation. We do a top-down calming. and it doesn't work. We try to use logic and reasoning and perspective and your prefrontal cortex goes partially offline. This is why you can't understand what's happening but still feel wired. Insight doesn't translate into relief. Talking, journaling or thinking makes it way worse. This isn't failure, it's biology. It's the way we're wired. The systemic... excuse me, sympathetic nervous system stays activated. The body remains in that fight, flight, fawn, or freeze state and oscillates between all of those sometimes. It makes us irritable, builds tension, creates urgency. We become restless, anxiety spikes, and we start overdoing. Energy's mobilized, but has nowhere to go. This creates the feeling of being pent up, buzzing around edge. So if you've been there, you get this. vagus nerve isn't getting enough safety signals. Calm requires signals of safety, not command. You can't demand that your body feels safe. You have to give it cues to get there. And when safety cues are missing, your breath stays shallow, muscles stay braced, attention stays hyper-focused. and you can't think your way into vagal tone. When the body starts looking for the bottom up strategy, we finally see exit. The nervous system wants movement. It wants sensory input that helps it to go into a calm state. It wants rhythm and expression. This is why people instinctively pace, fidget, doodle, tear paper, squeeze objects. All of those things are that releasing. that natural instinct to release. So it's not that you're bad at calming down. And this is what gets me, especially when I see friends make a post on Facebook. What do you do to calm yourself down when you have a racing mind? I just recently saw this and I was like, I gotta do a podcast on this one. Your body just hasn't been given the right doorway yet. That's really what it boils down to. So. The way that we're going to move our body in this particular episode, this prompt is about getting your hands involved. And this is something that I learned first from Kirk Duncan from Three Key Elements. He gave us a simple prompt during a conference. It was, draw yourself, get out a piece of paper and draw yourself. That simple. And we knew that this drawing would interpret things, but we weren't given any more direction than that. And that's what I loved about this. And I've done this with some of my clients just to see if they can get themselves one out of this fight flight nervous system and to get them to show themselves within the art and the interpretation of the art what's going on. just no stick figures were an option. So he did give us that tidbit. You can draw stick figures. If you cannot draw at all, draw a stick figure. And even that, when people started to resist wanting to do the art, tells us something about what's going on in our nervous system. What showed up on my page when I did this activity, not to give too much away, but what showed up on my page was a bust headshot of me. And it was probably one of the best drawings of myself that I felt I'd ever done. And it was very lightly drawn on the paper. And. from there when everybody was finished and we had a timeline. We had 10 minutes to make this drawing. know, stick figures again, we're totally okay. He prompted us through interpretation of our drawing. And I'm gonna get into that in a little bit. So hold tight and think about what you would draw if you were given the prompt to get out a piece of paper and draw yourself. Think about it. The thing was the art wasn't predictive of what was going to happen. It was descriptive of what was going on in my body. The body showed the present moment truth. Not who I am, but what my body was asking for. And that's the beauty of this kind of therapy, if you will. You don't have to be a good artist. I want to stress this. Stick figures were still giving us data. Stick figures still showed the pressure of your pencil or pen on the paper, the space that you consumed on the page, the placement of objects on the page, and the movement on the page. Your nervous system doesn't care. about your talent. It cares about your expression. Perfectionism and self judgment are a piece of that data. Resistance itself is informative. So if you're sitting there going, I can't do this, I'm not an artist, this isn't in my wheelhouse. That's information for you to glean. If you have a nervous system, you can do art. So what happens neurologically? When you create with your hands, you're regulating from the bottom up. Your parasympathetic nervous system comes online and your vagus nerve gets support through rhythm, movement and focus. Your prefrontal cortex softens, that front part of your brain that doesn't develop until you're about 25 to 27 years old. It gets less. in the overthinking, looping thoughts and less into the narrative control. It's especially helpful for high achieving analyticals like most of my listeners, like me. Then we get limbic system expression. Your emotions move without needing explanation. So this is where we get to stop talking about how we feel or what happened to us. And we get to move into that movement practice and stored stress gets an outlet. Your sensory motor integration, your hands, eyes movement, that's the whole bottom up regulation piece. It's so nice. if you're an athlete to think about it from that perspective as well. And I will