I’ve been reading recently about a rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain (sometimes called congenital analgesia). People born with it can’t feel pain at all. At first glance, that might sound like a gift — no stubbed toe agony, no migraines, no aching joints. But in reality, it’s deeply dangerous. Without the alarm system of pain, injuries go unnoticed. Burns, broken bones, and infections creep in silently. One of the paradoxes is that what we think of as “bad”: pain, discomfort, and fear, are often what protect us.
That paradox has been sitting with me this week as I’ve wrestled with my own alarm system: anxiety.
When the Alarm Becomes Noise
This weekend my mum wasn’t well. We ended up with two visits to the walk-in centre, a new antibiotic, and the slow drip of worry that maybe she was “really ill.” In the back of my mind lurked the word sepsis. I know too well how quickly that word can turn from possibility to catastrophe.
The worry exhausted me. Headaches and a migraine left me flat. My hypervigilance didn’t help me take better care of her; it left me frazzled. The alarm was ringing so loudly that I couldn’t rest, think clearly, or be present. It was just noise.
And yet, twenty years ago, that very same anxiety saved a life.
When the clanging bell actually is an urgent warning.
When our newborn son was unwell, something in me knew his strange cry and his “just not rightness” weren’t minor. My anxiety became an insistent ring, loud enough to push me past reassurance and straight into seeking emergency help. He had sepsis. He received timely treatment. He lived.
At that time, the alarm was vital. It cut through the fog and was the only reason I acted quickly enough.
So here’s the difficulty I live with: how do I separate the life-saving signal from the exhausting noise? How do I know when anxiety is the inner bodyguard I should heed, and when it’s the smoke alarm shrieking at burnt toast?
Pain, Fear, and Meaning
Reading about people who feel no pain makes me wonder if maybe the problem isn’t the fear itself but how finely tuned our systems are to it. Too many alarms, and life becomes overwhelming. Too little, and danger slips by unnoticed.
Writers like Bessel van der Kolk remind us that trauma rewires the alarm system, sometimes setting it on a hair trigger.
I sit with a nervous system that sometimes saves me but sometimes sabotages me.
Brené Brown puts it starkly: “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
I don’t want to numb it all. I want to find a way to discern, to live with both courage and care.
Finding Quiet
One thing I’ve found is that when anxiety becomes relentless noise, I need ways to gently quiet the alarms. For me, watercolour painting does that. There’s something in the slow bleeding of colours across paper, the unpredictability of pigment and water, that calms my nervous system.
In my Watercolour for Wellbeing sessions, attendees have told me similar things. One lady shared that she had had her first whole night’s sleep in years after coming along. Others have spoken of the “headspace” they found in the middle of stressful weeks. And so many have been delighted with what they produced, even those who came convinced they “couldn’t paint.”
Here are some photos of my lovely recent participants relaxing as they (for the first time) painted a watercolour sunset.
I’m super proud of them and their paintings. They’ve reminded me that creativity can be more than a fun hobby; it can be therapy.
An Invitation
I’ll be hosting another online Watercolour for Wellbeing session on Monday, 13th October at 7.30pm. The joining link is available at the end of this post for paid subscribers. To get the most out of the session, all you’ll need is a simple set of watercolours and some good-quality paper. Here are two affordable options if you’d like to get started:
A nearly half-price watercolour set on Amazon Prime.
A reasonably priced pack of 300gsm watercolour paper.
No experience is needed, just a willingness to set aside self-judgment and play.
I think the best way to care for ourselves is not to try to silence the alarms but to find spaces where they can soften, where the noise recedes, and where we can breathe again.