Why Anxiety Feels Physical: Understanding Your Nervous System | Cedar Rose Counseling
If you've ever experienced a racing heart, stomach in knots, or muscles so tense you can't seem to relax—even when there's no clear danger present—you're not alone. And more importantly, you're not imagining it.
As a licensed therapist specializing in holistic anxiety treatment at Cedar Rose Counseling & Wellness in West Chester, Ohio, I work with women every day who are struggling to understand why their anxiety feels so overwhelmingly physical. They often come to therapy asking, "Why can't I just calm down?" or "What's wrong with me?"
Here's what I tell them: Nothing is wrong with you. Your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do.
Anxiety isn't just a mental experience—it's a full-body phenomenon rooted in your nervous system's attempt to protect you. When you understand what's actually happening in your body during anxious moments, everything starts to make sense. And from that understanding, real healing becomes possible.
Understanding Your Autonomic Nervous System
To understand why anxiety feels so physical, we first need to talk about your autonomic nervous system (ANS)—your body's built-in autopilot system.
The autonomic nervous system runs continuously in the background, managing essential functions you don't consciously control: your heartbeat, breathing rate, digestion, body temperature, and more. It's an incredibly sophisticated system designed to keep you alive and functioning optimally.
The ANS has two primary branches that work in balance:
The Sympathetic Nervous System: Your Body's Alarm System
Think of your sympathetic nervous system as your internal security system. It's designed to activate when your brain or body detects a potential threat to your safety or well-being. This is often called the "fight-or-flight" response, and it's an evolutionary survival mechanism that has kept humans alive for millennia.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System: Your Rest-and-Digest System
The parasympathetic nervous system is essentially the opposite—it's your "rest-and-digest" mode. When this system is active, you feel calm, safe, and connected. Your body can focus on restoration, healing, digestion, and social connection.
A Deeper Look: Polyvagal Theory
Modern neuroscience, particularly Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, has given us an even more nuanced understanding of how our nervous system functions. According to this theory, the parasympathetic nervous system actually has two distinct parts:
Ventral Vagal System (Social Engagement): This is the state where you feel truly safe and connected. You can think clearly, engage with others, and respond flexibly to your environment. This is the optimal state for daily functioning and relationship building.
Dorsal Vagal System (Shutdown): When stress becomes completely overwhelming, your body might shift into this shutdown or "freeze" mode. You might feel numb, disconnected, or immobilized. This is your body's last-resort protective response when fight or flight aren't options.
For the purposes of understanding anxiety, we're going to focus primarily on the sympathetic nervous system—because this is where anxiety lives.
Why Your Body Goes Into Protection Mode
Your sympathetic nervous system is designed to activate whenever your brain or body identifies a possible threat. And this is the key word: possible.
Your nervous system doesn't distinguish between actual, immediate physical danger (like a car swerving into your lane) and perceived psychological threats. It responds to both with the same protective activation.
Common perceived threats that can trigger your anxiety response include:
A tense or critical email from your boss or coworker
Scrolling through social media and thinking you are behind or inadequate
Worrying about future events that might go wrong
Ruminating about conversations that haven't even happened
Feeling like you're not measuring up to your own standards of perfection or success
Financial stress or uncertainty
Relationship conflicts or tension
Overwhelming to-do lists with no clear end in sight
Your nervous system doesn't pause to analyze whether these concerns are rational or whether you're in actual danger. It simply recognizes: Something feels unsafe. I need to protect you. And immediately, it shifts into survival mode.
