When Doing Less Is the Hardest Thing
Reflections on stress, healing, and the quiet wisdom of not fixing yourself...
In the beginning, I was sure that stress was a problem I could solve — if only I could understand it better, master it, outthink it.
So I did what I always did: I learned. I read everything I could find. I journaled, tracked symptoms, tested techniques. I tried to make healing a project — something I could handle my way out of.
And for a while, it felt like progress. Until it didn’t.
What I didn’t realize was that I had turned stress into a task. Something to manage, something to fix. But stress — real, prolonged, body-deep stress — isn’t a puzzle. It’s a signal.
And the signal wasn’t telling me to do more.
It was begging me to do less.
In my case, the signal was more than emotional. It was physical, invasive, impossible to ignore.
It came in the form of a sharp, high-pitched tinnitus — a persistent and at times unbearable ringing in my ears that pierced through even the most well-intentioned coping strategies.
It wasn’t abstract.
It wasn’t symbolic.
It was loud.
And I kept trying to outthink it.
I searched for causes, theories, solutions — and in doing so, I missed the actual message.
My body wasn’t asking me to figure it out.
It was asking me to stop.
To stop fixing, fighting, analyzing — and to start listening.
Almost two years into my healing period, I can say this with quiet clarity:
Healing didn’t begin when I finally understood stress.
It began when I stopped trying to outsmart it.
When I stopped trying to function.
When I let the silence in — even when silence rang.
When I let the striving drop away.
And it was there — in that unfamiliar stillness — that something else stirred.
Not a solution.
Not an insight.
But a kind of memory. A different kind of knowing.
Not intellectual.
Not productive.
Just... honest.
I’ve come to believe that part of what we call “stress” today is actually a misalignment.
A friction between who we are — biologically, ancestrally — and the culture we’ve wrapped around ourselves.
We weren’t built for constant output.
We weren’t designed for noise layered on noise.
Maybe, just maybe, stress is not a dysfunction…
but a deep, cellular memory whispering:
You’ve gone too far from what you need.
A reminder that something softer still lives in us — even if we’ve forgotten how to listen.
The next reflection is for subscribers only.
In the next section, I’ll share a personal moment from my healing period — and a small speculative thread about whether our very biology might carry a kind of embedded memory from another time or place.Thank you for supporting this quiet space. 🫶
📘 Disclaimer
This post reflects personal experience and speculative thought. It is not intended as medical advice or scientific conclusion — only as a quiet offering from one person’s process of unlearning and rediscovery.