Calm Feels Uncomfortable: Why Hustle Feels Safe and Rest Feels Risky

What if your body treats calm like a threat — and a full calendar like safety?

We open the hood on why quiet moments feel uneasy, why a clear calendar can spike anxiety, and how hustle sneaks in as a substitute for safety. This isn’t a willpower problem or an ambition problem. It’s a nervous system pattern that equates urgency with worth — and once you see it, you can change it.

We trace how the nine-to-five narrative gets normalized as the only “safe” path and how many of us outsource our sense of stability to schedules, paychecks, and other people’s approval. Renae shares a candid story about relying on music gigs while building a business, a partner’s stress over an unfilled calendar, and the deeper conditioning that makes “packed equals safe” feel logical.

From there, we unpack the brain science — like the reticular activating system and familiarity bias—and why your attention keeps finding chaos simply because chaos feels like home.

This conversation also zooms out to the system level. Workplaces quietly benefit when people are slightly anxious: longer hours, fewer questions, and more tolerance for misalignment. We name the cultural scripts that glorify exhaustion and label boundaries as laziness, then offer simple, durable ways to push back—unapologetic lunch breaks, delayed non-urgent replies, spotting manufactured urgency, and asking better questions like “Is this sustainable?” and “Who benefits from this pace?”

If calm has felt suspicious, this episode is your map to making peace feel safe — without blowing up your life.

Free Access to Week One: Burn the Blueprint

If this episode helped you recognize how much of your stress is rooted in conditioning—not personal failure—you can go deeper with Burn the Blueprint, my 4-week self-paced course.

It’s designed to help you identify the beliefs, patterns, and nervous system responses you’ve been running on autopilot—and start changing them from the inside out.

You can access Week One for free to explore the conditioning you’ve been living inside before deciding what comes next.

http://wayward-wellness-coaching.kit.com/burn-the-blueprint-week-one

 Subscribe to Hustle Rebels for more conversations that question the conditioning behind success.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Myth Of Productive Stress
• 0:48 Welcome And Show Focus
• 1:21 Why Calm Feels Uncomfortable
• 2:29 Normalized Nine-To-Five And Safety
• 3:05 Subscribe For Ongoing Conversations
• 3:23 Structure Versus Safety
• 4:55 Personal Story: Income And Anxiety
• 6:01 The Brain’s Bias For Familiar Chaos
• 7:28 Systems Benefit From Dysregulation
• 10:56 From Self-Blame To Better Questions
• 12:33 Micro-Rebellions That Restore Regulation
• 13:56 Individual Choices Drive Cultural Change
• 14:40 Subscribe And What’s Next
• 15:05 A Weekly Practice To Rewire

