Nothing is particularly wrong. You’ve done the inner work. Your problems have quieted down for a few minutes. Maybe for once you’re peaceful. You may have even entered that “Silence” Neville Goddard talks about. You feel happy, possibly even joyful.

Then, suddenly, your mind gets an inexplicable little jolt of something’s wrong. A frightening thought comes in. You remember something you should worry about.

Why does this happen? When you’re finally feeling good, resting in that still space within or Observer consciousness, why do fear and anxiety creep back in?

I went looking for answers, and it turns out that modern psychology completely backs up this phenomenon. From the nervous system’s addiction to stress to the power of the pause, here are several different explanations for this.

1. Brené Brown and Foreboding Joy

Research professor at the University of Houston, Brené Brown has given this experience an apropos name. She calls it foreboding joy.

Brown mentions that joy proved to be one of the most difficult emotions she encountered in her research on vulnerability.

In her book Daring Greatly, she writes:

“Given that I study emotions like shame, fear, and vulnerability, I hardly expected to one day be telling you that exploring the construct of joy turned my professional and personal life upside down. But it’s true. In fact, having spent several years studying what it means to feel joyful, I’d argue that joy is probably the most difficult emotion to really feel. Why? Because when we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding. This shift from our younger self’s greeting of joy with unalloyed delight happens slowly and outside of our awareness. We don’t seem to even know that it’s happening or why. We just know that we crave more joy in our lives, that we are joy starved.

In a culture of deep scarcity—of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough—joy can feel like a setup. We wake up in the morning and think, Work is going well. Everyone in the family is healthy. No major crises are happening. The house is still standing. I’m working out and feeling good. Oh, shit. This is bad. This is really bad. Disaster must be lurking right around the corner.

Or we get promoted, and our first thought is Too good to be true. What’s the catch? We find out we’re pregnant, and we think, Our daughter is healthy and happy, so something really bad is going to happen with this baby. I just know it. We’re taking our first family vacation, but rather than being excited, we’re making plans for the plane to go down or the ship to sink.

We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

The fact that everything is okay becomes the evidence that something must be about to go wrong.

Brown found something else that surprised her. When she asked people about the experiences that made them feel most vulnerable, they didn’t just describe the obvious experiences that cause fear, shame, failure or humiliation but surprisingly mentioned experiences that cause happiness.

They mentioned happy moments like standing over their sleeping children. Loving their husband or wife. Falling in love. Getting promoted.

Brown then realized she had been doing the same thing:

“Before my 2007 breakdown spiritual awakening, foreboding joy was one of my own unconscious pieces of armor. When I first made the connection between vulnerability and joy reported by participants, I could barely breathe. I had considered my constant disaster planning as my little secret.

I was convinced that I was the only one who stood over my children while they slept and, in the split second that I became engulfed with love and adoration, pictured something really terrible happening to them. I was sure that no one but me pictured car wrecks and rehearsed the horrific phone conversations with the police that all of us dread.”

Brown calls this “rehearsing tragedy.” She says:

“We’re trying to beat vulnerability to the punch. We don’t want to be blindsided by hurt. We don’t want to be caught off-guard, so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment.

For those of us who rehearse tragedy, there’s a reason those images flood into our mind the second we’re overwhelmed with joy. When we spend our lives (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing away vulnerability, we can’t hold space open for the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure of joy. For many of us, there’s even a physiological response—a “coming out of our skin” feeling. We’re desperate for more joy, but at the same time we can’t tolerate the vulnerability.”

So it appears that dropping the armor makes some part of us immediately want to put it back on.

2. Gay Hendricks and the “Upper Limit”

Gay Hendricks comes at this from another direction in his book, The Big Leap.

He calls it the Upper Limit Problem. He mentions that we develop an internal ceiling for how much love, success or good feelings we are comfortable experiencing.

As he describes it:

“The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves. The Upper Limit Problem is caused by a too-low thermostat setting on our ability to achieve and enjoy our ultimate success.

The thermostat gets set low early in our lives, at a time when we could not think for ourselves. Later, as we dream about big goals and move up into realms of love, abundance, and creativity that are above our old thermostat setting, we bump up against the artificial lid that was placed on our success through unconscious childhood decisions.

Unless we solve the Upper Limit Problem, we will keep finding ways to bring ourselves back down when we’ve blown past our old setting.”

Hendricks says the interesting moment is when we catch ourselves doing it:

“We transcend our Upper Limit Problem each time we make more room inside us to feel more love, abundance, and success. It’s done moment by moment, and the moment goes like this: We catch ourselves worrying or starting an argument.

Suddenly we realize we’re Upper-Limiting. We let go of the train of worry-thoughts or the huffy point of view, taking a deep breath or two for relaxation.”

In one example, Hendricks caught himself Upper Limiting over practically nothing while sitting in his backyard:

“I sat for a few minutes in our swing, enjoying the soft breezes, the sweet air, and the sounds of my neighborhood. I could see Kathlyn in the living room, deep in communion with a novel by one of her favorite mystery writers. I could feel a warm, glad-to-be-home sensation within me, and as I expanded my attention to let myself enjoy it thoroughly, waves of bliss spread through me.”

