Trust God, Tie Your Camel

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • January 2, 2018

The Night That Wouldn’t End

It’s 2:17 AM. Camille is lying in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling of her San Francisco apartment. The sheets are tangled. The window is cracked because she thought the cool air might help. It hasn’t.

She’s already sent the proposal. She spent six weeks on it — the research, the formatting, the footnotes, even the font. She read it aloud three times to make sure it didn’t sound stiff. She had a colleague review it. She sent it on a Tuesday, because she’d read somewhere that Tuesday emails get the highest open rates. She sent it at 9:47 AM so it would land at the top of the inbox, not buried under the morning avalanche.

There’s nothing left to do. She knows that. And still, her mind won’t stop running through every line — wondering if the third paragraph was clear enough, wondering if she should have led with the budget or the vision, wondering if the client liked her voice or found it too direct. Wondering, wondering, wondering.

She’s exhausted. She desperately wants sleep. But her nervous system has gotten the message that this outcome matters — and somewhere in her wiring, mattering has come to mean: don’t stop monitoring. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t stop running the scenarios. Because if something goes wrong, you need to be ready.

If you’ve spent a night like Camille’s, you already understand the tension this post is about. You did everything right. You prepared, you planned, you delivered. And now there’s nothing left to do but wait — and for some of us, that waiting feels almost unbearable. The gap between action and outcome is where the anxiety lives. That gap is where we pace.

This is exactly the space the old Sufi proverb is speaking to. Trust God, tie your camel. Not one or the other. Both. And for many driven women, the “tie your camel” part is relatively easy. It’s the trusting that’s hard. It’s the releasing that costs something deep.

What Does “Trust God, Tie Your Camel” Mean?

The phrase comes from the Islamic tradition and is attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, as recorded by the ninth-century scholar and hadith collector Al-Tirmidhi. According to the account, the Prophet observed a Bedouin man leaving his camel untethered. When asked why, the man explained that he was relying entirely on Allah to protect his animal. The Prophet’s response was direct: “Tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah.”

In Sufi teaching — the mystical branch of Islam — this exchange became one of the most enduring examples of the doctrine of tawakkul, the Arabic word for surrender or reliance on the divine. Tawakkul doesn’t mean passivity. It doesn’t mean folding your hands and waiting for the universe to act. It means something far more nuanced: complete effort, followed by complete release.

The phrase has traveled across centuries and cultures precisely because it describes something universal. Nearly every spiritual tradition has some version of this same teaching: the Serenity Prayer’s “wisdom to know the difference” between what we can and can’t change; the Stoic concept of the dichotomy of control; the Hindu teaching of nishkama karma — action without attachment to outcomes. The insight is ancient and apparently inexhaustible: there’s a part of life you can affect, and a part you cannot, and wisdom lives in knowing which is which.

What makes this proverb especially resonant for the modern driven woman isn’t the religious framing. You can be Jewish, Hindu, secular, spiritual-but-not-religious, or skeptical of all of it, and the teaching still lands. What’s resonant is the structure of the teaching. First, do the work. All of it. Don’t be passive; don’t wait for miraculous intervention when your own hands are capable. But then — and here’s the harder part — tie that rope and walk away.

For women who’ve built their sense of safety on effort and preparation, “walking away” from the rope feels dangerous. There’s a reason for that, which we’ll get to. But first, let’s look at what the science says about why letting go is so neurologically costly — and why it’s also so necessary.

The Neuroscience of Letting Go

Letting go isn’t a simple choice. It isn’t a matter of deciding, once and for all, to stop worrying. If it were that easy, the self-help industry would have run out of material decades ago. The difficulty of releasing control is neurological, psychological, and — for many women — deeply tied to early relational history.

Let’s start with the brain. When we face an uncertain outcome that matters to us, the default mode network (DMN) — a set of brain regions most active during self-referential thought, future projection, and rumination — tends to go into overdrive. The DMN doesn’t quiet down just because you’ve decided to let go. It keeps running simulations, revising scenarios, scanning for threats. This is partly adaptive: your brain is trying to protect you. But it becomes maladaptive when the simulations run endlessly without ever resolving, which is what happens when you’re waiting on something genuinely outside your control.

