What a Flat, Numb Response (To a Cancelled Flight) Taught Me About Healing

Episode 174: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout

This summer my family flew home from two weeks in Southern California visiting my parents. Five of us plus our new dog, checked under the plane for the first time, which went fine. We got to LAX with time to spare, and then the delays started. Twenty minutes till boarding turned into an hour, then two, then three. Somewhere around my fiftieth trip up and down the escalator with my three year old, my husband called to tell me the flight had been canceled and we were rebooked for three days later.

A family of five, a dog, and three extra unplanned days away from home. My brain immediately went to how I was going to break that news to the kids. But what I actually want to talk about today isn’t the logistics of that trip. It’s what happened inside my nervous system in the minutes after I got that call, because it wasn’t what I expected, and it taught me something about how healing actually shows up.

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What We Cover in This Episode

• What actually happened in my nervous system when I found out our flight was canceled
• Why regulation doesn’t mean staying calm
• Two better questions to ask when you’re trying to measure your own healing
• The difference between reactive and proactive regulation, and which one was doing the real work long before I ever got to that gate

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Regulation Doesn’t Mean Calm

A few years ago, this kind of news would have sent me straight into an activated state. Spiraling anxiety, maybe a panic attack, definitely snapping at everyone around me and getting the airline on the phone to demand a fix. This time, after the initial gut punch of disbelief, what I actually felt was almost flat. Not high and activated. Low. A little numb. Halfway checked out while I dealt with the bags, the dog, and the phone call to my parents.

If you think about the nervous system as a ladder, moving from regulation up through activation and down into shutdown, it would be easy to read that flat feeling as a step backward. Like maybe my nervous system was more dysregulated than it used to be, not less. Or like a truly regulated system should have let me shrug the whole thing off with a smile and call it an adventure.

Neither of those is accurate. What I was in was a quieter, milder cousin of a shutdown state. I was still standing there, still making decisions, still getting the bags and the dog and my kids through the airport. I was just distant. Flat. Task oriented. My nervous system had turned the volume down on the frustration and the injustice of it all, not because something had gone wrong, but because it correctly calculated that I didn’t have the bandwidth to feel the full size of that stress and still function.

Think about an athlete in the middle of a game. You don’t want them fully calm out there. You want some sympathetic activation, some edge, some adrenaline sharpening their focus. But you also don’t want them so activated that fear of losing takes over completely. The goal is activation with an anchor still in regulation. That’s closer to what was happening at the gate. I had real characteristics of that lower, flatter state, but I was still anchored enough to be present, responsive to my kids, and functional.

Your symptoms always make sense, even the ones that don’t look like symptoms. Even a little checked out at the airport.

Capacity, Not Ease, Is What Changes

A few years ago, this exact scenario would have played out very differently for me, and it’s worth naming that the situation itself didn’t get any easier. I didn’t have three kids back then. I didn’t have a dog checked under a plane. If anything, this version of the trip was harder. What changed wasn’t the circumstances. What changed was my capacity.

I talk often about the stress bucket, your nervous system’s capacity to hold what life is asking of you. Coming into this trip, I had more room in that bucket than I used to. My sister and her husband were on the same canceled flight, my husband was there, and my parents were willing to be inconvenienced enough to come back and get us. More built capacity, plus more support in the moment.

Capacity doesn’t mean comfortable. I was still annoyed on that escalator. Still tired. Still flat and checked out, which is not a particularly fun way to feel. Having more room in your bucket doesn’t make the pressure disappear. It changes how far that pressure can pull you under before you find your way back.

How to Actually Measure Whether Your Healing Is Working

This is where a lot of us get the measurement wrong. We ask ourselves questions like, do I still get anxious? Do I still shut down? Do I still get triggered? And because the answer is almost always yes, since you’re human and not a robot, we conclude that nothing has really changed. That we’re always going to feel this way.

Those questions aren’t built to catch the kind of change that’s actually happening. A more useful set of questions looks at the spectrum instead of a yes or no answer. How far do I go now? How big does the reaction get compared to before? How long do I stay in that state? How quickly can I find my way back, and how much support does it take to get there? Can I stay connected to myself while something hard is happening?

You might still get anxious before a hard conversation, but you don’t spend the whole night before rehearsing every way it could go wrong. Conflict with your partner might still activate you, but instead of two days of spiraling, you’re reset in twenty minutes. You might still have days where you want to withdraw, but you notice it sooner and know more clearly what helps you reconnect. You might still panic sometimes, but the panic no longer creates a second layer of panic on top of itself. All of that is evidence of a nervous system with more room than it used to have.

One caution here. A single stressful event isn’t an accurate read on whether your healing work is working. If that flight had been canceled the day after a sleepless night or an extra meltdown from one of my kids, I might have spiraled the way I would have years ago. What we’re actually looking for is a pattern over time, not a single data point, and a willingness to look at that pattern with more nuance than pass or fail.

Reactive vs Proactive Regulation

This distinction is one I come back to often, both on this podcast and inside RESTORE, our one on one coaching program, and in the educational curriculum inside the Regulated Living Membership.

Reactive regulation is what you reach for in the moment. A deep breath, a walk, calling a friend, shaking it out. These tools pull on your physiology in real time and take the intensity off of something. They matter, and they’re part of the equation.

Proactive regulation is the deeper, ongoing work that changes your baseline over time. It’s what takes the standing water out of your bucket so you have more room before it overflows, or grows the size of the bucket itself. Proactive regulation was quietly working in the background for years before that airport moment ever happened. I didn’t need a breathing exercise on the escalator. The capacity was already built and already there, waiting to hold what that day was asking of it.

I want to leave you with an invitation to start noticing your own version of that escalator moment. A situation that used to take you all the way under, in whatever way under looks like for you, and this time it didn’t quite. Whether or not you handled it perfectly, whether or not you felt calm the whole time, notice the difference. Then get curious about what in your life, your habits, or your healing work actually contributed to that shift.

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Three Tangible Takeaways

1. Regulation doesn’t mean you stop reacting. A healthy nervous system still moves into activation, frustration, or mild shutdown when life calls for it. The goal is flexibility, not permanent calm.
2. Measure your healing by distance and speed, not absence. Instead of asking whether you still get anxious or still shut down, ask how far you go, how long you stay, and how quickly you find your way back.
3. Capacity gets built long before you need it. The daily, unglamorous inputs of sleep, movement, nourishment, and connection, combined with deeper work that reshapes your beliefs and patterns, are what quietly hold you through the moments that used to take you under.

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Looking for more personalized support?

• Regulated Living Membership -A Monthly membership for nervous system healing
• RESTORE -1:1 coaching program for anxiety and depression

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.