Intensity Addiction: Why Calm Feels Boring (Or Dangerous) When You Grew Up in Chaos

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • July 28, 2026

A Quiet Porch, A Restless Body: Margalit’s Sunday Afternoon

It’s 4:40 on a Sunday afternoon in late September, and Margalit is sitting alone on the back porch of the lake house her husband’s family has owned for three summers. She’s 44, wearing the fleece she keeps balled up in the car for exactly this kind of afternoon, holding a mug of tea gone lukewarm because she keeps forgetting to drink it. Her phone is face-down on the railing, which took an act of will. No notifications. No fires to put out. The air smells like cut grass and someone’s charcoal grill three houses down.

Her foot won’t stop moving. Not dramatically, just a small, steady bounce, heel to toe, the kind of motion she does at her desk during a tense call. Except there’s no call. Just water, and quiet, and her own body humming like it’s waiting for a verdict.

“I don’t understand what’s wrong with me,” she says the following Tuesday, in my office, still visibly annoyed at herself about it. “I finally had an afternoon with nothing on it. My husband was napping. My kids were with his parents. I had exactly what I keep telling everyone I want. And I sat there feeling like I was about to get bad news. I kept waiting for my phone to ring. Nothing was wrong. I checked. Twice. I don’t know how to just sit in a good moment without bracing for the other one.”

Sitting with Margalit that Tuesday, I felt the recognition I’ve come to expect with driven women describing this exact scene. Her nervous system wasn’t malfunctioning. It was doing exactly what it had been trained to do for four decades: treat unscheduled quiet as a variable to monitor, not a state to enjoy.

What I’ve come to think of as the boredom-of-calm pattern is something I see constantly in women who grew up with a parent whose mood you had to track before you knew what kind of day it was going to be. The nervous system that learns to scan a room before it can relax doesn’t get an off switch just because the room, decades later, is finally safe. It gets quieter. It rarely goes fully silent on its own.

This piece is for women who recognize themselves in Margalit’s porch. You notice that calm can feel flat, or worse, like something is about to go wrong. You find yourself pulled toward the next deadline or the next thing that needs fixing, even when nothing currently does. You’ve wondered whether stable and steady is something you’re capable of tolerating, or just something you’re good at performing until the next fire starts.

Here’s what we’ll walk through: what I mean, clinically, by intensity addiction, and just as important, what I don’t mean by it; the nervous system research behind why calm can feel foreign after a chaotic start; how this plays out in driven women’s working lives; the both/and truth that your intensity has also been a real asset; the cultural forces that reward the pattern wearing you down; and what building a wider tolerance for peace can actually look like.

If any of this is resonating, my Fixing the Foundations course goes deeper into nervous system safety work, and therapy with me is available if you want to do this work directly.

What Is Intensity Addiction? (And What It Isn’t)

I want to be precise about what this term is and isn’t, because the language matters. “Intensity addiction” isn’t in the DSM. It’s not something a clinician diagnoses you with the way you’d be diagnosed with generalized anxiety or PTSD. I use it, and I’ve heard other trauma-informed clinicians use versions of it, because it names a recognizable pattern in plain language, not because it’s an official category of disorder. Think of it the way you’d think of “people-pleasing” or “workaholism,” a useful description of a pattern, not a clinical entity with fixed criteria.

That distinction matters for a second reason. Naming a pattern isn’t the same as diagnosing a person. What I’m describing here’s a tendency that exists on a spectrum, one that plenty of people move in and out of depending on context and season of life. If you see yourself in parts of this article and not others, that’s expected.

Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, writes about how trauma survivors develop enduring survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, as ways of managing unsafe environments. What I’m calling intensity addiction often overlaps with a chronic, low-grade fight-or-flight hum, one where real stillness can start to feel like exposure rather than relief.

It’s also worth naming plainly what this isn’t. It’s not a moral failing, and it’s not evidence you secretly enjoy chaos or are sabotaging your own peace on purpose. Discomfort with stillness is common and workable. It’s not the same thing as being incapable of safety.