Brené Brown, PhD, research professor at the University of Houston and author of Daring Greatly, has written extensively about this territory through the lens of vulnerability and shame. Her research identifies what she calls “foreboding joy” — a tendency among driven, trauma-aware people to protect themselves from disappointment by rehearsing worst-case outcomes in advance. The mind reasons: if I imagine the bad thing first, it won’t blindside me. The problem is that this strategy also prevents full present-moment engagement with what’s actually good in your life right now. You can’t rehearse catastrophe and receive beauty at the same time.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, molecular biologist and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, approaches this from a different direction but arrives at a similar place. His clinical work centers on what he calls “non-striving” — the deliberate practice of being with what is, rather than constantly pushing toward what should be. In his landmark text Full Catastrophe Living, Kabat-Zinn describes acceptance not as passive resignation but as a radical act of presence: seeing clearly what’s actually happening and choosing to be with it rather than fighting the reality of it.

His research on MBSR found significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and physiological stress markers among participants — not because they stopped caring about outcomes, but because they developed a different relationship to uncertainty. They could hold the unknown without being consumed by it. That distinction — between tolerating uncertainty and being destroyed by it — is exactly what we’re building when we practice “trust God, tie your camel” as a lived discipline rather than a bumper sticker.

Taken together, the neuroscience and the clinical research point to the same insight the Sufi proverb arrived at centuries ago: effort and acceptance aren’t opposites. They’re partners. The skill isn’t choosing between action and surrender — it’s developing the capacity to do both, sequentially, without collapsing into one or the other. If you’re working on building that capacity and want support, trauma-informed therapy can be an important part of that process.

How This Shows Up for Driven Women

In my work with clients, I see a very specific version of this struggle that’s particular to driven, ambitious women. It doesn’t look like falling apart. It looks like competence. It looks like lists and contingency plans and “just being thorough.” It looks like a woman who is absolutely crushing it on the outside while her nervous system is running at 97% capacity just to keep the whole thing moving.

What I notice consistently is that the capacity to release — to genuinely stop monitoring once the camel is tied — tends to be directly proportional to how safe a woman felt as a child. If you grew up in an environment where the adults around you were reliable, predictable, and responsive, you got a chance to internalize the experience that letting your guard down is okay. That things tend to be okay even when you’re not watching. That outcomes don’t always require your constant intervention to resolve well.

If that wasn’t your experience — if you grew up in a home that was emotionally unpredictable, or where you had to be hyperaware of a parent’s mood to stay safe, or where love felt conditional on your performance — then your nervous system learned a different lesson. It learned that vigilance is survival. That watching, monitoring, over-preparing is the price you pay to keep bad things from happening. And that lesson doesn’t evaporate the moment you leave your childhood home. It comes with you into your career, your relationships, your 2:17 AM insomnia spirals.

Consider Priya. She’s a physician — a hospitalist in a large urban teaching hospital, whip-sharp, deeply committed to her patients. She’s also the daughter of immigrants who sacrificed enormously for her education, and she carries that weight with her into every shift. Priya told me once that she doesn’t allow herself to fully relax until she’s triple-checked everything. “If something goes wrong,” she said, “I have to know I did every single thing I could.” That’s entirely appropriate in a clinical environment where the stakes are real. The problem is that she applies the same standard to her marriage, her friendships, her parent-teacher conference preparation. She can’t locate an “off” switch. In her nervous system, the risk calculus is always running.

Or consider Nadia. She leads product at a mid-size tech company, manages a team of twelve, and is widely regarded as one of the most reliable people in the organization. She also hasn’t taken an uninterrupted vacation in four years. She checks her phone compulsively on weekends — not because she thinks something will actually go wrong, but because the not-checking feels unbearable. The gap between effort and outcome is where her anxiety lives, and the only way she’s learned to manage that gap is to close it as fast as possible through more action, more monitoring, more doing.

Neither Priya nor Nadia is failing. They’re doing what their nervous systems learned to do in environments that didn’t offer much room for genuine rest. But what they both lack — what so many driven women lack — is the internal experience of having released something and found that the world didn’t end. That the camel was still there in the morning. That the thing they entrusted to the universe actually got held.

This is where trauma-informed therapy and executive coaching can do work that willpower simply can’t. You can’t think your way into a regulated nervous system. But you can heal the early experiences that taught your system it wasn’t safe to rest.

What the Poets Knew About Surrender

Long before the neuroscientists arrived, the poets were writing about this. They didn’t have the language of polyvagal theory or the default mode network, but they understood, in their bones, the impossible tension between doing and releasing.

Mary Oliver didn’t spend her life advising passivity. She was a poet who showed up to her work daily, who walked through the same marshes and fields with the same radical attentiveness, year after year. But woven through all of it is this quiet insistence that presence — actual presence, not performance or preparation — is where the real living happens. The grasshopper in that poem isn’t rushing. It’s just there, washing its face in your palm. That’s the thing she’s pointing toward: the practice of allowing yourself to be where you are, rather than always leaning toward the next thing that needs managing.

