Why we self-sabotage peace and keep choosing chaos

Why do some of us keep choosing chaos over calm? 

In Snack Size Deep Dive 8 we explore why people who grew up in chaotic or emotionally unavailable environments often find drama familiar and peace uncomfortable. Learn how our nervous system can become addicted to chaos, how drama serves as emotional regulation, and why calm can feel suspicious, boring, or even anxiety-inducing.

This episode is about understanding patterns in ourselves and our relationships, recognising how trauma shapes our reactions, and learning how to sit with discomfort and grow. 

This episode includes:

• Introduction: Chaos vs Calm – Why the nervous system craves drama
• Why calm can feel uncomfortable and trigger anxiety
• Avoidance and discomfort
• Nervous system conditioning and hyper-vigilance
• Confusing intensity with intimacy and its impact on relationships
• Healing and self-awareness
• Recognising your own toxic patterns
• Self-sabotage and accountability: How we maintain chaos to feel safe

Self-Reflection Questions:

• What does calm bring up for you?
• How do you avoid being left alone with your thoughts?
• Are you able to sit in stillness without confusing peace with boredom?

Transcript

[00:00:00] If calm feels boring or unsafe to you, it's probably because your nervous system learnt chaos before a learned peace. 

Hello everyone. Welcome back. I am Tash, and this is things we say in therapies. Snack size, deep dives. This is snack size deep dive eight, I think. This is just a little snackable deep dive into a mental health topic to aid self-compassion and self-reflection. Learn how to sit in discomfort and hold ourselves accountable.

So

this episode is not about judging toxic behavior.

This is about understanding yourself more and recognizing patterns that keep repeating in yourself and in other people.

If you relate to this episode, you're not a bad person,

but you are responsible for your behavior once you recognize these patterns, and that is why I'm here. This [00:01:00] is uncomfortable on purpose, so let's call it like it is.

So let's get right into it. Most people don't consciously seek drama. drama distracts us from what we really feel. Those people who always seem to be in some sort of dramatic place in their life. There's always something happening. They're drawn to drama. They basically invite drama into their lives by hanging around certain people, things like that. People who seem like they don't really want to grow, and they're kind of just stuck in a place that they're clearly unhappy in.

Creating chaos on the outside for those people feels easier than dealing with what's on the inside.

Drama and chaos for these people feels familiar. Their nervous system feels safe in chaotic environments because it's what they're used to. I was exactly like this. I would always be making friends who weren't healthy for me. When I was unhealthy,

I was engaging in behaviors that [00:02:00] cause drama and chaos in my life, like drinking too much and hanging out with the wrong people. Because it was what I was used to because I grew up in chaotic environments.

Having a calm environment, when you're so used to chaos and drama, it feels empty at first. It feels boring.

The nervous system can't tell the difference between good excitement and bad excitement. It's just excited. It's just jumped up when drama happens, when we're so used to drama and the nervous system gets addicted and feels safe in whatever state, it's so used to being in, even if that state is harmful for you.

Being in a calm environment when you're so used to chaos, it leaves room for thought, leaves rooms for feelings, and it allows for self-awareness. People who actively involve themselves in chaos and drama avoid these things at all costs

because the pain or the trauma that they have [00:03:00] endured in their life is too much to deal with. It's too overwhelming.

And the bigger the pain, the bigger the trauma, the bigger the chaos, the bigger the drama in order to distract yourself from dealing with that pain.

The brutal truth is that calm environments force you to sit with yourself. There's nothing going on to deal with.

Many people haven't learnt how to safely sit with themselves in the discomfort of pain and difficult emotions.

I recently did an episode on how to tell the difference between a real mental health decline and normal feelings of discomfort

because I had never learnt . what normal discomfort felt like, and I couldn't tell the difference between feeling uncomfortable with sad or

hard emotions and my mental health declining again.

I'd never learned how to deal with it.

And normal discomfort is common, which causes people to avoid, avoid, avoid, because they can't deal with the difficult emotions.

So let's deep dive further into [00:04:00] why drama feels comfortable.

The first one is nervous system conditioning. Like I briefly mentioned before. If you grew up in houses or homes with emotional unavailability and lots of conflict, you may have developed hyper vigilance, which is having an overactive nervous system that constantly scans your environment for threats.

This could have caused you to develop reactive behaviors, intense anxiety, racing thoughts,

and therefore your nervous system learnt that when there's activation, when there's that excitement, that's not necessarily good for you. That is normal because it's so used to that state,

and therefore calm is suspicious and weird and uncomfortable because you're not used to it.

Initially, when you're so used to the chaos and drama, calm can trigger more anxiety because you're so not used to it. And this can cause you to subconsciously seek out problems so that [00:05:00] you can feel safe in the drama and chaos. Again, in that nervous system activation.

It causes a restlessness and an urge to create something to feel in control of your environment more. It sounds counterintuitive because drama and chaos typically is a less controllable environment than a calm environment. But because your nervous system is so used to the chaos, you feel in control when there's chaos and drama because you are so used to it.

