Understanding Anxiety as a Nervous System Response
July 11, 2025 | By Dana Harron
When Anxiety Isn’t Just Anxiety: Understanding the Deeper Signals of a Stressed Nervous System
Anxiety can feel like perfectionism, restlessness, or a body that just won’t relax. In this blog, we explore anxiety through a trauma-responsive, body-based lens, honoring both the science and the story underneath the symptoms.
Anxiety as a Body-Based Alarm, Not a Character Flaw
Anxiety is often treated like a nuisance to be managed or a flaw to be fixed. But when we look more closely, anxiety is the body’s way of saying, "Something doesn’t feel safe." It may not be logical or timely, but it is deeply rooted in our nervous system’s attempts to protect us. Muscle tension, racing thoughts, headaches, memory loss, coordination difficulties, and insomnia aren't just random symptoms. They’re cues from a body stuck in high alert.
How Early Relational Trauma Can Wire Us for Worry
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Not everyone who has anxiety has early relational trauma. But for some, chronic anxiety can build over time if love comes with conditions, care is inconsistent, or we don't have a supportive family and community.
The nervous system learns to stay braced. It adapts by constantly scanning for danger, reading between lines, noticing "problems," and preparing for things to go wrong. These early adaptations may look like overthinking or people-pleasing in adulthood, but underneath is a nervous system trying hard to survive.
The Performance-Anxiety Loop in High Achievers
For many high-performing individuals, anxiety becomes fuel. Success is a way to stave off the feeling that something is wrong inside. But the more you accomplish, the more pressure builds to keep it all going. Who you compare yourself to starts to shift: you were proud to be accepted into law school, now you need to be at the top of your class. Good grades used to be enough, but now you have to land a "plush" job and make it look easy.
Rest starts to feel risky, and slowing down might even trigger panic. This can create a loop where anxiety drives achievement, and achievement masks anxiety.
Why Coping Skills Aren’t Enough
There are a plethora of ways to soothe anxiety in a given moment. Breathing exercises and mindfulness apps can offer brief relief, but they often skim the surface. If the nervous system still believes the world isn’t safe, those techniques can start to feel hollow or even frustrating.
What actually helps is working slowly, relationally, and with deep respect for the body’s timeline. Therapy becomes a space not just for problem-solving, but for creating the felt sense of safety that was missing all along. It becomes a place to welcome back disowned parts of the self that may have been exiled in the name of survival.
Creating Safety Inside: How Therapy Can Unwind Chronic Vigilance
At Monarch, we don’t try to "get rid" of anxiety. We listen to it. Not to the content of the spiraling thoughts like, “What if I’m late on that project, and then my boss doesn’t like me, and I never get promoted, and somehow I end up sleeping under a bridge” chatter, but to the message it offers underneath, about what the body is experiencing.
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We understand anxiety as the language of a body that has been carrying too much for too long. Through somatic work, trauma-responsive care, and steady relational presence, we help clients move from vigilance to groundedness.
The goal isn’t forced calm or pretending everything’s fine. It's an enduring and sustainable inner calm that doesn't require constant bracing or achievement upkeep. That kind of change doesn’t happen overnight, but it is absolutely possible.
Rethinking Anxiety
We need to acknowledge that for many people it makes sense to be anxious, particularly right now. For many, however, the anxiety is not helping the situation and may in fact make it harder to respond appropriately. Anxiety might also be seen as a call from the parts of ourselves that we haven't been listening to. It may arise when we’ve over-identified with a polished version of self: the professional, the go-getter, the hyper-competent and hyper-busy achiever.
Underneath all that may be a quieter voice asking to be acknowledged: the tired part, the tender part, the part that doesn’t want to keep bracing. From that perspective, anxiety isn’t just a warning signal, it’s a threshold to a more whole version of yourself.
Listening to Anxiety
Anxiety is not a weakness. When we stop trying to “fix” anxiety and start understanding what it’s trying to tell us, healing becomes possible. Therapy can support this journey, helping you reconnect with the parts of yourself that have been working overtime to protect you.
Reach Out
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