If you want to go deeper on how this interacts with a demanding work life specifically, my article on executive coaching for driven women covers channeling intensity without burning out. For more on trauma’s effect on regulation generally, my newsletter covers ongoing clinical topics like this one.

The Nervous System Science: Why Calm Can Feel Unnatural

Your nervous system’s core job, underneath language and conscious thought, is to keep scanning your environment for safety or threat. Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, named this background scanning “neuroception”: the nervous system’s largely unconscious process of detecting cues of safety or danger, often before you’re consciously aware of either.

I’ve been rereading Porges’s more recent work on polyvagal theory this year, and the piece that stayed with me is how durable early calibration tends to be. An unpredictable early environment doesn’t get filed away as a memory. It gets filed away as a setting, a baseline, closer to a thermostat calibration than a belief you could simply decide to stop holding.

Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, describes the autonomic nervous system as moving along a ladder of states: ventral vagal, the safe and connected state; sympathetic, the fight-or-flight state; and dorsal vagal, the shutdown state. When early life involves chronic unpredictability, the nervous system can get stuck rungs higher on that ladder, treating sympathetic activation as the resting floor rather than the exception.

Here’s the distinction I want to be very clear about, because it’s easy to blur and it matters clinically. There’s a real difference between calm feeling unfamiliar and calm being actually unsafe. A nervous system calibrated by an unpredictable childhood can misfire in a currently safe room, treating an ordinary quiet Tuesday as though it were the tense quiet before something in the house used to shift. That’s a false alarm, and it’s worth learning to notice as one. But there are also situations where the discomfort with calm isn’t a false alarm at all, where a relationship or environment carries real, present threat, and the nervous system’s unease is accurate information. This article is about the first kind of situation. If any part of your restlessness is about a current relationship or environment that isn’t actually safe, that signal is worth taking at face value, not reframed away as an old trauma response.

Janina Fisher, PhD, has written about how, when high arousal becomes the nervous system’s long-held baseline, the body can come to associate that activation, and the adrenaline and dopamine that come with it, with feeling alive. Gabor Maté, MD, physician and author of When the Body Says No, writes about how the brain’s reward circuitry can reinforce familiar states, chaotic or not, simply because they’re familiar, which can make an unfamiliar calm feel hollow rather than restful, at least at first.

Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, adds a somatic piece: when a nervous system’s resting state is dysregulated, the body sometimes generates its own stimulation, through movement, risk, or emotional intensity, as an unconscious attempt to reach a felt sense of regulation. That’s often what’s underneath behavior that looks, from the outside, like restlessness or drama-seeking. From the inside, it can feel more like relief.

None of this means your biology is fixed in place forever. Nervous systems are more plastic than the old chaos-versus-calm framing suggests. But it does mean that if calm currently feels strange to you, that’s not proof of a character problem. It’s a body doing what bodies trained by unpredictability tend to do.

For more on expanding your own capacity to stay present with stillness, my Fixing the Foundations program works directly with this kind of nervous system pattern.

How This Pattern Plays Out in Driven Women

It’s 9:20 on a Tuesday night, and Jitka is still at her desk, laptop open to three tabs she isn’t reading anymore. She’s 40, runs operations for a mid-size logistics company, and she’s the person her team texts when something’s on fire, because she answers within minutes no matter the hour. Her partner asked, an hour ago, gently, if she was going to come sit down. She said “almost done,” and meant it. She’s still not done.

“I actually do my best thinking in a crisis,” she tells me, real pride in how she says it. “Give me a deadline that’s already blown and three people panicking and I’m completely in my element. It’s the Thursday afternoons with nothing scheduled that undo me. I end up creating a project just so I’ve somewhere to put the feeling.”

Her calendar, when she pulls it up to show me, is a wall of color blocks with no white space between them. She describes a specific dread that arrives on quiet weekends, not sadness exactly, more like a held breath waiting for something to happen. She fills the space with intense workouts, or a home project she didn’t need to start, or, more than once, a minor conflict with her partner she now suspects she half-manufactured just to give the day a shape.