But his mind couldn’t leave the quiet moment alone:

“Suddenly my mind chimed in with a philosophical observation: ‘This won’t last forever, but it’s wonderful while it’s happening.’ I realized with a chuckle that this commentary, whether wise or trite, was a subtle Upper Limit behavior. I had obviously exceeded my tolerance for backyard bliss. My Old Philosopher persona had shuffled in from the shadows to bring me back to earth. I gave the old fellow a loving pat on the back and sent him back to his quiet corner.”

So in a nutshell, we deflate the bliss and adjust our thermostats back to a comfortable temperature even if that temperature is freezing.

3. Bessel van der Kolk, Trauma and The Nervous System

Why is quiet so scary to the body? It appears the nervous system prefers the familiar, even if the familiar is stressful. When a physical body is wired for hypervigilance, anything different from that state is frightening.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Dutch-American psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk points out:

“At the core of recovery is self-awareness. The most important phrases in trauma therapy are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Traumatized people live with seemingly unbearable sensations: They feel heartbroken and suffer from intolerable sensations in the pit of their stomach or tightness in their chest. Yet avoiding feeling these sensations in our bodies increases our vulnerability to being overwhelmed by them.

Body awareness puts us in touch with our inner world, the landscape of our organism. Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness, or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our automatic, habitual reactions. Mindfulness puts us in touch with the transitory nature of our feelings and perceptions. When we pay focused attention to our bodily sensations, we can recognize the ebb and flow of our emotions and, with that, increase our control over them.”

That little word notice is going to become important.

Van der Kolk goes on:

“Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy.

Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless.”

And later:

“In order to recover, mind, body, and brain need to be convinced that it is safe to let go.

That happens only when you feel safe at a visceral level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness.”

So, a bodily reaction can occur now even when the situation that originally taught the body something is long gone. And van der Kolk’s first instruction is to not argue with it but Notice that.

4. Joseph LeDoux and The Brain

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux gets even more specific. In The Emotional Brain, LeDoux explains why we can’t just think our way out of it. Why sometimes fear seems to arrive before we’ve even had time to invent the reason for it.

LeDoux writes:

“The automatic nature of emotional habits can be extremely useful, allowing you to avoid routine dangers without having to give them much thought. However, when emotional habits become anxiety disorders, then the rigid unextinguishable learning that typifies avoidance behavior becomes a liability.”

And elsewhere he makes an interesting observation or how our brains are wired.

“It is well known that the connections from the cortical areas to the amygdala are far weaker than the connections from the amygdala to the cortex. This may explain why it is so easy for emotional information to invade our conscious thoughts, but so hard for us to gain conscious control over our emotions.”

So now we have several ways of looking at this.

Brown tells us joy leaves us vulnerable, so we rehearse tragedy before tragedy can surprise us. Hendricks informs us we have a thermostat but we can exceed our set limit. Van der Kolk shows how emotional and bodily reactions continue after the original danger is gone and how noticing the reaction can change our relationship to it. And finally, LeDoux shows how learned emotional responses can become automatic and why conscious thought can’t stop it.

5. Rollo May and The Pause

Ancient Eastern wisdom and Rollo May’s existential psychology land in the same place.

In Freedom and Destiny, May finds the one real escape hatch: the pause.

He defines freedom as almost absurdly simple:

“Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one.”

To be clear, freedom is in the gap, not the response. It’s not in the fight for liberty or independence but this space. And why?

May says:

“The significance of the pause is that the rigid chain of cause and effect is broken.”

So the Pavlovian machine stops, the machine stops, and you’re left with the silence. There’s a catch, though, this silence bites us because it is a moment of max exposure.

“The pause is the moment when a person is most vulnerable to anxiety… The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety.”

So we freak out. Distract ourselves. Grab the phone. Start a fight with someone we love. Anything to feel the old ball and chain snap back on because they are at least familiar.

But, if you can stay in the gap or this silence without running for the hills, something will shift. May calls it entering the holy void:

“In the holy void the nothingness that we experience gives our deeper thoughts room to make themselves manifest… the nothingness then becomes a something.”

This “holy void” is not an empty room by the way. It’s where you actually meet yourself. But it might only last a fraction of a second. But there’s a sliver of space now between the reaction and your belief in it. And the Observer gets to watch from there.

May said it perfectly:

“The concentration on the spaces between words, the intervals, the pauses in life — these yield the touch of ecstasy.”

So you don’t need to sit on a yoga mat for years, it’s right there in that, pause, silence, void, gap – that one fraction of a second where the future stops being written by the past.

As Neville says at the end of most every lecture, “Now let us go into the Silence.”

Resources

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012), Chapter 4: “The Vulnerability Armory.”

Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (2009), Chapter 1: “The One Problem and How to Solve It,” and Conclusion.

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014), Chapter 5: “Body-Brain Connections,” and Chapter 16: “Learning to Inhabit Your Body: Yoga.”

Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996), Chapter 8: “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Chapter 9: “Once More, with Feelings.”

Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny (1981), Chapter IX: “The Significance of the Pause,” and Chapter X: “The Dizziness of Freedom.”