eventually do an episode around why that type of movement as an athlete is super beneficial to the nervous system too. So the nervous system pieces that are being supported here, the parasympathetic nervous system. So that's your rest digest nervous system, your vagus nerve, ventral vagal pathway and your sympathetic discharge without suppression. Beautiful, beautiful thing. So what we see there is art invites slower rhythm, repetition and presence. It signals safety without forcing any sort of relaxation. I hand coordination, curiosity, and play support social engagement and regulation as well. Gentle focus increases vagal tone over time. And strong strokes, pressures, or tearing the paper make for a healthy stress release. And it allows fight flight energy to move through instead of getting stuck. Regulation happens without cognitive effort. No thinky thinky here. And this is why it's so great for those of us who are over-thinkers that could have issues dropping into our feels when we're in that over-processing, over-thinking place, getting overly analytical. The body feels safe enough to tell the truth. That's the beauty of this kind of work. And insight follows regulation, not the other way around. Here's the breakdown on the drawing. So if you have crowding or lack of space on the paper, so my headshot, bust up headshot, took up the entire page. There was a little bit of room on either side of my head. That's sympathetic activation. Feeling compressed, overwhelmed. or over-responsible. Very light lines. This was another thing that I did on this drawing. Very light lines or disappearing images. So I was also missing things like my ears, my hair, like I see myself in the video. My hair is over my ears some of the time or sometimes I'll tuck it back and you can see my ears, but my ears were missing. So very light lines is dorsal vagal tendencies. Back body, dorsal vagal. ah It's shut down, freeze, low energy, self-minimization. And then what Kirk explained to us was if your ears were missing, then you might have some issues hearing, receiving information through auditory, or... You might overemphasize, it might be the opposite, and you're using your ears mostly and not the rest of your senses. And that's if you drew big ears proportionally to the rest of your body. uh If you were winking, you see things through one eye over the other. If you create a very small nose, so that goes back to the lack of space and crowding, minimizing. your olfactory. So those were just some of the things. If you didn't draw feet, so mine was from the chest up, if you didn't draw your feet or your hands, you're ignoring this portion of your body. So it went back to the fact that I was very heady. I operated in the world at that time from the cerebral brain space. Heavy pressure. So if you had a tendency to draw very dark lines or sharp edges on your body, which if you think about looking at your body, how many sharp edges do we have? Maybe the corners of our eyes, which I have an hair in my eye right now. Maybe our eyebrows have some sharp shape to them. The corners of our lips, that's probably the only sharp edges that we have. The rest are our external self. Doesn't have a whole lot of sharp edges. And then heavy pressure as you draw means mobilized stress. And it means anger, urgency, and boundary needs. Repetition and patterns. So if you had a shirt on and it had stripes on it and you drew that as part of your drawing. Yes, you might have been drawing the shirt you were wearing, but why did you pick that shirt in the first place? How are you showing up? So repetition and patterns is self-soothing attempts, desire for predictability and safety. So you were searching for it in your clothing. You were searching for it in the way you drew yourself. And then large use of space and fluid movements meant ventral vagal availability, which is where we get that vagal tone increase. want the higher vagal tone increase. And then capacity, curiosity, and regulation. So someone who used up the space and made maybe your arms flowing instead of straight down by your sides. shows that you have higher capacity, more curiosity and regulation. So, so beautiful. No image is bad or wrong. It just is. It's just what your nervous system is sharing with us. It's not what's broken. Regulation comes from responding to the message, not judging it. And I can't stress that one enough. When I drew this picture, I was really proud of it. And then when I got the information, oh, you didn't include your entire body, I wasn't going, my gosh, I completely deny my body, judge, judge, judge. I went into, I really need to get more embodied. I need to get back to working out. At that time, I wasn't working out nearly as much as I wanted to. I need to add in more flowing movements to my day. And it's just information. My favorite personal quote, my own quote is, it's neither bad nor good, it's just data. If you can treat things like that, things get a whole lot easier. So this was just a drawing with Kirk and There are obviously other forms of art out there. And if you are someone who has gotten pent up and is feeling really wired right now, really having a hard time letting the looping thoughts go, I highly, highly, highly encourage you to get out into the world, find an art class, and treat it like therapy. Treat it like I'm gonna do the art and then