Sitting with Jitka, what struck me wasn’t the crisis competence, which is real and often truly useful. What struck me was the specific quality of her dread on the quiet Thursday, the way she called it undoing her, a word she used twice without seeming to notice she’d repeated it.

What I’ve come to call the crisis-competence trap is common in women who grew up needing to be useful, sharp, and one step ahead to feel secure in a household that didn’t offer much predictability otherwise. The skill of staying sharp under pressure is real and often truly valuable at work. The cost surfaces later, in a body that never learned what to do with an ordinary afternoon that isn’t asking anything of it.

This isn’t a case for “just relaxing more.” It’s closer to a mismatch between an old survival setting and a present-day life that mostly doesn’t need that setting anymore. The unscheduled Thursday isn’t dangerous. It just doesn’t match what Jitka’s body learned an ordinary afternoon should feel like.

If you recognize yourself in Jitka’s Tuesday night, you’re far from alone. This pattern surfaces in overwork, restless people-pleasing, and relationships that feel unearned specifically because they’re calm. For more, my article on therapy with Annie goes further into what building real, felt safety can look like in practice.

The Boredom of Calm: What the Restlessness Is Actually Saying

It’s 3:15 on a Sunday afternoon, weeks later, and Margalit is back in my office describing a version of the same porch scene, except this time she caught herself mid-pattern. “I noticed myself reaching for my phone,” she says, “and I stopped and asked what I was actually looking for. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just needed my hands to be doing something instead of nothing.” She’d tried the things she’d read about, a short walk, a cup of tea, five slow breaths. The restlessness didn’t leave. It just got a name.

What Margalit is describing is a phenomenon I see across almost every version of this pattern. The boredom of calm isn’t really boredom in the ordinary sense of understimulation. It’s closer to the absence of a familiar hum the nervous system learned, long ago, to associate with being alert and therefore safe. Janina Fisher’s phrase for this, an “addiction to the familiar,” names something precise: when high arousal has been your baseline long enough, flat calm doesn’t read as peace. It reads as missing something.

This tends to develop because, during years of relational unpredictability, the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight branch, gets recruited as the everyday operating mode rather than the occasional emergency mode it’s built to be. So when actual safety arrives later, the system often goes looking for the stimulation or task that would restore its familiar rhythm.

Deb Dana describes this dynamic clearly: for many trauma survivors, the nervous system’s so-called resting state isn’t the ventral vagal state of real social ease. It’s a low, chronic hum of sympathetic activation that simply feels like normal life. True ventral vagal calm, when it arrives, can register as strange purely because it’s unfamiliar, and the body may respond with agitation or a compulsive urge to do something, anything, to close the gap.

Pat Ogden’s work points to a related somatic piece: when a nervous system’s baseline sits in chronic dysregulation, the body sometimes manufactures its own stimulation through movement or emotional intensity, an attempt to reach a felt sense of regulation using the only mechanism it has practiced. Gabor Maté’s writing on the dopamine system adds the chemical layer: familiar arousal, chaotic or not, tends to carry its own neurochemical reward, part of why calm can feel like deprivation rather than relief, at least at first.

None of this makes the discomfort a personal failure, and it doesn’t mean it’s permanent. What tends to help, in my experience with clients, isn’t forcing stillness harder. It’s noticing the restlessness without immediately obeying it, the way Margalit did on her second try at that Sunday porch, and giving the nervous system repeated, low-stakes evidence that this quiet isn’t followed by anything bad. That’s slow work, rarely instant and not usually linear.

If this is resonating, my Fixing the Foundations program works directly with this kind of nervous system pattern through somatic and relational tools, and my article on executive coaching touches on managing intensity without letting it manage you.

