This morning I was finishing a message while sitting in another room, focused, and in my own head.
When I finally looked up and walked out Matt was standing quietly, still as a statue, and suddenly said, “Boo.”
My whole body tightened instantly - not in a cute startled or laughing way. In fact, my nervous system reacted so quickly that irritation flashed through me before my thinking mind even had time to catch up. I looked at him with anger in my eyes even though I knew, truly knew, he was only being playful.
And honestly, it wasn’t even an aggressive scare, it was gentle; sweet, even - but my body didn’t experience it that way.
I kept thinking about it afterward because the reaction felt so disproportionate to the moment itself. And slowly something important started to click into place, his “boo” wasn’t the whole story.
It landed on top of a nervous system that was already mobilized, tight, braced, and carrying activation. And it connected me to something about my daughter that I couldn’t understood before.
She loves horror movies - not disturbing psychological horror, more the jump-scare kind. The kind where people scream and laugh and grab each other and throw popcorn. And if I’m honest, I’ve never really understood why someone would enjoy feeling scared.
But this morning I realized something humbling: maybe that question itself was shaped by the state of my own nervous system. Because if your body is already carrying a high level of activation, fear doesn’t feel playful, it feels like too much. A jump scare doesn’t feel thrilling, it feels invasive.
But for a nervous system that isn’t already living in that same level of mobilization, scary may feel completely different – exciting, stimulating, contained, and maybe even fun.
Not because one person is right and the other is wrong, but because the body receiving the experience matters.
And what struck me most wasn’t actually the insight itself. Intellectually, none of this was new to me. I already know people experience life differently. I talk about nervous systems and physiology all the time in my work. I understand, conceptually, that our internal state shapes perception.
But this morning I didn’t just understand it - I felt it. And that was entirely different.
Because there’s a kind of knowing that lives in the intellect…and another kind that only seems to land when the body experiences something directly.
For a brief moment, before logic entered, before context entered, before relational remembering entered, my body fully believed that moment was overwhelming. And somehow that visceral experience taught me more than the idea ever had.
It made me wonder how often this happens in human life. How often we intellectually understand something about another person, but don’t fully grasp it because our body has never touched the experience itself.
How often we think people are overreacting, too sensitive, avoidant, dramatic, reckless, intense, or irrational without realizing their nervous system may genuinely be having a profoundly different experience than ours. Not theoretically, but rather physiologically.
And I think when something moves from intellectual understanding into lived experience, it softens us. Not because we become more compassionate as an achievement or a virtue, but because we can no longer so easily separate people’s reactions from the state of the nervous system underneath them.
This morning, for a brief moment, I felt how differently the exact same experience can land depending on what a body is already carrying.
Matt’s playful “boo” landed in a nervous system that was already mobilized and it felt overwhelming. My daughter’s horror movies may be landing in a nervous system that isn’t carrying that same baseline activation and they feel exciting.
The experience is different, but perhaps even more importantly, the starting place is different.
And once I could feel that in my own body, it became harder to judge, dismiss, or assume that my experience was the experience.
You begin remembering that two people can walk through the exact same moment and have completely different experiences of it—not because one of them is right and the other is wrong, but because their nervous systems are meeting that moment from different places.
And honestly, I think moments like this are part of how compassion deepens. Because maybe compassion begins the moment we stop assuming everyone is standing where we are standing.
In the companion guide for paid subscribers, I’ll share several practices that grew out of this realization including:
how to recognize when a reaction is being amplified by a mobilized nervous system
questions I ask myself before assuming my interpretation is accurate
simple exercises that help create space between what happened and the story my body immediately wants to tell about it
and how this shows up in parenting, relationships, conflict, and everyday misunderstandings where the real issue may not be the event itself, but the state of the nervous system experiencing it