afterward, I'll come back to this episode and figure out the interpretation of what my nervous system was saying at that time. different kinds of arts out there, painting classes, those seem to be unbelievably popular. Acrylic painting, watercolor painting, both some of my favorites. You can go to a drawing course, usually found at a rec center or an art studio. ah There's also ceramic painting, so you can pick out a piece of ceramic and paint it and then they'll glaze it for you. There's also glass art where you put a glass mosaic together and then they'll fire it for you as well. Glass blowing, if you can find a glass blowing class, my gosh, that. involves the breath as well as this very, very fluid movement practice and learning about fire. There's something about humans interacting with fire in this way that is just magical. Pottery classes or clay mold classes where you actually throw the clay on a wheel and turn it into a pot or a bowl or something like that or molding clay with your hands into different shapes, statues. There are so many options out there. Find one. If you live in a rural area, some of the paint classes will actually deliver ship stuff to you. for a class and you can do it online if you're stuck in your home right now because it's unbelievably cold outside and maybe snowed if you're in Texas. So how do we select what kind of art we do now that we know that there's a bunch of options? Well, you base it on your current stress load, your trauma history, your capacity versus your overwhelm, and whether your nervous system needs discharge. containment, expansion, or safety. Some highly activated anxious systems need contained art. So this might look like creating with your hands a molded structure. Or it might look like structured prompts like a painting, acrylic painting class. where they're telling you, okay, we're gonna do the sky first and then we'll do the ground and then we'll do between and then build the tree. So they're giving you prompts to move through it. Another really, really great one that I didn't mention before was creating a mandala. And you can do that with glass art, you could do that with drawing, you could do that with painting. But a mandala is a very specific geometric shape and it repeats over and over and over again. And that repeating pattern creates that safety that a highly activated, anxious system needs. If you are shut down or you have a collapsed system, you need expression, movement-based art. Another form of art I didn't mention before would be dance. Looking at your rec centers for dance classes, looking at dance studios for dance classes, adult dance classes are Sometimes harder to find, but you'll notice the trend. We're looking at dance classes that look like country line dancing, where you repeat the movements over and over and it flows. um Two-stepping, ah swing, both East and West Coast swing. It's more rare to find things. Well, I take that back. There's tap dance class at my rec center that I love watching the ladies do. Very rare to see men in a tap dance class. It's less rare to see like jazz or... I can't think of the other types of movements, ballet for adults. Those are more rare. So just know that type of expression helps you to open up this collapsed system. The perfectionistic system. Been there. You need messy, non-dominant hand work. Non-dominant hand. So I'm right handed most of the time. I do some things left handed. Doing things with both hands for me gets real fun. So if you can imagine taking both hands and drawing. or trying to draw in opposite patterns. This is an art that I have some of my clients do so that they can do the hand-eye coordination piece of it, but then also they're drawing opposites at the same time. And then non-dominant hand work, sometimes that looks like you're writing a story with your non-dominant hand. That is a form of art, trust me. And it does look messy in the beginning. Some things take practice, but... Looking for messier arts? That could look like a drum circle. That could look like going outside and playing in the mud with your kids, making mud pies. That is a very messy form. My best friend got me a book. See if I can see it. It is an art book. yeah, I found it. book is called Mess, the Manual of Accidents and Mistakes by Kerry Smith, creator of Wreck This Journal. And let me tell you, some of the prompts in here like rip up this page. The page that I can't open was go get syrup and pour it on the page. This thing, I mean, and you can see I've gotten maybe halfway through it. quarter of the way through it. Yeah, about a quarter of the way through it. This is art. This is as simple as it gets for those of you who are perfectionists. And then there's the over controlled systems. You put yourself in a box. You need to work with intuition and choice led creation. So this might be the glass blowing or create your own art. kind of class, not one where you're being instructed today you're doing this type of painting. You need to allow your intuition to lead and you can go to those kind of art classes and you know, kind of follow what's going on, but then go rogue. I've done that before. I've done a painting, an acrylic painting, one of my first actually, it was a really bad idea, but I really, really needed to tap into that intuitive side of me to see what comes out because I was in that over controlled