Both/And: Intensity Can Be a Gift AND the Chaos Version of It Is Costing You

It’s 6:50 on a Thursday evening, and Jitka is standing in her kitchen still buzzing from a client call that went better than anyone expected. She led the room, thought three steps ahead of every objection. Her team is still texting her exclamation points an hour later. She feels, by her own description, completely alive. And underneath that, a tightness in her chest that hasn’t fully let go. “I don’t know if that’s excitement or just my usual thing,” she tells me the following week. “Sometimes I honestly can’t tell the difference anymore.”

Jitka’s question is one of the most useful ones a driven woman can ask herself, and it doesn’t have a single tidy answer. Intensity, the drive, the sharpness, the capacity to perform under real pressure, is often a real asset that has built real parts of her career and her sense of competence. It’s not something to pathologize wholesale. And the chaos-driven version of that same intensity, rooted in old survival wiring rather than present choice, can also be quietly costing her, in exhaustion, in a nervous system that never fully lands, in relationships that feel suspiciously calm because calm itself feels foreign.

Both things are true at once, and that’s the both/and this section is named for. You can hold real respect for what your intensity has built, and real honesty about the toll the chaos-shaped version of it takes. This isn’t a contradiction to resolve. It’s simply the more accurate picture than either “your drive is a gift, full stop” or “your drive is only a trauma response.”

The practical distinction I use clinically is about source and quality, not intensity level itself. Intensity that arises from real engagement or stakes you’ve chosen tends to feel enlivening without draining you past your own limits. Intensity that’s compulsive and hard to turn off even when nothing currently requires it tends to be the chaos-shaped version, running on old wiring rather than present circumstance.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems therapy and author of No Bad Parts, describes the mind as made up of many internal parts, some protective, some wounded, each trying to help in its own way. In my clinical work, the part that reaches for intensity is often protecting something more fragile underneath, a part that learned, early, that being unremarkable wasn’t safe. Working with that part directly, rather than trying to override its behavior, tends to produce more durable change than sheer willpower ever does.

Jitka’s next step wasn’t learning to feel less. It was learning to notice the specific bodily signals, the tight jaw, the shallow breath, that distinguish the chaos-driven version from the chosen kind, and practicing a pause before automatically following the pull. That’s not the same as suppressing her drive. It’s aiming it.

If any of this both/and tension is familiar, my Fixing the Foundations course works with exactly this kind of internal differentiation, and therapy with me is available for more individualized support.

The Systemic Lens: When a Culture Rewards the Very Pattern That’s Exhausting You

Margalit’s phone buzzes again at 11:40 on a Sunday night, three weeks after that porch afternoon. She’s a VP of finance at a firm that praises her, often and publicly, for being the person who’s always reachable, always calm under fire. Her firm’s leadership frames this as a strength worth modeling for junior staff. Margalit is proud of the reputation and quietly exhausted by what maintaining it actually costs her.

Her situation isn’t unusual. In a great deal of modern professional culture, the same patterns that develop as trauma adaptations, constant vigilance, crisis responsiveness, an inability to stand down, get relabeled as ambition or grit. Midnight emails become evidence of dedication rather than a signal worth examining.

This creates a specific bind. A nervous system already calibrated toward high alert meets a workplace culture that actively rewards staying in that state, and the two reinforce each other in a way that makes the pattern harder to interrupt. It becomes truly difficult to tell where the trauma adaptation ends and where legitimate professional excellence begins, because the culture around you often isn’t asking that question either.

The sociologist Evan Stark, PhD, author of Coercive Control, writes about how systems of control can compress a person’s autonomy so gradually the compression becomes invisible from inside it. I think about that framework in a workplace context, not because a demanding job is coercive control in the clinical sense Stark means, but because the logic rhymes: a culture that only rewards constant availability makes it structurally harder to practice the stillness recovery requires.

This is where the systemic and the personal both have to be held together. You can’t fully separate your nervous system’s healing from the environment asking things of it every day. Recognizing that a culture, and not your own psychology alone, is keeping the chaos pattern alive doesn’t excuse you from doing your own nervous system work, but it removes a layer of unearned shame. This was never only a you problem.