I hope that makes sense.

Your body might feel uncomfortable in the calm because that calm may have also come with a feeling of danger, waiting for something to go wrong or something to blow up in the house where you grew up.

The second psychological concept I have is drama as emotional regulation

So you're essentially using drama as a distraction from what's going on in your head in yourself and your own emotions. It gives you something else to focus on [00:06:00] besides your own thoughts. It keeps you from feeling whatever feelings you're avoiding, emptiness or uncertainty.

It's kind of like being addicted to drugs.

You keep taking it because you're trying to avoid whatever pain or discomfort is going on in your life, and it numbs it. Some people seek out drama and chaos because it's a distraction and it numbs the background pain of whatever's going on inside you.

It suppresses it in order to help you feel safe.

People in these situations or people who do this, tend to confuse intensity with intimacy and chaos with connection, which is why people who grew up in such chaotic environments end up in toxic relationships or friendships because first of all, they're used to the chaos and the intense emotions that come along with toxic connections, but also because there's a lack of self-worth there and a lack of self-respect.

And so [00:07:00] you dunno what it's like to have a real healthy connection with somebody, and so you settle for less than you deserve.

Also the intense highs and lows of toxic relationships and connections they make You crave that euphoric feeling that you get in the intense highs. You know when people say, when it's good, it's great kind of thing, but when it's bad, it's really bad.

Therefore the drama and the chaos must continue in order for you to feel that amazing, euphoric high you get when things are good.

I have overstayed many, many, many friendships and relationships that weren't good for me because being treated poorly was what I was used to. I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I'm just trying to be real here. I chased the wrong kind of people because I grew up in toxic environments and I didn't know how to value myself and my time.

Bar some, what I felt with these people wasn't a genuine connection.

A lot of connections I have had were just [00:08:00] mutually using each other for comfort and security.

When you're dysregulated yourself, it's very difficult to maintain friendships with people who are regulated emotionally because there's a mismatch there with how you deal with things, how you talk to each other, being able to hold each other accountable and holding the right kind of empathy for each other.

I'm not sure if you've listened to Monday's episode about performative empathy, but I'm sure how you can see there would be a mismatch there if someone was a performative empathizer and someone who could actually deal with the discomfort. but once I started regulating myself and started introducing calm into my life, I started realizing my own toxic behaviors and how I contributed to those environments.

So once I started healing and moving away from those behaviors, I started noticing more about the people who I was associating myself with, the people who I was around. inevitably, those [00:09:00] relationships crumbled they were fake relationships built upon

the person I used to be that was traumatized and running from herself and therefore I associated with people who were also running from themselves.

But moving away from all that felt so boring at first

and I still have moments where I grieve the old me. Because of the intensity of some of those emotions, I had what I felt was love at the time,

but I would never, ever, ever now trade my piece for that. So here are some brutal truths that a lake sit with.

Peace will feel boring to a dysregulated nervous system. Drama helps to give the illusion of control.

Some people thrive in chaos and miss chaos when it's gone

because it gives them an identity when they've never had a chance to find out who they truly are beneath all the pain and the trauma.

If you're addicted to intensity, calm will feel wrong at first, it feels like there's no spark in the [00:10:00] relationship. It feels like there's no excitement in your life.

Or it feels like you are around the wrong people.

Healing often feels dull before it feels safe. I.

People with dysregulated nervous systems, sabotage, calm. Because it removes the distractions. You're only left with your thoughts, your unmet needs, and your toxic patterns. I knew someone like this who

would create drama by being defensive, deflective, reactive, and rude.

Then they would blame others for starting drama because they caused the reaction of this person. It's a tactic to outsource blame, to avoid accountability. And to stay reactive in their dysregulated nervous system where they feel safe instead of doing the work to be intentional with their behaviors.

For these people, internal and external chaos is easier than holding themselves accountable.

We self-sabotage, calm, because when we heal, it involves a lot of [00:11:00] change. And when things change, that's scary. Therefore, most people just continue the toxic behaviors. They continue in a dysregulated cycle because that's where their nervous system makes them feel safe, and they end up being stuck and staying in the same place in order not to have to taste the discomfort of change.

So let's have some self-reflective questions to end with. What does calm bring up for you? What do you do to avoid being left alone with your thoughts?

Are you able to just sit and do nothing?

When you sit and do nothing, what do you think about and do you confuse peace with boredom. Thank you so much for listening to Snack Size deep Dive eight. I am so happy you stayed until the end. Thank you so much for your support.

I got on. Fire Me on social media if you haven't already. I post honest conversations about mental health topics and self-reflection and learning [00:12:00] to sit with discomfort. I hope you come back again to join me next week and make sure to go and listen to my previous episodes if you haven't already.

If this felt uncomfortable, that means something clicked. Sit with it. I'll see you again. Bye.