Rethinking Anxiety: A Somatic Return to the Body

Anxiety has long been treated as a mental puzzle… something to be reasoned with, medicated, or talked through.
It’s been pathologized, named, and categorized in diagnostic codes.
But a growing number of clinicians, researchers, and somatic practitioners are inviting a profound shift: what if anxiety doesn’t begin in the mind at all? What if it begins in the body?

Anxiety as a Bodily Experience

Pause and sense into your body right now. Where is most alive in you?

Is it in the shallow rise of your chest?
The static hum behind your eyes?
The clench of your belly before a big decision?

Somatic practitioners are noticing a pattern: the body often perceives threat before the mind can make meaning of it. Anxiety isn’t just a racing mind, it’s a racing system.

The tension in your shoulders. The sweat on your palms. The clentching of your jaw.

They are messages.
Yet so many of us are conditioned to override these messages in favor of productivity, perfection, or emotional suppression.

Rather than sweeping them aside, somatic practices teach us to listen to them, to be with the body, not override it.

Breath as a Healing Portal

The breath is one of the most accessible, body-led tools we have. It’s not a hack or a trick.

It’s a portal.

It improves oxygen uptake, supports heart health, and clears brain fog.
More importantly, it helps us to shift from a sympathetic (fight/flight) into a more ventral vagal state, where we are able to rest & recover.

Here’s one simple practice to get you started:

Box Breathing -

Inhale slowly through your nose for four counts. Pause for four counts. Exhale slowly through your nose for four counts. Pause for four counts.

Do this for 5 minutes.

Let your body settle.

Let your system exhale.

This isn’t woo. It’s nervous system regulation.

What becomes possible when your breath becoems your companion, not an afterthought?

If you want to develop this practice in a tailored, structured, body-informed way, explore The Repattern. My signature nervous system program.

Somatic Therapies: Listening, Not Fixing

Somatic approaches to anxiety are not about achieving calm as a goal.

They are about developing capacity to stay present with what is, even if what is feels overwhelming, fragmented, or charged.

Therapies like EMDR, vagal toning, and Shadow work don’t treat anxiety as pathology.

They treat it as a pattern of dysregulation, an imprint of something unresolved that’s still asking for completion.

In this view, anxiety isn’t a failure of your mental strength.
It’s the imprint of a body that never got to finish its defensive response.

It’s the freeze that got stuck. The fight that had no outlet. The flight that was never allowed.

This changes everything.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?”, we begin to ask,

“What happened to my system, and how is it still trying to protect me?”

This work is deeply supported in The Reclaim, the container for shadow integration and identity healing through a somatic and parts-based lens.

The Trauma Loop and the Nervous System

Most chronic anxiety can be traced back to “the trauma loop”: a cycle of incomplete survival responses that continue to loop in the nervous system without resolution.

Imagine your body as a river. Trauma creates a dam. The flow gets blocked. Anxiety becomes the build-up of pressure behind that dam. Until we allow the flow of stored emotion, sensation, and impulse to move, the system stays braced.

This is why top-down strategies (like affirmations or mental reframing) often fail when the body is locked in survival.
They’re like trying to talk a flood into receding while ignoring the dam.

What the body needs isn’t convincing. it needs completion.
Completion might look like trembling, breath, tears, movement, sound, or stillness.

It doesn’t follow a script. It follows the body’s timing.

Healing from the Inside Out

Somatic work is not a destination. It’s a relationship, a returning over and over to the language of the body.

It asks for small, repeated moments of connection.
A breath. A hand on the heart. A pause.

This kind of presence rewires more than just anxiety, it rewires our capacity to be with life.

When we stop seeing anxiety as the enemy, we begin to see it as a compass: one that points us toward what needs care, attention and release.

The beauty of somatic work lies in its humility. It doesn’t chase grand fixes, it asks for presence.

Perhaps the body isn’t something to manage.

Perhaps it’s something to listen to.

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