You can't fake calm on a horse

Last week, I was catching up with my friend who had just returned from a horseback riding trip. Her stories inspired me to read about the science of horse movement and how its slow, repetitive rhythm provides the brain and body with rich sensory information that supports balance, coordination, and regulation [1-2]. But as I was watching the videos she shared, one thing struck me differently - the unspoken communication between human and animal, and that made me think about control.

Specifically, about THAT controlling woman - the one who finds it almost impossible to let things go.

At work, she tends to micromanage and conduct a full forensic audit on a project ten minutes before it goes live. She quietly rewrites an email her team member drafted because the phrasing lacks the EXACT polish she wanted for a Tuesday status update. Delegation is a nice theory, but doing it herself takes four minutes, while explaining it takes twelve minutes and three follow-up checks.

And at home? Home is where her management expertise really shines. Thank goodness, really! Because as modern society has clearly proven, men are biologically, physically, and spiritually incapable of surviving on their own. So she hovers near the kitchen island during grocery unpacking to ensure the olive oil goes near the stove, because leaving a grown man to store dry goods unsupervised is an operational risk no household can afford.

She also finds herself supervising her husband as he packs the car trunk, offering tactical guidance on bag placement. She just MUST step in, driven by a quiet conviction that she is, objectively speaking, the most qualified person in the room to handle... well, everything.

Deep down, she isn’t trying to be bossy. She is simply carrying the heroic & exhausting burden of knowing that if she turns her back for five minutes, the domestic ecosystem will collapse. The laundry will sit wet in the washing machine until it grows its own civilization, the dog will be fed twice while the kids aren't fed at all, and her husband will somehow manage to burn water.

She isn't micromanaging - she's just keeping society from crumbling into chaos. You're welcome, everyone (especially men!).

I imagine we all know someone like that. Maybe we have been THAT woman ourselves. From the outside, it often looks like an exceptional work ethic or high perfectionism. People admire it. She is organised, dependable, and remarkably capable. She anticipates problems before anyone else even notices them, keeping everything moving smoothly even when life becomes overwhelmingly complicated. In many ways, control becomes the very engine of her success.

The problem is that what begins as a useful strategy at work or during difficult periods of life rarely stays neatly contained there.

Over time, the nervous system begins treating control as something much bigger than a professional skill. It gradually becomes fused with safety itself (it often starts in chaotic childhood). The brain learns that constantly monitoring, anticipating, and managing the environment is what keeps unpleasant surprises away. It is no longer just an administrative habit - it has become her primary mechanism for self-protection.

Now, can you imagine THAT woman sitting on a horse for the first time?

As I was watching my friend’s videos from her trip, I paid close attention to the riders’ postures. There was no visible struggle, no forceful steering, no attempt to overpower the animal. Everything looked fluid, less like an act of control and more like an unspoken conversation.

It made me wonder: what must that experience feel like for a woman whose nervous system has spent years believing that holding everything together is the only way to remain safe?

Her instinct will naturally be the exact same one that has served her everywhere else in life. She tightens her grip on the reins, braces through her shoulders and core, monitors every slight movement, and tries to stay three steps ahead of what the horse might do next. She approaches the animal in the exact same way she approaches her job, her relationships, and her daily life: by trying to anticipate every variable before it happens.

Except, a horse will see straight through that performance.

You cannot manage a 500 kg animal with the same strategies you use in an office. A horse is not a project to oversee or a problem to solve. It is a living biological system continuously responding to movement, posture, touch, attention, and the wider physiological state of the person beside it. As prey animals, horses evolved to detect subtle changes in their environment and in the behaviour of other living beings, because recognising possible danger early supported their survival - noticing micro-shifts in muscle tension, breathing depth, and heart rate was a matter of life or death [3].

If you approach a horse with outward composure but carry an internal baseline of hyper-vigilance, the horse registers that subtle friction immediately (there are those of us humans who can tune into this too - do you remember the last time you knew someone was simply "off"?). To the horse, physical bracing signals hidden tension, and hidden tension signals potential danger. The more the rider tries to force obedience through rigid control, the more hesitant or reactive the horse becomes. The rider feels even less in control, and both nervous systems end up locked in a cycle of mutual defense [3].

So HER strategy that worked everywhere else now completely crumbles.

The fascinating part, however, is that the solution is never to become more controlling.

Instead, riders discover that a horse responds best when they organise their own internal state. They are forced to soften unnecessary tension and move with the rhythm instead of fighting it. They communicate through subtle shifts rather than brute force. What initially feels like giving up control gradually transforms into something entirely different - cooperation.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is a vivid illustration of co-regulation. We often think of co-regulation as something that only happens between parent and child, or between romantic partners, but our nervous systems are continuously scanning and responding to the living beings around us. We influence one another through posture, breath, and micro-movements long before our conscious mind forms a thought.

Horse riding just makes that exchange unusually visible because a confused or threatened horse is a resisting horse [4].

So it strips away the illusion that control creates safety, because another living nervous system responds to what our body is actually communicating, rather than the polished story we tell ourselves and others (hello, office etiquette and politics!)

For women who have spent years using control as a shield (a way to ensure they are never caught off guard, disappointed, or hurt by the unpredictability of others) this can be a profound threshold. It offers a rare space to discover that safety does not always require tightening your grip around uncertainty.

Sometimes, safety begins when we allow another biological system to share the movement, realizing that trust is not the opposite of competence. It is simply another way the nervous system learns that the world will not fall apart the moment we stop holding every piece of it together.

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The lesson is not really about learning how to guide a horse. It is about discovering, through experience rather than insight alone, that the body can begin to feel safe without relying on the constant effort of controlling everything around it. You cannot fake calm on a horse, because the horse is responding to far more than the expression on your face or the confidence in your voice. It responds to the tension you are still carrying, the movement you are resisting, and the signals your body is communicating before you have found the words for them.

For a woman who has spent years understanding herself intellectually, this can become something profoundly different: an opportunity to experience, in real time, that competence does not disappear when control softens, and that trust can be learned through the body before the mind is fully ready to believe it ♥

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References:

[1] What is hippotherapy? The indications and effectiveness of hippotherapy. PMID: 28058377  [2] Therapeutic Effects of Horseback Riding Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. PMID: 28252520

[3] Unveiling directional physiological coupling in human-horse interactions. PMCID: PMC11414536

[4] Additional reading: Horses that Refuse Due to Confusion https://www.horsejournals.com/riding-training/more-disciplines/natural-horsemanship/horses-refuse-due-confusion