There’s a story a lot of people tell about themselves. It usually sounds something like this: I know what I need to do, but I just can’t make myself do it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
When you’re in this mindset, the tasks start to pile up. You feel like you have a hundred things sitting on your plate, unstarted, and daunting. But, instead of getting to work, you feel paralyzed, and tortured by an internal voice telling you: “You’re lazy. You’re undisciplined. Other people can manage, so why can’t you?”
It’s an awful experience, and one that so many of us deal with. The truth is, that little voice probably isn’t right. Let’s talk about what’s actually going on.
What Dysregulation Really Means
Your nervous system has one primary job: keep you safe. It’s constantly scanning your environment for signs of threat. When it perceives danger, it responds by mobilizing your body’s resources accordingly.
When the threat is manageable, the system returns to a regulated state relatively quickly. You feel settled and capable of the ordinary tasks of living.
However, when the threat feels larger, the return to regulation doesn’t happen as easily. Instead, you get stuck. It probably doesn’t feel like a sense of constant danger, more like a fog, or a sense of flatness. Maybe it feels like a sort of paralysis in the face of what you know should be a simple task.
What I’m describing here isn’t the same as what that little voice in your head has been telling you. In other words, it’s not laziness or a character flaw. What’s happening is the product of a physiological state that has identifiable causes.
Hopefully, understanding this first piece of what’s going on helps to take a little bit of the guilt off your shoulders. But beyond definitions, the important thing to understand here is that there are real things you can do to get yourself out of this dysregulated state. Before we get to that, I’ll explain why this is so often mistaken for laziness.
Why It Gets Mistaken for Laziness
Laziness, as most people use the word, implies a choice. If I felt perfectly fine, and you gave me the choice between cooking dinner myself or ordering fast food, and I chose to order the food, that could be laziness. But, it’s only laziness because I felt fine, and had the choice between an active and an inactive option.
Dysregulation, on the other hand, isn’t a choice. It’s a state your nervous system moves into in response to conditions that feel overwhelming, threatening, or simply beyond your current capacity.
So, let’s go back to our fast food example, but with a few changes. Let’s say I didn’t feel fine. Let’s say I just had an incredibly stressful, emotionally overwhelming day, and when I went into the kitchen I simply felt so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even begin to process what needed to be done. In this new situation, there’s a wall of dysfunction between me and one of the options. Maybe, even the fast food option feels too overwhelming, and instead of eating anything at all, I just sit there. In short, the element of choice has been replaced by a barrier of dysfunction.
The reason this gets mistaken for laziness is that the threat is often invisible. Instead of being something obvious, it’s the accumulated weight of a life that has been running too fast for too long, and a body that has decided it simply cannot take another step forward until something changes.
What Puts a Nervous System Into This State
There isn’t one answer, but some of the most common contributors are:
- Chronic stress. When the nervous system has been operating under sustained pressure it gradually loses its capacity to return to a regulated baseline. The window of what feels manageable narrows, and things that would once have been easy begin to feel impossible.
- Unprocessed trauma. Trauma (unfortunately) doesn’t just stay in the past. For people carrying trauma, the nervous system may be operating in a state of chronic low-level threat even when the environment is objectively safe. In this context, the dysregulation is a response to past trauma, running on a loop that the conscious mind is often unaware of.
- Sleep deprivation, chronic pain, poor nutrition, and isolation all dysregulate the nervous system too. As does the exhaustion of spending years performing competence while privately struggling; something which, as we’ve explored elsewhere on this blog, a lot of high-achieving people know intimately.
What Actually Helps
Okay, here’s the bit you’ve probably scrolled straight to. I get it, the context part isn’t always interesting, and when something doesn’t feel right, we all just want to see it fixed. Before I get into it, I just want to make sure you know that this isn’t always an easy straightforward fix. There isn’t a magic bullet, and while I’m going to do my best to give you some great tools, it takes time and hard work to get through dysregulation.
The answer to dysregulation is not, generally speaking, trying harder. Telling a dysregulated nervous system to just push through is a bit like telling a smoke alarm to stop being so sensitive. The alarm isn’t going off for no reason, and if you spend all your energy trying to stop the alarm, you might not notice the fire in the next room.
What helps is to work with the nervous system rather than against it. This looks different for different people, but some things that often work are:
- Movement. A walk, a run, anything that gets the body moving can shift the physiological state in ways that willpower alone cannot.
- Co-regulation. The nervous system is a social organ; it regulates partly through contact with other regulated nervous systems. This is why talking to someone who makes you feel understood can be so beneficial.
- Reducing the load rather than increasing the pressure on yourself to manage it. I know this is a tough one because it might require saying no to things that really do feel important, but when your plate gets so full that you can’t take care of yourself, something needs to shift.
What to Take Away From This
If you have spent years calling yourself lazy, I want to offer this directly: you may have been misreading the situation the whole time.
The gap between knowing and doing is not always a motivation problem. Sometimes it’s a nervous system problem, and as we’ve learned, nervous system problems are not fixed by shame, by self-criticism, or by any other kind of self-inflicted cruelty. Instead, they’re fixed by understanding what’s actually happening and responding to it in a way that your nervous system understands.
You are not lazy. You may be exhausted, overwhelmed, or carrying more than is sustainable.
If this resonates and you’d like to talk with someone, our team at Bellevue Family Counseling would be glad to hear from you.