Why you cannot seem to relax even when nothing is wrong

You are sitting on the sofa in the evening and the day is done, but your body is still switched on. Shoulders tight, thoughts that will not quiet down and somewhere in your chest a tension you cannot place. Maybe you also wake up at half past three at night, for no reason, with a body that is tired but thoughts already running at full speed.

I know what that is. What I first took for a burnout turned out to be mostly an alarm system that went off far too quickly.

Your internal alarm system

Deep in your brain, a system is constantly assessing whether you are safe. The amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure, plays an important role in it, but it does not work alone. Your whole brain takes part, and it keeps listening to your body as it does: your heart rate, your breath, your muscle tension.

What most people do not know: that alarm system relies heavily on what we call implicit memory. Your body has a kind of memory. A memory without words, without conscious recollections, just stored experiences in your body. Your brain uses those experiences to predict what is about to happen. When something now resembles something from the past, your nervous system can re-experience that old situation, even if it has little to do with what is actually happening now.

An example many people recognise

Imagine your partner says something in a certain tone and something in you shuts down, while you rationally know nothing serious is going on. Or someone does not reply to your message and your thoughts immediately spiral towards the worst. Your alarm system goes off, while there is no actual danger in that moment. Your body has simply remembered that a certain situation was once threatening. Your muscles tighten, your breathing changes and you physically relive what you experienced before.

That is not an overreaction, that is your nervous system doing exactly what it was made to do. You may have read about a “lizard brain” that takes over from your rational human brain. That picture is outdated. You have one brain, and in the face of danger that whole brain briefly shifts its priorities. Survival comes first, the rest follows later or not at all.

How that pattern gets stronger

With trauma, your nervous system learns that the world is dangerous. Peter Levine describes it this way: trauma symptoms are not caused by the event itself, but by the survival energy that did not escape the body and got stuck there, causing that energy to keep activating the system. Sometimes even for years.

Chronic stress works the same way, even without one single major traumatic event. Years of work pressure, always switched on, never enough rest, that builds up in the body and your alarm system goes off more and more quickly, making small things feel big. Under prolonged stress, the front part of your brain, the part you use to plan and see nuance, temporarily works less well. You literally think less clearly, because your brain shifts its energy towards survival.

Why talking sometimes is not enough

Cognitive therapy is valuable and it helps you recognise patterns and gain insight, but there is something I have experienced myself and now hear from many people who come to me: you can understand everything and still feel it. That is because you cannot access those tensions from the head alone. About 80% of the fibres of the vagus nerve, the large nerve between body and brain, send information from the body to the brain. Only 20% goes the other way. This means your body sends far more information to your brain than the other way around.

How Somatic Experiencing works differently

The key difference is that with Somatic Experiencing you work from the body. You engage with those tensions, sensations and emotions rather than from the head.

What is important to understand here: your body often barely distinguishes between something that happened in the past and what is happening now. If you talk about a situation from last week that triggered something, your body will already start firing signals in that moment, as if it is happening again. And that is exactly what we can work with. We do not need to go back to the trauma itself, but work with what your body is showing right now.

Not through reasoning, but through what you feel in your body right now.

By calling up small doses of activation again and again and then returning to rest (for example through your resources), your nervous system learns something new: I can handle this feeling and I will not be swept away. That is how you activate your body’s self-regulating capacity, step by step.

If you feel like you understand everything but still feel tension, pressure or something that just does not sit right, somatic work can be a way back into communication with your nervous system and your body.

Going beyond understanding

Want to know where your nervous system stands right now? The free Nervous System Scan gives you a clear picture in just a few minutes.

Looking for personal guidance? Book a 1:1 session with me at the practice.