Most people describe anxiety as worry. Racing thoughts. A mind that won’t stop. And yes, that’s part of it. But anxiety in the body often shows up first, before a single thought has formed.
The tight chest before you know why. The stomach that drops the moment you wake up. The shoulders that live near your ears. The jaw you only notice is clenched when someone points it out.
Your body has been sending signals. And if you’ve only been trying to think your way out of anxiety, that’s why it keeps coming back.
Everyone knows the textbook symptoms: racing heart, shallow breathing, sweaty palms. But anxiety in the body shows up in ways that are easy to misread or dismiss.
It might look like:
These are not random physical quirks. They are your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you from threat. The problem is that in anxiety, the threat detector gets stuck in the on position. Your body keeps responding as if danger is present, even when you’re sitting safely on your couch.
Here is something that changed how I think about anxiety, and how I work with it: your nervous system does not know the difference between a real threat and a perceived one.
When your brain registers danger, whether that’s a car swerving toward you or an email from your boss, it sends a signal through your body in milliseconds. Cortisol releases. Your heart rate climbs. Muscles brace. Digestion slows. You are ready to fight, flee, or freeze.
This response is not a malfunction. It is a feature. The problem is that modern life is full of low-grade, chronic stressors that never fully resolve. Your nervous system activates, but there is no physical threat to respond to and nowhere for the energy to go. So it stays. It layers. Over time, that activation becomes your baseline.
This is why you can know, cognitively, that everything is fine, and still feel like something is wrong. Your body is working from a different set of data than your thinking mind.
Therapy that focuses only on thoughts, identifying them, challenging them, reframing them, can be genuinely helpful. But for many people it hits a ceiling.
You can know that your fear is irrational and still feel afraid. You can talk about why you’re anxious for years and still wake up with that same dread in your chest every morning. That is not a failure of insight. It is a sign that the anxiety is stored somewhere that insight alone cannot reach.
The body keeps its own record. Tension patterns, bracing, shallow breathing, these are not just symptoms of anxiety. They are anxiety, held in tissue and muscle and the firing patterns of your nervous system. To really change them, you have to work at that level.
This is where somatic work comes in. Somatic is just a word that means body-based. It means paying attention to what is happening physically, not just mentally, and using that information as part of the healing process.
In practice, it might look like:
Noticing before changing. One of the most powerful things you can do is simply learn to notice what anxiety feels like in your body, without immediately trying to stop it. Where do you feel it? What does it actually feel like physically? Is it moving or still? This kind of awareness interrupts the cycle of reactivity and builds a different relationship with sensation.
Working with the breath. Breath is one of the few parts of the autonomic nervous system you can consciously control. Slow, extended exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for rest and regulation. This is not just relaxation advice. It is physiology. A longer exhale than inhale signals safety to your nervous system in a way that thinking calming thoughts simply cannot.
Releasing held tension intentionally. Anxiety braces the body. Practices that invite the body to soften, through yoga, movement, body scan meditations, or somatic exercises, help discharge the activation that has nowhere else to go. This is not about flexibility. It is about giving your nervous system a way out.
Titration. In somatic therapy, we do not dive into the hardest material first. We work in small doses, staying within what is called the window of tolerance, so your nervous system learns that it can feel difficult things without being overwhelmed. Over time, that window expands.
One of the most important things I want you to take from this: anxiety in the body is not a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It is a sign that your nervous system learned, at some point, that it needed to stay ready.
Maybe that was because of something specific that happened. Or it was the cumulative weight of years of stress, pressure, or not feeling safe enough to fully relax. It could’ve been that you grew up in an environment where staying alert made sense.
Whatever the reason, the body adapted. And bodies can adapt again.
Healing anxiety is not about eliminating the feeling. It is about building enough safety in your system that the alarm does not have to stay on all the time. That work happens in the body, not just the mind.
At Integrative Healing, I combine clinical therapy with somatic and body-based tools to help you work with your nervous system, not against it. If anxiety has felt stuck no matter how much you’ve talked about it, this approach might be what’s been missing.
