If you have ever felt your heart race before a meeting or your stomach tighten in traffic, you have felt anxiety. This is your nervous system at work. It’s the body’s built-in alarm — designed to protect you. But when that alarm becomes overactive, the same mechanism that once kept you safe can begin to harm your health.
Anxiety isn’t just in your head. It’s a full-body state. It is a response that can be understood. With practice, it can be reset through body therapy for anxiety.
The Biology of Anxiety
The human nervous system has two main modes: the sympathetic (fight or flight) and the parasympathetic (rest and digest).
When the brain senses danger, like a speeding car or a stressful email, it releases stress hormones. Hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Heart rate increases, muscles tense, and digestion pauses.
This response evolved to save us from predators. The problem is that modern stressors — deadlines, social tension, financial worries — rarely resolve through action. The threat remains psychological, but the chronic stress response stays physiological.
Over time, living in a state of prolonged activation contributes to inflammation, sleep disturbance, digestive issues, and cardiovascular strain. Research from Harvard Medical School shows that long-term stress can be harmful. It increases the risk of high blood pressure, and can also weaken the immune system. Additionally, it raises the chances of anxiety disorders.
When the Body Misreads Its Own Signals
Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, explains how we can become very sensitive to anxiety. This includes feeling a fast heartbeat, shallow breathing, or tightness in the chest.
At first, these sensations are adaptive warnings. But when our nervous system starts perceiving these sensations themselves as dangerous, we enter a feedback loop: we begin to fear the feeling of fear.
In this state, the body isn’t reacting to an external threat but to its own internal sensations — a body-mind connection turned against itself. This can trap the nervous system in chronic sympathetic activation, even when life appears calm on the outside.
Why Long-Term Fight or Flight Is Unhealthy
When your body stays in fight or flight mode for too long, it drains energy reserves meant for healing, digestion, and deep rest. The result can be fatigue, gut issues, irritability, and difficulty focusing.
This is because the parasympathetic nervous system — the body’s “recovery mode” — can’t do its job while stress hormones dominate. Learning to shift consciously from activation to rest is at the heart of nervous system reset practices.
How to Reset the System
Cognitive insight alone often isn’t enough because anxiety is generated below conscious thought. Whereas approaches like somatic therapy for anxiety or mindfulness counselling can help recalibrate the body’s alarm system.
Here are a few science-backed ways to begin:
- The Physiological Sigh
Take a deep breath through your nose, then a second, smaller sip of air at the top of the inhale. Slowly sigh it all out through your mouth.
This double-inhale, long-exhale pattern activates the vagus nerve and helps engage the parasympathetic system.
Research from Stanford University’s Huberman Lab shows that just a few physiological sighs can reduce anxiety within minutes.
- Ground Through the Senses
Notice five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste.
This sensory grounding draws awareness out of mental rumination and into the present — helping calm the brain’s stress response.
- Gentle Movement
Slow, mindful movement — walking, stretching, or shaking out the hands — helps the body metabolize residual stress hormones.
Movement signals to the nervous system that the threat has passed, completing the cycle of regulation.
Mind and Body Working Together
This is where mindfulness and anxiety research intersects with neuroscience. Mindfulness is not about emptying your mind. It is about noticing sensations without judging them. This helps the nervous system to calm down.
Organisations like The Hakomi Institute, teach that awareness itself can be transformative when paired with compassion and curiosity toward bodily experience.
From Guarding Against Life to Working With It
Anxiety is the body’s attempt to protect you. But when the alarm won’t turn off, learning to listen — rather than fight — becomes the real work. Through body-based psychotherapy and mindfulness counselling, the nervous system can relearn safety, one breath, one physiological sigh at a time.
