Understanding Trauma, Anxiety, and Burnout in Your Nervous System – Break the Anxiety Cycle
There are two ways that your nervous system plays a direct role in anxiety and depression. Your alerting, activating system, your autonomic nervous system, can get stuck on or stuck off. And most of the people who get stuck in these states don't realize it. They're trapped in these cycles, and they just feel chronically anxious or chronically exhausted.
But the good news is that when you learn to identify what's happening, you can change it.
The Three States of the Nervous System
According to polyvagal theory, there are three states of the nervous system. There's safety, also known as the ventral vagal or the parasympathetic response. There's activation, which is also known as the sympathetic response or the fight/flight/freeze response.
And there's the overwhelm or shutdown response, the immobilization response, which is also known as dorsal vagal, which, confusingly, is also a parasympathetic response in your nervous system, but it's a more primitive state.
What Does a Healthy Nervous System Look Like?
You might think that if you're healthy, you're calm all the time, but that's not the case.
A healthy nervous system is adaptive and accurate. A person with a healthy nervous system probably spends much of their time feeling relaxed or safe, but when there's a real or immediate danger, they can respond very quickly with a fight/flight/freeze response or even an immobilization response. They can take action and then restore their sense of safety quickly.
A healthy nervous system has a broad range of emotions. You can feel calm, love, activation, excitement, stress, right? But also joy and fun. You can get quite activated, even stressed, and take action, meaning that after a stressful event, you could return to calm pretty quickly.
With a healthy nervous system, you're able to relax, sleep well. You're able to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full.
The Nervous System Is Modifiable
Your body can heal and repair, and restore. If you're listening to this and you're feeling a sense of hopelessness, like this is an impossible goal, I just want to remind you that your nervous system is like a muscle. When you learn to use it in the right way, when you exercise it in the right way, it can become healthy and strong. Your nervous system is modifiable.
It can learn, develop, change, and adapt. So if you're stuck in chronic stress, it's because your nervous system learned that. And if it learned that, it can learn the other way too.
Bottom-Up Regulation: How the Body Communicates with the Brain
Our body has a really interesting feedback loop. Our brain, probably through a part of our brain called the insula, is constantly scanning our body to see how it's functioning, and it uses sensations to determine if the body's running all hunky dory or if there's a problem.
When your body's in pain or if something's not working right, it sends a message up to your brain that it's in danger. But when your body is calm or soft or relaxed, it sends a message from your body to your brain to chill out.
And this is called a bottom-up approach to nervous system regulation. When we calm our body, we calm our mind.
Signs of an Anxious Nervous System (Hyperarousal Explained)
One form of an unhealthy nervous system is called sympathetically dominant, or nervous system hyperarousal. It's when your fight/flight/freeze response is highly active. It's stuck on all the time. And the unfortunate thing is that anxiety makes us more sensitive to threats, so when we're anxious, we actually get more anxious.
If you're stuck in the on mode, you might feel like you're on high alert all the time. You'll have a stronger reaction to threats, and that reaction may occur more quickly and at a higher level of stress. This means you're less accurate. You're more likely to interpret things as more dangerous than they are.
You're more likely to take offense when none is intended, or you're more likely to feel scared or stressed, or overwhelmed even when you're safe, and you might feel more agitated or irritable.
Physical and Mental Signs of Being Stuck “On”
When you're stuck in a state, you might feel jumpy, jittery, have an upset stomach, or crave carbs. Your heart and breathing are faster. You might feel the need to keep moving or stay busy or to overthink things, and you might also have a hard time concentrating, focusing, or remembering things.
This is, you know, it's like your nervous system is stuck in the on position all the time. You might have a hard time sleeping, relaxing, settling down, or playing, and you just might feel like you're on edge all the time, like you're always alert or always vigilant.
Usually, when people are sympathetically dominant, their alerting muscle is strong.
Rigidity, Trauma, and Chronic Stress
Usually in this mode, you're able to get stressed out and get stuff done, but you might have a hard time having fun, or you feel anxious when you try to relax. So your nervous system isn't flexible. It's rigidly stuck in the on position.
And this can be a result of trauma or chronic stress, but it can also just be a habit that we fall into. It could be caused by worrying too much or simply not knowing how to self-regulate.
And again, this is like a muscle, right? This part of your nervous system that gets activated has become very strong. But the part of your nervous system, the parasympathetic response, that relaxes is weaker, so it has a harder time kind of overriding that fight/flight/freeze response.
But like a muscle, what you exercise you strengthen.
Rewiring the Nervous System
You can rewire this through a constant process of nervous system regulation. You can check in with your body multiple times a day, multiple times an hour. Remind yourself that you are safe, and then choose to consciously engage the parasympathetic response in your body. You are choosing to regulate your nervous system.
And that's because that trauma response is essentially stored, a learned memory that it recorded of those stimuli to trigger that reaction in your nervous system.
Trauma as Learned Survival
Let me give you another example. If you're a child in an abusive home, and you know that when your mom comes home cranky from work, it's time to keep your head down, to lie low, to hide, or withdraw.
And if this happens enough over and over as a child, if that hide-and-shutdown response gets really ingrained, you may develop a response at work to avoid every form of confrontation, but you don't even realize you're doing it. Like it's this deep subconscious learning.
This is one way to understand trauma is to see it as deep and a subconscious form of learning that your nervous system does to keep you safe from threats.
But unfortunately, these defense mechanisms don't really serve us that well in the long run. And when we get rigidly stuck in these patterns of hyper or hypoarousal, it interferes with our health and our mental health, and our ability to enjoy life.
What Can We Do About This?
We can't just treat anxiety or trauma or depression or burnout in our heads or in our thoughts.
We have to treat it in our body, in our nervous system.
The first step is becoming aware.
I'm going to make a wild guess right now that you don't actually know what anxiety is like in your nervous system, and that you're constantly trying to distract yourself from uncomfortable sensations, or you're constantly intellectualizing about it, or maybe you've just never been taught to recognize what's going on in your body.
Awareness and Interoception
The first step is becoming more aware of the state of your nervous system. And one word for this is interoception. It's our ability to kind of scan our body and see what's going on.
In the next section, I want you to use the workbook to explore what anxiety feels like in your nervous system, what the activated hyperarousal response feels like, and what the shutdown response feels like.
Practical First Steps to Regulate Your Nervous System
Regulating your nervous system doesn’t require fixing yourself or doing everything perfectly. It starts with small, gentle moments of awareness throughout the day.
Pausing to notice your breathing, placing your feet firmly on the ground, or softly relaxing your shoulders can already send a signal of safety to your body.
Even naming what you feel — “I’m tense,” “I’m tired,” or “I’m safe right now” — helps your nervous system shift out of survival mode. These simple acts, repeated consistently, slowly teach your body that it no longer has to stay on high alert all the time.
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