For driven women in the middle of trauma recovery, this is often the hardest sentence in any therapist’s session: What would it be like to just be here for a moment? Not fixing. Not planning. Not running the simulation again. Just here. For many of us, that simple instruction can activate genuine panic. Because “just being here” was never safe. Here was where things happened that we couldn’t control.

The Sufi mystics understood this. Rumi wrote extensively about the soul’s longing for a surrender that doesn’t feel like defeat — a releasing that is not passivity but a deeper form of action, a choosing to trust something larger than your own analysis. The poets knew what the research is now confirming: that the capacity to rest, to genuinely hand something over, is not weakness. It’s a practice. It’s a skill. And like all skills, it can be learned — especially with the right support.

If you’re curious about the underlying patterns in your own relationship with control and release, Annie’s free quiz can help you identify the early wound that’s likely driving the difficulty. It’s a starting point — not a diagnosis, but a door.

Both/And: You Can Do Your Part AND Release the Rest

Here’s what I want to say as clearly as I can: doing your part and releasing the rest are not in conflict. They’re not a trade-off. You don’t have to choose between being thorough and being at peace. The “Both/And” is the whole point of the proverb.

The women I work with often arrive in therapy with a belief — usually unconscious, sometimes articulated — that their vigilance is the thing standing between them and disaster. That if they stop monitoring, something will fall apart. That their oversight is what’s holding the structure together. And sometimes that belief has roots in real experience: there were times when their monitoring was the thing that caught a problem before it became a crisis. Their vigilance was adaptive once.

But adaptation becomes a prison when you can’t turn it off even in contexts where the threat is no longer present. When you’re lying in bed at 2:17 AM reviewing a proposal you’ve already sent, your vigilance isn’t protecting you anymore. It’s costing you sleep, presence, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you’ve done your best and that your best was enough.

Jordan is a corporate attorney — meticulous, brilliant, the person her colleagues call when a deal gets complicated. She came to me after her second miscarriage, which she initially framed as a “grief management” issue. What emerged over time was something deeper: Jordan had spent so long believing that if she prepared enough, reviewed enough, controlled enough variables, she could prevent bad outcomes. And then she encountered an outcome — two of them — that no amount of preparation could have altered. She was faced with the most devastating version of the proverb: she had tied the camel, as carefully as any human being could, and the outcome was still heartbreak.

What Jordan learned in therapy wasn’t that her vigilance had been wrong. It had kept her safe in real ways. What she learned was that vigilance has a jurisdiction — and that jurisdiction doesn’t extend to everything. The camel-tying matters. And so does the trusting. And there are things in life that belong entirely in the second column, and fighting that reality is its own form of suffering.

The Both/And in trauma recovery isn’t just philosophical. It’s practical. It means: I can do excellent work and sleep at night. I can care deeply about outcomes and release the parts I can’t control. I can grieve a loss and trust that my life still has meaning. I can take my recovery seriously and not make it another arena for performance. Both things at once.

The Systemic Lens: Why We Were Trained to Over-Control

It would be incomplete — and honestly a little unfair — to talk about the difficulty of releasing control without naming the systemic reasons driven women over-monitor in the first place. This isn’t just individual psychology. It’s a product of the water we’ve all been swimming in.

Women in high-stakes environments — medicine, law, finance, tech, academia — have often had to be twice as prepared to receive half the recognition. They’ve learned through direct experience that small errors get amplified and attributed to their competence in ways they wouldn’t be for male colleagues. They’ve navigated environments where the bar for “enough” is constantly moving. In that context, hypervigilance isn’t a neurosis. It’s a rational adaptation to a system that punishes imperfection more harshly depending on who you are.

And for women of color, first-generation professionals, or anyone navigating spaces where they’ve historically been an outsider, the stakes of “getting it wrong” carry additional weight. The over-preparation isn’t just a trauma response — it’s also a form of code-switching, of anticipatory management, of trying to stay one step ahead of a system that hasn’t always been designed with you in mind.

What this means for the practice of “tying your camel and trusting” is that we have to be careful not to pathologize vigilance that has genuine protective value. The work isn’t to dismantle all control. It’s to develop discernment: the capacity to know when extra effort is actually needed versus when it’s your nervous system running a threat-detection program that no longer fits the current situation.

This is also why individual healing and systemic change aren’t in opposition. You can do both. You can work on your own nervous system regulation and still name the structural conditions that required over-vigilance in the first place. In fact, the clearest thinking about systemic inequity tends to come from people who’ve done enough of their own inner work that they can see the system clearly, without either collapsing into it or dissociating from it entirely.