For women working through this exact tension between professional reward systems and nervous system health, my article on Fixing the Foundations addresses building regulatory capacity even inside demanding environments, and therapy with me offers a trauma-informed lens on exactly this kind of bind.

Finding Your Path Forward: Building a Nervous System That Can Tolerate Peace

Healing this pattern isn’t a matter of deciding, once, to relax more. It’s slower and less linear than that. Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes trauma healing as unfolding across three broad stages: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection. Each stage asks something different of the person doing the work, and none happen on a fixed timeline.

Establishing safety. This is usually the longest and least glamorous stage, and the one most relevant to the pattern this article describes. It typically involves building a body’s actual, felt sense of safety, rather than only an intellectual understanding that things are fine now. Grounding practices, breath work, and co-regulation with people you trust all tend to help here. Deb Dana’s work emphasizes something simple but often overlooked: a warm voice or a relaxed face from another person can send the nervous system real-time signals of safety that intellectual reassurance alone doesn’t reach. If calm currently feels strange to you, that discomfort is often a sign the nervous system is mid-recalibration, not evidence something has gone wrong. Margalit’s second attempt at her porch, noticing the restlessness rather than immediately obeying it, is a small example of what this stage looks like in practice.

Remembrance and mourning. Once a baseline of safety is more stable, some women find it useful to gently examine the original story, often alongside a therapist, integrating fragmented memories into a coherent narrative, sometimes working with internal parts the way Richard Schwartz describes. This stage tends to bring up real grief for the childhood that didn’t offer predictability, and that grief is appropriate, not a setback.

Reconnection. The final stage is less about processing the past and more about building a present life that reflects your actual values rather than your old survival logic, practicing relationships and work that can tolerate steadiness, and slowly testing whether stillness really is safe now, one low-stakes afternoon at a time.

A few specific approaches that tend to help. Peter Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing, describes pendulation, gently moving attention between a felt sense of activation and a felt sense of resource, which can help the nervous system discharge stored tension in manageable increments. Pat Ogden’s somatic tracking work involves noticing bodily sensation in real time, catching early signs of a spike before it takes over. Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model works directly with the part of you that reaches for intensity, understanding what it’s protecting rather than talking it out of existing. Co-regulation, sitting with a steady, trusted person or therapist, can help a dysregulated system borrow calm it hasn’t yet learned to generate alone. David Treleaven, PhD, has written about why standard mindfulness instruction can backfire for trauma survivors, since raw stillness can flood rather than soothe a nervous system that isn’t ready for it.

Timelines vary enormously and I want to be honest about that rather than promising a specific outcome. Some women notice real shifts within months. For others, this is slower, multi-year work, often with real setbacks along the way. What tends to matter more than speed is consistency, and having support around you while you do it.

Margalit’s porch afternoons haven’t become effortless. What’s changed is that she can now sometimes notice the restlessness, name it, and let it pass without automatically obeying it. Jitka still loves a crisis, and she’s gotten better at telling the ones that are actually hers to solve from the ones she’s manufacturing. Neither would describe herself as finished with this work. Both would say it’s different than it used to be, in ways that matter.

If you’re ready to start exploring this in your own life, my Fixing the Foundations course offers structured, self-paced tools for exactly this kind of nervous system work, and therapy with me offers individualized support if you’d rather do this work directly with a clinician.

If calm feels boring, or worse, unsafe, and you find yourself quietly reaching for the next crisis to feel alive, I want to name what that usually is. It’s not a character flaw and it’s not a failure of gratitude. It’s a nervous system that learned to equate intensity with safety, because in the home you grew up in, stillness often came right before the storm. You can honor the part of you that seeks intensity as a form of vigilance and, at the same time, teach your body, slowly, that calm can be trusted. Both can be true at once. Peace is a skill, not a personality you were born without. When you’re ready for support in learning it, I’m here.

Warmly,
Annie

Warmly, Annie

Related Reading

• Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Routledge, 2017.
• Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Wiley, 2003.
• Walker, Pete, MA. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
3. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
4. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
5. Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
6. Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
• Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., 2018.
• Dana, Deb. 2018. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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