Understanding Your Body's Alert System: A Guide to Feeling Safer in Everyday Life
Ever notice how your body reacts when you open a stressful email or get into an argument? That racing heart, those tense shoulders - these aren't random reactions. They're part of your body's natural alert system called the threat response cycle, and understanding this system can change your life in wonderful ways.
Ever notice how your body reacts when you open a stressful email or get into an argument? That racing heart, those tense shoulders - these aren't random reactions. They're part of your body's natural alert system called the threat response cycle, and understanding this system can change your life in wonderful ways.
Your Built-In Safety System
Think of your body as having a special safety alarm, an instinct for safety. Just like our ancestors needed this alarm to stay safe from wild animals, we use it today in our modern world. This system kicks in when:
Reading a difficult email
Sitting through a tense meeting
Having a disagreement with someone you love
Walking into a crowded restaurant
Even chatting with a friend when a sensitive topic comes up
The Threat Response Cycle
Why Understanding This Matters
When you know how your alert system works, you gain a superpower: the ability to pause and check if you really need to be on high alert. Sometimes your alarm might go off when you're actually safe, like feeling panicked about giving a presentation to friendly colleagues. Other times, you might not notice real warning signs when you should, like staying in an unhealthy situation for too long.
Taking Back Control
The good news? Once you recognize when your alert system is active, you can:
Take a moment to pause
Look around and check if there's a real reason for concern
Choose how to respond rather than just react
Return to feeling calm and present when you realize you're safe
This awareness helps you move through your day with more peace and confidence. Instead of being controlled by automatic reactions, you can choose how to respond to life's challenges.
Remember: Your alert system isn't your enemy - it's trying to protect you! Learning to work with it, rather than against it, can help you feel more in control and at peace in your daily life.
Beyond Talk Therapy: Discovering Somatic Experiencing
There's a special way to help with feelings that are hard to access or even know about. It's called Somatic Experiencing.
Why We Think and Talk
We think and talk for lots of reasons. One of those reasons is to feel better. Let's explore this more.
How Thinking and Talking Help Us
When we feel something strong inside, we want to let it out. This brings us relief and contributes to our life. Here are some examples:
- When we're sad, talking to someone helps us feel less sad and understand ourselves better
- When we're angry, we might want to rant to someone about what's bothering us, think about how to solve what’s bothering us and maybe even fantasize about what we could have done differently, all in an attempt to feel less angry.
- When we do something good, we want to share it with others, this helps us feel more whole and happy.
- When we’re intrigued about something we think about what’s grabbed our attention in order to enjoy the exploration and hopefully to eventually feel the relief of understanding
Our feelings are like messages from our body. They tell us what is going on and what we need to feel better and live happier lives.
Why Some Feelings Are Hard to Notice or Talk About
Sometimes when we share our feelings, things don't go well. Maybe someone didn't listen, or we got hurt. When this happens, we might start automatically hiding these feelings, even from ourselves and even before we know we’re having them. This can make us feel worse over time. They can even cause us to misunderstand the present, to confuse our current situation with the past and react poorly because of that. With feelings that are stuck, out of our awareness and causing us problems talking and thinking alone are about the slowest ways there are to feel better. And often then only keep us stuck.
A Different Way to Feel Better
There's a special way to help with feelings that are hard to access or even know about. It's called Somatic Experiencing. Instead of just talking, we:
- Pay attention to your body and the sensations inside
- Allow some of the movements from spontaneous impulses in the body
- Learn how to navigate activation and de-activation in the body which helps you deal with stuck, pent up feelings little by little instead of in an overwhelming way.
- Empowers you
- Plus much more
Someone trained in Somatic Experiencing helps you do this safely. They teach you how to listen to your body and understand what it's telling you. While you still talk about your feelings, you also learn to feel them in a way that's comfortable and safe. This brings things that are unconscious to the light of day and lets them out so you feel better and live easier.
All of which helps you find answers that come from deep inside yourself, making you feel more sure about what you need.
Are these feelings shadows or real?
Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.
Here is this post summarized in three sentences:
Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.
Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.
Working on our past helps our present be clearer.
It’s popular to say that you won’t let fear drive your life. While that’s maybe an important counter balance to living too much in fear or giving away your personal power it’s also a misnomer. The goal shouldn’t be to get rid of any core emotion, instead it should be to slow down when we are sped up and automatic so that we can listen to what we’re feeling (this might take a lot of self acceptance and be alarming to do). That is how we start to be truly adaptive. Remember what we feel is going to be based on both the present moment and your past. So it takes some time to suss out whether your intuition is adaptive emotions to the present moment or out of date feelings from the past being put on the current moment. Our brains are prediction machines. Their job is to efficiently predict what will happen based on the past. When the past is incomplete then we inaccurately predict. So in order to be more present we need to not only slow down we also need to process and complete or re-complete the past. Fear is important, without fear we would be much more vulnerable to being taken advantages of. That said, unnecessary fear keeps us small and under selling ourselves.
So to recap once again in those three sentences:
Our brains are prediction machines using the past to predict the future and un-healed past events cloud those predictions and can cause un-adaptive emotions.
Slowing down and reflecting using non judgement and lots of self acceptance helps us suss out whether our feelings are adaptive or not.
Working on our past helps our present be clearer.