place. Everything around me needed to be controlled. So if that resonates for you, then that kind of intuitive art, even though you're at a structured art center, might mean you're going rogue on what that teacher's saying. And most art teachers, most art classes, they aren't gonna restrict you. They aren't gonna be like, you can't do that unless it's not safe for you. And then obviously, they'll put bounds around it so you know where to be and how to be safe. Particularly if we're dealing with fire, firing any sort of ceramics, glassware, making glass blowing. There's gonna be some rules around what you can do there. But you can also go rogue. The medium is the medicine. This is the takeaway. And the wrong art at the wrong time can actually be dysregulating. So please know that. And just like I just said, you can take a structured art class and go rogue, but you know, give the teacher a heads up. Like I'm probably not going to follow all your rules. Is that okay? And if it's not, see if you can get a refund, walk out. That's honoring what your body needs. I have prompted my clients on several occasions when they have gotten into that heady, heady space, because a lot of my clients are intellectuals. are highly intelligent people and they tend toward the perfectionism. They tend toward a dysregulated nervous system in the looping thinking. So I tend to give them either draw me a picture of yourself, no other instructions. And then they start asking a billion questions. Or I have them draw an abstract picture. And if you know what abstract art is, it's anything. It's a choose your own adventure. It doesn't matter how it turns out, what it looks like. And every time after they're done and they send me a picture of what they did, my very next question is, how do you feel? Almost every single time, they feel free. They have found a level of freedom in their body, in their brain, in their thought processes, in how they move. They found freedom. That's the goal. That's always the goal first. And then we go into the interpretation of the art. Some of the art I've received back, drawings. I have definitely received several drawings where They have an 8 by 11 piece of paper and they drew a little itty bitty stick figure off to one side. That's happened actually several times. I have had art where I told them go make an abstract piece and they will go paint and they'll come back and tell me their interpretation of what this particular line or squiggle or color meant to them, which frees them even more. And then I've had people who drew an egg and then they sectioned off the egg and then colored it in and they colored it with some very bold colors which spoke to that heavy line movement which for them it was mobilized stress. They needed to mobilize it. They needed to move it. and they had anger, urgency, or boundary needs. All three of those actually at the same time. I will post some of their art over this week, over this weekend, when they've told me it's totally okay for me to share it. I love the different kinds of art that have showed up and you can go and look at it and come back to this episode and... Look through what were they doing? What did their nervous system need? And it'll be anonymous. So you won't know who they are or male, female, nothing. You'll know nothing other than the interpretation of their art. You can go there now that you have this information. So what next? Go find yourself an art class. If you're feeling pent up, you're feeling tight. You're feeling wired. Your thoughts are looping. This isn't meant to be a hobby, though you can pick up hobbies that you maybe haven't been doing. I know for me, I've been itching to get back to knitting and it's that repetitive motion that mind numbing don't have to think motion and you know, that sounds like I'm making a scarf apparently. Or I can get headier into it and it'll be It's mostly the same repeating motion. And then I have to like count things, which my brain loves to do. So I really have to sit with that and see what does my nervous system need right now. And I might start with drawing a picture to see what my nervous system plops out on the page. This isn't about productivity. It's a regulation container. It's about getting your nervous system. calm back down. So choose the art based on what you need to release. Is it anger, frustration? Go for clay work, throwing, tearing paper like this mess book I showed you, sculpting. If you're anxious, go for watercolors, slow brush work, repetitive patterns like the mandala. If you're feeling grief right now, do a collage. Do mixed media, image layering. of some sort you can play in Canva they have a free version if you're feeling shut down movement based or large scale art you're looking at dance you're looking at big paintings so that you have to move your body you're looking at glass blowing and then local art studios community centers trauma-informed art therapists expressive art workshops Somatic or wellness spaces offering creative classes. That's where you can find them. And I highly encourage you for curiosity over commitment. Again, it's not a hobby you're creating. You're not trying to be productive. Get curious. The body's intelligent. Expression is regulation. Use it. Insight comes from the safety in the art. What do your hands want to do next? What does your body want you to create? Ask it.