What Survival Mode Feels Like in Your Body
When your sympathetic nervous system activates and your body enters survival mode, a cascade of physiological changes occurs almost instantaneously:
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Your muscles tense up so you're prepared to fight or flee from danger. This often manifests as:
Tight shoulders and neck
Jaw clenching
Tension headaches
Overall body rigidity
Your heart rate increases to pump more blood to your major muscle groups, preparing them for action. You might experience:
Racing heartbeat or palpitations
Chest tightness
Feeling like your heart is pounding out of your chest
Your breathing becomes rapid and shallow to quickly increase oxygen intake. This can lead to:
Shortness of breath
Hyperventilation
Dizziness or lightheadedness
Feeling like you can't get enough air
Your digestion slows or stops entirely because your body deprioritizes functions not essential for immediate survival. This results in:
Nausea
Stomach pain or cramping
Constipation or diarrhea
Loss of appetite or stress eating
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms
Your thoughts become fixated as your brain rapidly scans for threats and attempts problem-solving. You might notice:
Racing thoughts
Inability to concentrate on anything except the perceived threat
Catastrophic thinking
Mental loops that you can't seem to break
The Long-Term Physical Impact
Here's what makes chronic anxiety so damaging to your health: Any bodily process not essential to immediate survival gets paused or deprioritized.
This means:
Digestion suffers: Leading to chronic gastrointestinal issues, malabsorption of nutrients, and gut health problems
Reproductive function is affected: Hormones become imbalanced, menstrual cycles may become irregular, sex drive decreases, and fertility can be impacted
Immune function decreases: Making you more susceptible to illness and infection
Higher-order thinking becomes impaired: Concentration, memory, creativity, and decision-making all suffer when your brain is in threat-detection mode
This protective system is absolutely brilliant when you're facing genuine, immediate danger. The problem? We were never designed to live in a chronic state of activation.
When your nervous system remains on high alert day after day, week after week, without receiving the clear message that it's safe to relax, the toll on your physical and mental health becomes significant and cumulative.
Why You Can't Just "Calm Down"
If you've ever felt frustrated when someone told you to "just relax" or "stop worrying so much"—or if you've tried giving yourself this same advice—here's why it doesn't work:
Your nervous system doesn't respond to logic. It responds to safety signals.
You cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot simply decide to calm down through willpower alone. If your body genuinely believes it's unsafe—regardless of what your rational mind knows—it will maintain its protective stance.
This is why understanding your nervous system is transformative. Once you recognize what's happening and why, you can begin working with your body's protective mechanisms instead of fighting against them or feeling ashamed of them.
The Window of Tolerance: Understanding Your Capacity for Stress
One of the most helpful concepts for understanding anxiety and nervous system dysregulation is the "window of tolerance," a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel.
What Is Your Window of Tolerance?
Your window of tolerance is the emotional and physiological zone where you feel stable, grounded, and capable of handling whatever life presents. When you're operating within your window of tolerance, you:
Feel like yourself
Can think clearly and problem-solve effectively
Connect easily with others
Process emotions in healthy ways
Respond to stress with resilience and flexibility
Maintain perspective on challenges
What Happens Outside Your Window
When something pushes you beyond your window of tolerance—whether it's a specific trigger, accumulated stress, or simply one too many demands on your system—you shift into one of two dysregulated states:
Hyperarousal (Above Your Window): This manifests as anxiety, panic, rage, or overwhelm. You feel:
Revved up and on edge
Unable to settle or calm down
Hypervigilant and scanning for threats
Emotionally reactive
Physically tense and uncomfortable
Hypoarousal (Below Your Window): This manifests as shutdown, numbness, disconnection, or depression. You feel:
Flat and emotionally unavailable
Exhausted and unable to engage
Disconnected from yourself and others
Hopeless or despairing
Physically heavy and immobilized
Why Some People Have Narrower Windows
When you've experienced trauma, chronic stress, or ongoing anxiety, your window of tolerance becomes progressively narrower. This means it takes less stress or stimulation to push you out of your regulated zone.
Things that might not have bothered you in the past—a minor criticism, a change in plans, a busy schedule—suddenly feel completely overwhelming because your capacity to handle stress has diminished.
The good news? Your window of tolerance can be widened through intentional nervous system work.
How to Work With Your Nervous System
The goal of holistic anxiety treatment isn't to never feel anxious or stressed—that's neither realistic nor desirable. Appropriate anxiety serves important protective and motivational functions.
