Why Cant I Switch Off?

The day is done. There is nothing left to do. And something in you is still standing up, still scanning, still braced for a thing that is not coming.

Season two of Where We Are turns inward, from what happens between two people to what happens inside one body. In this opening episode, Dr. Alon Aviram sits with the person who cannot switch off: the one who is awake before the alarm, who reads every room, who is tired in a way that sleep never seems to reach. Through the story of a man named Daniel, he asks a gentler question than what is wrong with me. He asks where you have been standing, for how long, and whether staying switched on was ever really who you are.

Not advice. Not a diagnosis. A slow look at a body that learned to stay alert a long time ago, and never got told it was safe to come down.

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Where We Are is a podcast about where you are, not what's wrong with you.

Hosted by Dr. Alon Aviram, psychotherapist. The show is built on the framework he uses in his practice: a way of finding where you're standing across the different parts of a life — the body, the self, relationships, groups, and meaning — and finding your way back to movement.

If something in this episode landed, you can go deeper at dralonaviram.com, where a free tool helps you find where you actually stand. The newsletter, The Shift, lives on Substack. And you can follow along on Instagram.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the second season of Where We Are. Before we dive into the new episodes, I want to say a warm thank you. To the hundreds of you, yes, literally hundreds, who listened to the first season, who texted me, who emailed me. If you've ever poured your heart and soul into a project like this, you know just how humbled I'm feeling right now. All right, let's get into season two. It is late. The day is done. Every task that could be finished has been finished, and the ones that cannot wait until morning. By any honest measure, there is nothing left to do. And your body has not received the message. You lie down, and something in you is still standing up, still scanning, still braced for a thing that is not coming. You tell yourself to relax and it lands like an instruction in a language your body does not speak. You are tired in a way that sleep does not seem to touch. Because tired and switched off turn out to be two completely different things. Somewhere along the way, staying on stopped being something you do. It became something you are. My name is Dr. Alon Aviram. I'm a psychotherapist. This is where we are, a podcast about what's actually happening in you. I want to tell you about a man I'll call Daniel. Daniel came to see me because his body had started sending bills he could not pay. His jaw ached in the mornings, his shoulders lived up near his ears. He had been to his doctor, who found nothing wrong and told him kindly to relax more. Daniel found this hilarious. Relaxing, he said, was the one thing he had never once managed to do. He was good at his life. That was the part he wanted me to understand first. He was the person who caught the problem before it became a crisis. The one who was already three steps ahead in the meeting. The one everyone could count on, because Daniel had never, not once, been caught off guard. I asked him when it started this, being ahead of everything. He thought about it for a long time. And then he told me about a house he grew up in, where the weather could change without warning, where a good evening could turn into a bad one in the space of a slammed door, and where a boy learned very early that the way to stay safe was to never stop reading the room. He got very quiet and he said, I have been reading the room for 40 years. Nobody told me I could stop. That is not a flaw in Daniel. That is a brilliant piece of engineering built by a child who needed it. The tragedy is not that he built it, the tragedy is that it kept running long after the house he built it for was gone. Here is something the body knows that we forget. Being switched on is not a defect, it is a capacity. There are moments that ask everything of you, and a body that can rev up to meet them is a gift. The problem was never that Daniel could get activated. The problem is that he could no longer come back down. A healthy body moves, it rises to meet what the day demands, and then when the demand passes, it settles. Up for the thing that matters. Down when the thing is done. That movement between the two is not a luxury, it is how a body stays a body and not a machine that eventually seizes. What happened to Daniel is what happens to a lot of us. He got stuck at one end. He learned in a house that needed him alert that coming down was dangerous, that the moment you stop scanning is the moment you get hurt. So he stopped coming down. He parked at the far edge of switched on and called it being responsible, being reliable, being the one who has it handled. And the cost of parking there is not dramatic. That is what makes it so hard to see. The cost is that the off switch rusts. The capacity to settle does not disappear. It goes quiet from lack of use, the way a language you never speak goes quiet. Until one night you lie down and reach for it and find you are not sure where it went. It is still there. This is the part I need you to hear. The calm is not gone. It is not a thing you have to build from scratch or learn from a book. It is a part of you that went silent because once silence felt unsafe, and a part that went quiet can be invited back. The goal here is not to become a calm person. There is no calm person to become. The goal is to get the movement back, to be able to rise when life asks you to, and to trust your body to calm down when it is over. Maybe you know this from the inside. You are not anxious in a way you could point to. There is no single thing you are worried about. It is more that the engine never fully idles. You are the one who is already awake before the alarm. The one who checks the lock twice. The one who, on the rare quiet weekend, feels a low static of wrongness, as if the quiet itself is a problem you are failing to solve. And people probably admire this about you. You get things done. You are ahead of it. You are the safe pair of hands, which is exactly why nobody, including you, has ever asked whether the person behind the safe hands is allowed to rest. Hear this clearly. Your body is not broken. It is doing precisely what it learned to do at full power, in a season that ended a long time ago. Staying switched on was intelligent. It kept a version of you safe. It is only that you are standing at one end of something, and you have been standing there so long you forgot it was a place and not a personality. It is a place. And places are not permanent. So here is one small thing to try this week. Not a meditation practice, not an overhaul. One small proof. Offer to your body that coming down is survivable. Once a day, pick a moment when nothing is actually required of you. Not bedtime, when the stakes are high and you are trying to fall asleep. A lower stakes moment, waiting for the kettle, sitting in the car before you go in, and for sixty seconds let one part of your body that is bracing stop bracing. Drop the shoulders. Unclench the jaw. Let the breath go out longer than it comes in. Your body may not like it. It may throw up that flicker of wrongness, that sense that letting go means getting caught. Do not argue with it. Just notice. Nothing came. You unbraced for sixty seconds, and the room did not change, and no door slammed. That is the message getting through. Not once, over and over in small doses, until the off switch remembers it still works. You are not forcing calm. You are showing your body gently that the far end is still there and that it is safe to go there for a minute. Late at night, the day is done. A body that is still standing up. That body is not your enemy, and it is not defective. It is a loyal thing that learned to stay on for a very good reason and never got told the reason had passed. You do not have to become someone else. You only have to show it slowly that the room is safe now, that you are allowed to come down. That switched on was never who you are. It is only where you have been standing, braced for a very long time. And where you are standing is something that can change. I'm Arlon. I'll see you next time.