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

A dysregulated workforce is a productive workforce. People who are constantly in low grade stress work longer hours, question less, tolerate more, but burn out quietly. When your nervous system is always on edge, you don't have the capacity to step back and ask, does this make sense? Is this sustainable? Who actually benefits from this pace? Calm people ask better questions. Regulated people notice misalignment. And systems built on overwork don't love that. This is Hustle Rebels, a podcast for people who know how to grind but are starting to question the cost. I'm Renee, and here we talk about success, burnout, and nervous system regulation without glorifying exhaustion or sacrificing your health, relationships, or your sense of self, and without pretending ambition is the problem. Let's get into it. Have you ever had a rare, calm moment, no emergencies, no deadlines, no fires to put out, and instead of enjoying it, you felt uneasy, not relaxed, not relieved, just off. Like you should be doing something. Like you're forgetting something important. Like peace is temporary. And you just better not trust it. If that's you, I want you to stick with me. Because by the end of this episode, you're going to understand why calm feels uncomfortable. How hustle quietly turns into an addiction. And what's actually happening in your nervous system when you try to slow down and feel worse instead of better. More importantly, I'm going to show you how to start interrupting that pattern without quitting your job or blowing up your life or pretending you're suddenly a different person. Here's something wild. Most people never question the nine to five. Not because it's perfect, not because it's natural, but because it's normalized. It's just what you do. You grow up, you go to school, you get a job, you work hard, you earn stability, and you retire. End of story. At least that's what you hope happens, right? And when something is framed as normal, we stop interrogating it. Quick pause. If this already resonates, hit that subscribe button. This show is for people who know how to grind but are starting to question the cost. And if that's you, you'll want these conversations in your feed to reference again. I was talking to a friend recently, and she told her dad that she was starting her own business. And she said he just about almost had a heart attack. He's a union guy, good benefits, pension, decades of doing everything right. And to him, stability meant one thing: structure provided by an institution. A corporation tells you when to show up, when you're allowed to rest, how much you're worth, and whether you're safe. And anything outside of that, that's instability. And that's risky. It's irresponsible, not because it's actually irresponsible, but because it's unfamiliar. And this is where things get interesting. We have been taught that structure equals safety. But structure and safety are not the same thing. Structure can be regulated, or it can be imprisoning. Safety isn't about predictability alone, it's about capacity. But when your nervous system grows up equating external structure with survival, you start outsourcing your sense of safety. That's being outsourced to schedules and paychecks, to approval, to productivity. So when that structure loosens, even temporarily, your body reacts. Not because you're in danger, but because your body doesn't recognize the environment. I'll give you a real example. This weekend, I had a heated conversation with my boyfriend. We have a band, and right now, while I'm building a new business, I've been leaning on gigs as a main income stream. I have gigs, just not as many as I usually do. And that doesn't stress me out because I know how this works. Sometimes bookings come in waves. I'm financially stable, I have no debt, I pay my bills on time, always, but he told me it stresses him out that the calendar isn't packed. And I remember thinking, honestly, a little sarcastically, if I'm not stressed out, why are you stressed out? And then I caught myself because that reaction wasn't about logic. It was about conditioning. See, he works a nine to five, more like a seven to seven. It's high stress, high demand, very well paying, but taxing as hell. His nervous system is trained to expect a consistent income, a visible structure, linear progress. So when he can't see that plan yet, when the money flow isn't steady, his body reads that as threat. Not because it's unsafe, but because it doesn't match the pattern that his nervous system has trusted for so long. And I don't blame him because this conditioning is everywhere. Here's the nervous system piece. Your nervous system doesn't care about happiness, it cares about familiarity. If your body learned that stress and urgency and constant output meant I'm doing it right, I'm valuable, I'm safe, then calm will automatically feel suspicious. Your brain goes into scan mode. Why is it quiet? What am I missing? Something bad must be coming. That's not intuition, that's conditioning. Your reticular activating system, the part of your brain that filters reality, it looks for what it already knows. So if chaos is familiar, it will keep finding chaos. This is how hustle becomes addictive. Not because you love working, but because hustle keeps your nervous system in known territory. And yeah, if you ask my family, they'll tell you I've always been wired differently. They'll say it's because I'm the baby of the family, a little free-spirited, the one who always kind of did things her own way. And honestly, they're not wrong. I mean, I moved here from Buffalo to Boston with$400 in my bank account, with my mom's van packed with all my stuff and a friend tagging along because I met someone who said he would show me the ropes in the music industry. I stayed with an elderly couple I had met on a spiritual retreat who offered me a place to land while I figured some things out. So, yeah, on the outside, that looks pretty reckless. But from my nervous system at that time, that felt aligned. Not easy, not comfortable, but it was familiar because my body trusted movement more than stagnation. Here's the truth that most high performers don't want to hear. You don't feel addicted to hustle because you're ambitious. You feel addicted because your nervous system doesn't trust peace yet. You in turn mistake calm for complacency, rest for laziness, spaciousness for danger. And until you address that, no amount of mindset work is going to fix it. And I want to zoom out for a second, because this isn't just about you as an individual learning how to calm your nervous system. This is about the system that we are all swimming in. Because once you see this pattern, you start noticing it everywhere. Think about a normal work day. Most people wake up already slightly tense. The alarm goes off, phone gets checked immediately, email, slack, notifications, text messages. Your nervous system hasn't even oriented the room yet, and it's already being told you're behind. Then we praise people who skip lunch, answer emails at night, never take their PTO, push through exhaustion, and we call that dedication. But if someone says, I'm logging off at five or I'm not available this weekend, I need a slower pace right now, we don't call that regulated. We call it lazy or uncommitted, not a team player. That's not accidental. Here's the uncomfortable truth. A dysregulated workforce is a productive workforce. People who are constantly in low grade stress, work longer hours, question less, tolerate more, but burn out quietly. When your nervous system is always on edge, you don't have the capacity to step back and ask, does this make sense? Is this sustainable? Who actually benefits from this pace? Calm people ask better questions. Regulated people notice misalignment. And systems built on overwork don't love that. That's why they want to keep control of the entire environment. If this made you think of your workplace or yourself, you're not alone. Sit with that. We'll keep pulling on this thread together. When you have been questioned to believe that structure equals safety, productivity equals worth, rest equals risk, then challenging those ideas don't just feel rebellious. It feels unsafe. Your nervous system reacts before your logic can catch up. So instead of questioning the system, we internalize the problem. We say, I just need to be more disciplined, I need to manage my time better, I need to handle stress better. But maybe the question isn't what's wrong with me? Maybe it's what did I learn to tolerate that I shouldn't have had to? And no, I'm not saying to go quit your job and live off the grid. This applies inside of the system too. Questioning conditioning can look like this: taking your full lunch break without apologizing. Not responding immediately to every single message. Noticing when urgency is manufactured, refusing to equate exhaustion with importance. It's subtle, it's quiet, and it's powerful. Every time you choose regulation over reaction, you're interrupting the pattern. And here's the part that really matters. When enough people start regulating instead of reacting, systems have to adapt. Cultures shift when burnout stops being the badge of honor, rest stops being suspicious, calm stops being equated with complacency. It doesn't happen overnight, but it does start with awareness. It starts when people start realizing that they're not broken, they're conditioned. So yes, regulate your nervous system, but also start questioning what you've been taught to normalize. Notice where the rules are inherited, not chosen, and ask yourself, is this actually necessary or is it just familiar? That question is where personal regulation turns into collective change. So let's make this practical for you as an individual. This week I want you to notice where you create urgency unnecessarily, where you might feel silence, where you feel guilty for resting, and instead of fixing it, ask, is this actually a problem? Or is this my nervous system just unfamiliar with calm? That question alone starts rewiring and interrupting the pattern. If this episode hit a nerve, that's not an accident. I created Burn the Blueprint, my four-week self-paced course for people who are realizing that much of their life has been shaped by conditioning they never consented to. It's designed to help people identify the beliefs, patterns, and nervous system responses you've been running on autopilot and start changing them from the inside out. You can access week one for free if you want to test the waters. No pressure, no hype, just awareness. Because once you see the blueprint, you get to decide whether you keep living inside it or if you just want to burn it the fuck down. If this episode helped you see your patterns a little bit differently, make sure you subscribe to Hustle Rebels. We're going to keep unpacking the conditioning around success, burnout, and ambition. Without glorifying exhaustion or pretending that your drive is the problem. I'll see you in the next episode.