Mind the Gap
A Soft Place to Land
Nervous system-focused care for overloaded humans
Issue 03 · Why You Can’t Think Your Way To Calm · Week 3 of 52
Welcome. I'm so glad you're back!
Something I hear from clients on a regular basis — usually said with a kind of weary humor — is "I know I need to manage my stress better."
And they're right. They do know. (Because I tell them)
Almost everyone does.
The knowing is rarely the problem.
The problem is the gap between knowing and doing.
This week I want to talk about why that gap exists — not to make it bigger, but to make it smaller, by understanding what we're actually working with.
Sincerely and with Gratitude,
Jenny
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC
Why you can't just think your way to calm
This may sound a bit sharp, but it’s something I want you to really hear:
If you could have thought your way out of chronic stress, you would have done it by now. You are clearly intelligent. You clearly understand, on some level, that what you're carrying is too much.
The fact that you haven't been able to reason your way to relief is not a failure of willpower or intelligence.
It is a feature of how your nervous system actually works.
Your autonomic nervous system — the part that governs your stress response that we talked about last week — does not speak the language of logic.
It speaks the language of sensation, rhythm, safety, and threat.
And it operates largely below the reach of your conscious, reasoning mind.
You cannot think your way to feeling safe. Like Sandy told Danny Zuko “You have to feeeeeel your way” there. The body leads, and the mind follows — most often not the other way around.
It's why you can completely understand why you should be relaxing while your muscles are still rigid and your heart rate is still elevated.
Understanding and experiencing are different neurological events.
It's also why bodywork — real, intentional bodywork — can reach places that thinking cannot. When I work with theBowen technique, I'm not addressing a logical system. I'm addressing a biological one. The gentle, precise moves of Bowenwork communicate directly with the fascia and the autonomic nervous system, creating the conditions ( less noise of constant input) for a shift that the conscious mind didn't orchestrate and can't take credit for.
That shift — when your body suddenly lets go of something it's been holding for months or years — is one of the most profound things I witness in my work. And what I want for every person who experiences it on my table is to understand what just happened well enough to support it continuing beyond the session.
That's where the HeartMath tools I use in coaching become so powerful. The emWave Pro and Coherence tools (think Biofeedback people) give you real-time feedback on your heart rhythm — literally showing you on a screen when your nervous system is shifting from stress to coherence. You're not guessing. You're seeing it. And seeing it teaches your system to find that state again on its own.
Your nervous system is trainable. It just needs the right language spoken to it.
THIS WEEK'S REFLECTION
Notice the gap between knowing and feeling
This week, pay attention to the moments when you know you should feel calm — but don't. When you know everything is fine — but your body doesn't seem to have gotten the message.
1. When was the last time you knew logically that you were safe, but felt anxious or tense anyway? What was happening?
2. Are there situations where your body's response seems disproportionate to what's actually happening? What do those feel like?
3. What have you tried in the past to manage stress? What worked, even temporarily? What didn't?
There's no judgment in these questions — just curiosity. You're gathering information about your own system, and that information is valuable.
CLIENT STORY
A voice from the table
I had been working with this particular client for a couple of months when we were both feeling a bit fatigued from their tension patterns not shifting through their massage sessions. We shifted gears to Bowen and in one session they felt a difference. They experienced this full body buzz during the wait times and it felt like there was electric currents running through the length of their body.
After the session, we had some time and as they described the sensations they realized that their mind felt clearer and they were better able to communicate with me what they felt was contributing to the physical stress holding on.
So we shifted gears again to includeHeart Focused Breathing to conclude the session. This tool was something I asked her to use anytime they felt their stress begin to rise to regulate their nervous system before our next session.
Two weeks later they come back for a followup Bowen session and they reported that they used Heart Focused Breathing A LOT in the past two weeks and by doing so they were able to pick up a pattern in their stress response that aggravated their specific pain point on their body. That noticing led them to take action to make a VERY bold change in their life- and it WORKED. The pattern is no longer in play and they have a freedom from the bondage they didn’t realize they were being held in.
They were able to notice the pattern because the noise level in their mind and their body quieted in those moments. the biochemical reactions happening in a moment of stress in the body subsided and brought their rational thought processing part of their brain back online so they could SEE the situation clearly.
If you'd like to share your story for an upcoming newsletter, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at hello@jennyodell,me
A FINAL THOUGHT FROM ME
If you've ever felt frustrated that knowing better didn't translate into feeling better, you are not alone and you are not failing. This is exactly the territory we work in together. I'd love to talk about what that could look like for you. Just know, that even this work isn’t a quick fix. It takes time and intention.
You’ve heard me say: Any dysfunction that took years to create, will take time to heal.
If this week's topic is resonating with something you've been feeling but haven't had words for, I'd love to have a conversation. My Building Your Personal Resilience coaching program exists for exactly this — to take the awareness you're building through bodywork and turn it into lasting change. Learn more or book a free clarity call at jennyodell.me or if you would rather, connect with me via voice note onVOXER or simply reply to this email to share what’s been landing.
Sincerely and with Gratitude,
Jenny O'Dell
