Calming storms in our nervous system

When life gets overwhelming, processing our emotions helps us release them. Music can help us do that. Enter this week's song recommendation: "Nervous System" by Joseph.

I’ve found the most rewarding relationships center authenticity and vulnerability, and since ✨this✨ is a new relationship between you (as the reader) and me (as the writer), let’s open this first Sunday service with a confession:

I’m three months into writing a new chapter of my life after the 10-year relationship that was the backdrop of my entire 20s ended earlier this summer.

Whew, okay. Let’s keep ripping this band-aid right off —

It’s been a long 90 days of trying to pick up the pieces and put the ones I’m keeping back together again, but thankfully, the two years I dedicated to healing my childhood trauma through EMDR therapy immediately preceding The Breakup have made it infinitely more manageable to navigate.

Enter: Part of the inspiration for Take Me To Church.

Like other forms of therapy (i.e. somatic) and wellness practices (i.e. yoga), EMDR is designed to connect you to (and thus help you regulate) your nervous system through bilateral stimulation: A rhythmic technique that alternates between stimulating the left and the right sides of your brain.

Now seems like the right time to clarify I’m not a trained mental health professional nor am I otherwise qualified to offer expert advice on any of this — I can only share what I’ve learned from my experiences, which are just as certain to diverge from yours as they are to have some commonalities.

While not all music is inherently bilaterally stimulating, dancing and/or “tapping” along to the beat can be — which means in addition to its natural healing powers, the junk-science argument I’m making as part of Take Me To Church mission is: Music can help us process internalized emotions into physical feelings by activating our nervous systems.

Singing can also stimulate our vagus nerve — the main nerve in our parasympathetic nervous systems — which helps our bodies relax.

I’m debating whether future editions of this newsletter will feature one or multiple recommendations (we’re taking this new project week-by-week), but with the table now set, I’d like to introduce the first Take Me To Church recommendation:

Written by the trio sisters who made up the band Joseph when this song was released in 2023 (before they went from a trio to a duo), “Nervous System” is an anthem about believing in our own ability to navigate the storms that brew inside of us.

Or in their words (from an interview with Notion):

Notion: How can people love and tend to themselves more in 2023?

Joseph: Listening. A great start is taking a second to tune in and listen to ourselves. From there it can look different for everyone but taking a breath and asking ourselves what we might need in moments of stress or discomfort is the beginning of the process.

As discussed in that interview, part of Joseph’s inspiration for Nervous System was their own healing work — including somatic therapy, which I’d argue explains intent behind the effect of the instrumental buildup from each verse into the chorus, which feels like it culminates in a “release” all three times (including when the song ends seemingly abruptly).

That’s why, whenever I’ve noticed an internal storm brewing to a near-breaking point in me over the last few months, I’ve turned to this song to manufacture a release (or, put frankly, to cry).

As a quick aside: We don’t talk enough about how similar of an experience crying is to throwing up — it sucks to do, so we avoid it, but we usually feel better after giving in (and the need to will submit us into surrendering eventually anyway).

What I love about this song — and others I hope to spotlight in future editions of this Sunday newsletter — is how the instrumentation mirrors the emotion of the lyrics.

The intro starts the slow buildup, grounding you in a message of hope…

“The best part about it is we're still in the fight
And I know this is the deep end, but we can still survive”

Then the beat picks up with the pre-chorus, almost as if the song is getting “louder” like a storm seemingly does as it develops…

“You think you've made your way out of the deep, but there's a ripple effect
It's not over yet”

And then it mounts into a full-belt at the end of the chorus before dissipating…

“It's in your head and it's under your skin
I know that you can calm the storm in your nervous system”

As the Take Me To Church “about” page promises, each edition of this newsletter will make music recommendations to help this community of readers process a new emotion every Sunday — and overwhelm is an emotion that, unfortunately, many of us can likely relate to right now given the state of our world.

So thank you to Joseph for helping us access what can otherwise be an all-consuming emotion and giving us a tool to process it so we can complete stress cycles and keep our nervous systems regulated.

And thank you, the reader, for showing up — for me and for yourself.

I’ll see you next Sunday.