The Systemic Lens on this particular proverb asks: who, historically, has been permitted to rest? Who has been allowed to trust that the camel will be fine without their constant supervision? The answer has a lot to do with power, privilege, and whose vigilance has been treated as neurosis and whose has been treated as wisdom. Naming that doesn’t make individual healing less important. It makes it more honest.

The Path Forward: Practices for Trusting and Releasing

So what does it actually look like to practice “trust God, tie your camel” in the real world — in a body that’s been trained by experience to stay alert, in a system that has rewarded over-preparation, in a life that genuinely includes high stakes? Here’s what I’ve seen work — both in my own ongoing practice and in my work with clients over thousands of clinical hours.

1. Do the work, fully and completely — then name it as done. This sounds obvious, but many driven women skip the second step. They complete the task and immediately pivot to worrying about the outcome, without ever allowing the moment of completion to land. There’s enormous value in a brief, explicit ritual of closure: saying out loud (or writing down), “I did everything I could do. That part is complete.” It’s not magical thinking. It’s a signal to your nervous system that the action phase has ended and the release phase has begun. Your Fixing the Foundations work often involves building exactly these kinds of internal transitions.

2. Practice physiological release, not just cognitive reframing. You can’t think your way into a calm nervous system. If your body is in a state of arousal, affirmations and mindset work will only get you so far. What tends to be more effective: a long exhale (the exhale activates the parasympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system and signals safety), cold water on your face or wrists, slow walking without a destination, or the kind of somatic work that trauma-informed therapy specifically targets. The goal isn’t to feel nothing — it’s to return to your window of tolerance so that releasing becomes physically possible.

3. Build a track record with yourself. One of the core reasons it’s hard to trust — the universe, other people, your own judgment — is that trust is built through repeated experience, not through deciding to trust. So the practice is cumulative: every time you release something and it turns out okay (or you survive it turning out badly), you add a data point to the internal ledger that says “I can handle this.” Over time, that ledger shifts the cost-benefit analysis of releasing. It doesn’t happen in one night. But it does happen.

4. Distinguish between preparation and control. Preparation is finite — it has a natural endpoint when you’ve done everything that’s in your power to do. Control is infinite — there’s always one more thing to check, one more scenario to run, one more edge case to prepare for. Getting clear on the difference — and being honest with yourself about which one you’re doing in any given moment — is a key skill. Therapy and executive coaching can both be useful spaces for developing that discernment in the context of your specific life.

5. Work the grief underneath the control. For most driven women, the hypervigilance is a grief management strategy. If I stay vigilant enough, I won’t have to feel how scared I am. I won’t have to feel the loss of not being able to guarantee outcomes. I won’t have to sit with the helplessness that comes from caring deeply about something I can’t fully control. The grief work — actually feeling the fear, the helplessness, the losses both past and present — is often what allows the vigilance to soften. Not disappear. Soften. And in that softening, there’s an opening for trust.

6. Find your version of the divine. You don’t have to be religious for the second half of this proverb to be meaningful. What you do need is something to release to — some sense that the universe is larger than your individual analysis, that there are forces and processes beyond your comprehension that are nevertheless not hostile to you. For some people, that’s God or a higher power. For others, it’s nature, or community, or the broad arc of time. What matters is that you’re not asked to release into a void. You’re asked to release into something. The specific theology matters much less than the functional experience of not being entirely alone in carrying the outcome.

In my clinical work, I’ve watched women come to the end of a long, grueling piece of inner work and find — sometimes to their own surprise — that they actually can rest. Not because the uncertainty has been resolved, but because they’ve developed enough internal stability to hold it. That stability is built slowly, through exactly the kind of sustained, relational work that the Strong & Stable newsletter writes about every Sunday. It’s not about getting to a place where nothing is uncertain. It’s about becoming someone who can be with the uncertainty without it costing you your sleep, your presence, or your joy.

The camel is tied. That’s your part, and you did it. The rest was always going to be bigger than you. The practice — the lifelong, imperfect, deeply worthwhile practice — is learning to let that be okay. To find, somewhere in the space between effort and outcome, the quiet radical act of trust.

If you’re ready to do this work with real support, I’d encourage you to connect with us and learn more about what working one-on-one looks like. You don’t have to keep carrying this alone.

Related Reading

• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.
• Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Revised ed. New York: Bantam Books, 2013.
• Oliver, Mary. “Wild Geese.” In Dream Work. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
• Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2020.
• van der Kolk, Bessel, MD. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
• Al-Tirmidhi. Jami’ at-Tirmidhi, Hadith 2517. Translated by Abu Khalyl. Riyadh: Dar-us-Salam Publications, 2007. (Source of the original camel-tying hadith.)

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer