Riding the Emotional Wave
Our days are filled with tides, subtle shifts and crashing waves of emotion.
For some of us, these are not just tides; they are riptides, unpredictable and powerful.
A forgotten task can feel like failure. A criticism can echo for hours. A moment of boredom can feel physically uncomfortable. We feel joy, frustration, longing, confusion, fear, and everything in between, often all at once.
This is not a moral failing. It’s not something to fix. It’s the human experience of a nervous system that has learned to react intensely.
But we were never taught how to move through these waves. We were told to sit still, to focus, to calm down, instructions that often feel like being asked to stop the ocean itself.
So instead, we learned to outrun them. To silence them with noise. To drown them out with a new obsession. To react immediately because the urgency feels unbearable. Or to reach for a screen, a snack, a story, anything that will make the relentless discomfort stop.
It’s no wonder we so often feel disconnected from our own sense of knowing.
We have been taught to mistrust our emotional intensity, to confuse the brain’s urgency for a true emergency. We lose the fragile spaciousness where our wisest choices once lived.
But what if we could learn to understand our emotions instead of fearing or being hijacked by them? What if we allowed them to move through us like waves, rising, peaking, and gently passing, without letting them decide the course?
Two Systems: Why Pausing Feels Impossible
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes two systems our brains use to make decisions. For minds prone to dysregulation, this is not a gentle balance. It is a constant tug-of-war.
System 1 is our default.
It’s fast, intuitive, automatic, deeply emotional. It’s the source of creativity and chaos. It reacts before you have a conscious thought, fueled by a lifetime of learned urgency and a nervous system wired to seek relief now.
It’s not bad. It’s trying to protect you from the discomfort of boredom, overwhelm, or perceived failure. But it offers the fastest escape from discomfort, not the choice that serves your future self.
System 2 is the executive function.
It’s slower, more thoughtful, and requires energy to engage. It’s the part that steps back, pauses, and reflects. This is where intention and long-term planning live.
For us, System 2 is easily depleted and easily drowned out. By the time it arrives, the moment has often passed, leaving a trail of reactivity in its wake.
Learning to pause, to ride the emotional wave rather than be swept away, is a radical act of nervous system regulation. It is the practice of building a pier into your stormy sea. You are not stopping the waves. You are learning to stand within them, creating space for a choice that aligns with your deeper needs, not just your system’s immediate impulse for relief.
Changing the Pattern
Over time, the more you pause, feel, and wait, the more you teach your nervous system that intensity is not danger.
System 1 learns through repetition. If you keep reacting to the urge - scrolling, snapping, abandoning - you reinforce old neural pathways. But if you start responding differently, even just once, you begin to carve a new, fragile path.
You show your system that this feeling is a wave, not a command. You can feel its intensity and not be consumed. You can choose.
Over time, your system begins to trust the pause. It learns that unmet impulses will not destroy you. That tolerating uncertainty is possible. That the other side of the wave often holds clarity.
This is how we reshape a lifetime of automatic responses, not through force, but through gentle, consistent return. When you stop reacting and start noticing, you are literally rewiring your nervous system to respond with intention instead of fear.
Transformation happens slowly, quietly, in the space between impulse and action.
A Gentle Practice to Ride the Wave
Notice.
Just for one breath. Notice the shift in your body, the tension, the restlessness, the heat. Name it quietly: "I feel the urge to escape." "I feel overwhelmed."
Listen.
Get curious. Ask gently: What is this emotion trying to protect me from? Overwhelm? Rejection? Boredom? Does it feel urgent or familiar? You are listening, not analyzing.
Pause.
Do not react. Do not numb. Sit with the energy for even three breaths. Set a timer for two minutes if it helps. You are being with it, not solving it.
Feel the Peak.
If you feel safe enough, let the emotion rise fully. Witness it. It may feel overwhelming. That is the wave at its peak. Acknowledge it: "This is a big one."
Watch the Release.
Every wave softens eventually. Notice the shift as the tightness eases and the frantic thoughts slow. A quieter voice may appear, the one rooted in what you truly need.
Reflect.
Ask yourself, write it down, or speak it out loud: How do I feel now? What was this emotion really about? What does the wiser, quieter part of me know or need right now?
The Work, Again and Again
This is deep, brave work for a nervous system that craves immediacy. It is not simple or fast. Even doing it once a day plants the seed of a different life, one rooted in self-trust, not reactivity.
You are learning to hold yourself through your intensity, to listen before acting, to respond with presence instead of habit.
You are walking the path of emotional maturity, teaching your nervous system that you can hold the storm and still stay rooted. You are building a life that is not reactive, but intentional.
Not perfectly regulated, but deeply and compassionately your own.
This is the work of living a well-curated life, not free from intensity, but guided through it by presence, patience, and the quiet strength you are slowly remembering.
One wave at a time.
