What’s Happening in Your Body
03 of 07Your body has an alarm system designed to keep you alive.
When it senses danger, it acts fast, often before you’ve consciously registered what’s happening. Stress hormones are released. Your heart beats faster, your breathing changes and digestion can slow as your body prepares to protect you.
This response is vital if a car is speeding towards you. It’s far less helpful in a meeting, in a supermarket queue or lying in bed at 3am.
Sometimes, you have no idea why you feel anxious. You might be safe, surrounded by good people and in a happy chapter of your life, yet still feel that something isn’t right. That mismatch can be confusing: “Everything is good. Why do I feel like this?”
Your alarm system responds to more than what’s happening around you. Past experiences and learned patterns can shape what feels threatening now. A tone of voice, a sensation or a familiar situation may remind your body of an earlier time when you felt unsafe, even when you don’t consciously recognise the connection.
This can be an invitation to gently look within. You don’t need to force a memory or find one hidden cause. Anxiety can have several contributors, including ongoing stress, poor sleep and changes in physical health.
Start with curiosity: “What am I feeling? What might be contributing to it?” Or simply ask your inner self, “What do you need from me right now?”
You don’t have to understand every part of your anxiety before you deserve relief and support.
When the alarm gets stuck on
For some people, the alarm becomes oversensitive. It might be the result of a frightening experience, years of stress, growing up in an unpredictable home, or simply the way someone is wired. Often it’s a combination.
Over time, the body learns to stay on guard. The alarm goes off at things that aren’t actually dangerous: a raised voice, an unread message, a crowded room, a sensation in your chest.
That’s why you can know, logically, that you’re safe and still feel completely unsafe.
Why logic doesn’t switch it off
“Just calm down” rarely works, because anxiety doesn’t live only in the thinking part of the brain. The parts of the brain and body that sound the alarm respond to signals of safety, not to arguments.
This is why body-based tools can help so much. Slowing your breath, especially your breath out, feeling your feet on the floor, moving your body or being near someone safe all send a message to your nervous system: we’re okay right now.
The breath and anxiety
When we’re anxious, we tend to breathe fast and shallow, high in the chest. That can create more of the sensations we associate with fear: a tight chest, dizziness, tingling. Which makes us more anxious. Which makes us breathe faster.
Many people have never been taught how to breathe in a way that settles the body. Learning to breathe more slowly and gently, low into the belly, with a longer breath out, can be a simple and powerful place to start.
“It wasn’t until my 40s, when I paid a breathwork coach, that I learned how to breathe in a way that helped me feel calmer. Until then, I’d been taking shallow breaths high in my chest, without realising how much that pattern was adding to my anxiety.”
Anxiety is protection, not a flaw
Your anxiety may once have helped you survive. Being alert, careful and quick to sense danger can be exactly what a child needs in a frightening environment. The problem isn’t that your body learned to protect you. It’s that it hasn’t yet learned it can stand down.