The goal is to:
Widen your window of tolerance so you can handle more before becoming dysregulated
Develop awareness of when you're moving outside your window
Build skills to bring yourself back into regulation more quickly
Co-Regulation in Therapy
One of the most powerful tools we use in therapy is co-regulation—the process by which one person's regulated nervous system helps another person's nervous system find regulation.
As your therapist, I'm continuously attuning to your body language, tone of voice, and nervous system state. I use my own grounded, regulated presence to help signal safety to your nervous system. This might involve:
Slowing my speech and softening my tone
Maintaining a calm, open body posture
Breathing slowly and deeply
Offering validation and compassion
Creating a physically and emotionally safe therapeutic space
This is why therapy is about so much more than just talking. It's about creating an environment where your nervous system can finally experience what safety actually feels like—often for the first time in a long time.
Self-Regulation Practices
While co-regulation in therapy is powerful, there's also significant work you can do independently to support your nervous system. Here are the foundational steps:
1. Develop Nervous System Awareness
The first step toward regulation is awareness. Begin noticing:
What does dysregulation feel like in your body specifically?
Where do you hold tension? (Jaw? Shoulders? Stomach?)
What are your early warning signs that you're moving outside your window?
Do you tend toward hyperarousal (anxiety) or hypoarousal (shutdown)?
The more attuned you become to your own nervous system signals, the earlier you can intervene.
2. Identify Your Personal Triggers
Understanding what pushes you outside your window of tolerance is essential. Common triggers include:
Specific people, situations, or environments
Lack of sleep or poor sleep quality
Skipping meals or blood sugar fluctuations
Overcommitting and lack of boundaries
Perfectionism and unrealistic expectations
Comparison and social media consumption
Unresolved conflict or difficult conversations
When you understand your patterns, you can either avoid unnecessary triggers or prepare yourself with extra support when facing unavoidable ones.
3. Build Your Regulation Toolkit
This is where specific practices and techniques become essential. Effective nervous system regulation strategies include:
Breathwork: Slow, deep breathing directly signals to your vagus nerve that you're safe, shifting you from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation.
Grounding Exercises: Techniques like the 5-4-3-2-1 method (identifying 5 things you see, 4 you can touch, etc.) bring you into the present moment and out of anxious thinking.
Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness—the practice of present-moment awareness without judgment—is foundational to anxiety healing. It helps you observe your thoughts and bodily sensations without becoming overwhelmed by them.
Guided Meditations: Structured meditation practices can help retrain your nervous system's baseline state over time.
Movement: Gentle movement like walking, yoga, or stretching helps discharge the physical tension and activation that accompanies anxiety.
At Cedar Rose, I've created numerous guided practices specifically designed to help you regulate your emotions and calm your nervous system. I also offer a free Calm Guide that walks you through implementing a personalized relaxation training routine—essentially helping you identify which practices resonate most with you and how to incorporate them into daily life.
The Role of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
In my practice at Cedar Rose Counseling & Wellness, I primarily use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as the therapeutic framework for anxiety treatment. ACT is particularly effective for anxiety because it aligns with the physiological changes that occur within anxious moments. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we don’t simply challenge or change particularly distressing thoughts (as is taught in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy); We learn to fundamentally shift how we respond to anxiety as a whole.
Core Principles of ACT for Anxiety
Acceptance Rather Than Avoidance: Instead of trying to eliminate or control anxiety (which paradoxically often makes it worse), ACT teaches you to make space for uncomfortable feelings while still moving toward what matters to you.
Cognitive Defusion: You learn to observe your anxious thoughts without believing them or being controlled by them. Your thoughts are mental events, not facts or commands.
Present Moment Awareness: Grounded in mindfulness, ACT helps you stay connected to the present rather than getting lost in anxious projections about the future or rumination about the past.
Values Clarification: You identify what truly matters to you in life—your core values—and use these as a compass for decision-making rather than letting anxiety dictate your choices.
