The Anxious Body
anxiety & nervous system
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When You Know What’s Wrong But Your Body Won’t Calm Down
It was 11:41pm and I already knew exactly what this was. I’d sent the email an hour earlier. Short, polite, the kind of message you write four times before you let yourself hit send. That person would read it in the morning. There was nothing left to do. I’d said the thing. It was out of my hands now, in the truest sense a sentence can be true. And still — my heart was going like I’d just sprinted somewhere. Still my jaw was tight enough that I could feel my own pulse in my teeth. Still my hands, resting flat on the duvet, wouldn’t stop their small private tremor,…
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5 Signs Your Nervous System Is Dysregulated (And What To Do About It)
I was in a meeting. An ordinary one — nothing on fire, nobody upset with me. And yet something in my chest was braced. My jaw was tight. I kept waiting for something bad to happen. Nothing happened. The meeting ended. I sat at my desk and couldn’t understand why my body was still in it — still coiled, still scanning. I’d eaten. I’d slept. By every external measure, everything was fine. That’s the thing about a nervous system that won’t settle. It doesn’t care about your calendar. It doesn’t respond to your reasoning. You can know, intellectually, that you’re safe — and your body will carry on as if…