Committed Action: You take action aligned with your values even when anxiety is present, building confidence and expanding your window of tolerance over time.
Self-as-Context: You recognize that you are not your anxiety; you are the person experiencing anxiety. This creates psychological distance and flexibility.
Why ACT Works for Nervous System Healing
ACT is particularly powerful for anxiety because it doesn't require your nervous system to be calm before you can live your life. Instead, it teaches you to carry your anxiety with you while still doing what matters—and in the process of taking values-aligned action despite anxiety, your nervous system gradually learns that the feared situations are actually safe.
This exposure, combined with acceptance rather than avoidance, is what creates lasting change.
Moving Toward Healing
If you've made it this far in this article, here's what I want you to understand:
Your anxiety is not a character flaw. It's not evidence that you're broken, weak, or damaged.
Your anxiety is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do—protect you from perceived threats. The problem isn't the anxiety itself; it's that your nervous system has learned to stay activated chronically, even when you're physically safe.
But here's the hopeful truth: Your nervous system is capable of learning new patterns.
Through understanding, awareness, and consistent practice—combined with professional support when needed—you can:
Expand your window of tolerance
Teach your body what safety actually feels like
Reduce the frequency and intensity of anxiety symptoms
Build genuine, sustainable calm rather than just managing symptoms
Reclaim your life from anxiety's grip
When to Seek Professional Support
While self-regulation practices are valuable, some situations call for professional therapeutic support. It may be time to seek this support if:
Your anxiety significantly interferes with daily functioning
You're experiencing panic attacks
You've noticed physical health problems related to chronic stress
Self-help strategies haven't created meaningful change
You're feeling hopeless or experiencing depression alongside anxiety
You have a history of trauma affecting your current anxiety levels
You want guided support in expanding your window of tolerance and building lasting change
At Cedar Rose Counseling & Wellness, I specialize in holistic anxiety therapy for women throughout Ohio. Using a combination of nervous system education, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mindfulness practices, and mind-body integration, we work together to understand what's happening in your nervous system, process what's keeping you stuck, and build sustainable calm from the inside out.
I offer both in-person sessions at my West Chester, Ohio office and telehealth appointments for clients throughout Ohio.
Your Next Steps
Understanding your nervous system is the crucial first step toward healing anxiety. From here, the journey involves:
Building awareness of your own nervous system patterns and triggers
Practicing regulation techniques consistently, not just when you're in crisis
Challenging avoidance patterns and taking values-aligned action despite anxiety
Seeking support when you need guidance, validation, or co-regulation
Being patient and compassionate with yourself through the process
Remember: You didn't develop chronic anxiety overnight, and healing won't happen overnight either. But with understanding, practice, and support, meaningful change is absolutely possible.
Your nervous system has been working overtime to protect you. Now it's time to teach it that it's safe to rest.
Free Resources
Download the Calm Guide: Get my free guide with 5 proven nervous system regulation strategies and a step-by-step action plan for implementing relaxation training in your daily life.
Guided Meditations: Access free guided practices on the Mindful Moments YouTube channel and Spotify, specifically designed to help you regulate your nervous system and find relief from anxiety.
Ready for Deeper Support?
If you're a woman in Ohio struggling with anxiety, burnout, or chronic stress, I'd love to support you in your healing journey.
At Cedar Rose Counseling & Wellness, we don't just manage symptoms—we address what's actually driving your anxiety so you can experience lasting peace and relief.
Book a free consultation to learn more about holistic anxiety therapy and whether working together might be a good fit.
If you are outside of Ohio, Cedar Rose is proud to be able to support you through our online, self-paced anxiety course.
Katie McLaughlin, LPCC-S, is a licensed therapist and the founder of Cedar Rose Counseling & Wellness in West Chester, Ohio. She specializes in holistic anxiety treatment for women, using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, nervous system education, and mind-body integration to help clients heal anxiety at the root.
