Persistent Anxiety? What Unresolved Trauma Does to Your Nervous System

A key to understanding anxiety is understanding how and why it began. Often the anxiety we experience today is the result of an experience we had in the past. Even though we logically think "we're over it" and it was "so long ago," our nervous system is still reacting as if it's experiencing that event all over again.

In psychological terms, trauma occurs when distressing events are so extreme or intense that they overwhelm a person's ability to cope. It's not about the objective facts of what occurred—it's about whether your resources for coping were sufficient in that moment. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.

This is why the same event can be traumatic for one person and manageable for another. It's why what seems "minor" from the outside can be devastating to your nervous system, and why what looks catastrophic might not leave lasting trauma if you had adequate support and resources.

Trauma is how your nervous system experienced what happened—and more critically, what it learned about survival in that moment. Your racing heart when someone raises their voice. The numbness that descends when conflict starts. The hypervigilance that won't turn off even when you're objectively safe. These aren't weaknesses. They're your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Your Nervous System's Survival Intelligence

Your nervous system has one primary directive: keep you alive. It constantly scans your environment for threat through a process called neuroception—unconscious threat detection that happens faster than conscious thought. When it perceives danger, it doesn't wait for your permission to act.

Maybe you grew up walking on eggshells, never knowing which version of a parent or caregiver you'd encounter. Your nervous system learned that constant monitoring equals survival. That's not anxiety—that's adaptive brilliance.

Maybe you froze during something overwhelming because fighting or fleeing wasn't possible. Perhaps you were too young, too small, or the person who hurt you was someone you depended on. Dissociation wasn't weakness—it was your brain's most sophisticated protection mechanism.

Maybe survival meant anticipating everyone else's needs, making yourself small, staying perfectly quiet. Your nervous system encoded that pattern as: "This is how I stay safe."

The problem isn't that your nervous system learned these strategies. The problem is it's still using them long after the actual danger has passed.

Why Traumatic Memories Stay Stuck

Traumatic memories get encoded differently than normal memories. They're fragmented, visceral, and disconnected from context. Your nervous system remembers the threat without the full story of what happened, when it happened, or that it ended. This is why a certain smell, a tone of voice, or a seemingly random trigger can catapult you back into a survival state instantaneously.

Your body is reacting to pattern recognition, not present danger.

When Your Body Knows What Your Mind Denies

Maybe you can relate to the feeling that "something is wrong" but you can't articulate what. On paper, everything's fine. But your body tells a different story.

Chronic jaw tension. Persistent insomnia despite exhaustion. An inability to tolerate any uncertainty—every email has to be answered immediately, every project plan needs backup plans for the backup plans. Panic attacks that seem to come from nowhere.

You might think, "I should be fine. Nothing bad is happening."

Maybe nothing bad is currently happening, but something did happen. Maybe years of childhood unpredictability with inconsistent caregivers. Maybe emotionally immature parents whose moods shifted without warning. Maybe you thought it was normal because it's all you ever knew. Or maybe things looked fine from the outside, but inside you always felt responsible for managing other people's moods and emotions.

In those circumstances, your nervous system learned that vigilance, control, and constant threat-scanning were survival strategies. They protected a frightened child, but they're creating uncontrollable anxiety in adulthood.

Your nervous system is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. It doesn't matter that your circumstances have changed or that the original threats no longer exist. These protective patterns run deeper than logic. They're encoded in your body's automatic response system, bypassing rational thought entirely.

What Nervous System Dysregulation Actually Means

Your autonomic nervous system operates through two main branches: the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest).

When trauma remains unprocessed, your nervous system loses its flexibility. You get stuck in chronic activation (persistent anxiety, hypervigilance, always "on") or you swing into shutdown (numbness, disconnection, chronic fatigue). Sometimes you oscillate wildly between both.

You're not broken. Your nervous system is just dysregulated. It’s lost the ability to smoothly shift between states based on actual present conditions.

Most people with unresolved trauma also have impaired interoception which is the ability to accurately perceive and interpret internal body signals. If your body repeatedly gave you signals during trauma that you couldn't respond to, your nervous system learned that body signals are either dangerous or meaningless.

So you disconnected. You learned to override hunger, ignore fatigue, suppress pain. Now you can't tell the difference between anxiety and excitement, or between tired and sad. Every internal sensation gets interpreted through the lens of threat.

Without accurate interoception, you can't regulate. You don't notice you're dysregulated until you're in full panic or complete shutdown.

Your Brain Can Learn New Patterns

Fortunately, the nervous system that learned to be chronically vigilant can learn something else.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's capacity to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. The same mechanism that encoded those survival patterns can help create new pathways that support regulation and safety.

But here's the critical part: you can't think your way into nervous system change. Trauma lives in the body, in implicit memory, in automatic response patterns. You need approaches that work directly with your physiology, not just your cognition.

This is where somatic practices and trauma-informed yoga come in. They engage your body to influence your nervous system, creating new experiences of safety at the physiological level. Through repetition, these practices create new neural pathways. Your nervous system starts associating them with safety, building a new baseline.

Your Nervous System Deserves Compassion

That anxiety that won't quit? It's not defective. It's protective. Your nervous system is trying to save you using the only strategies it knows.

The numbness that descends? That’s not apathy, it’s protection. Your system learned shutdown as survival.

The hypervigilance? That’s not paranoia, it’s pattern recognition trained by experience.

These responses made sense when you developed them. They may have literally kept you alive. The work isn't to shame yourself for having them, it’s to help your nervous system update its threat assessment database.

With the right practices and support, your nervous system doesn't forget the old survival strategies, they’ll always be available if you need them. But you develop flexibility. You can shift between states based on what's actually happening now, not what happened then.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing isn't arriving at some permanent state of calm. It's developing nervous system flexibility or the capacity to activate when appropriate and return to baseline when threat passes.

It's noticing you're dysregulated before you're completely hijacked.

It's having more space between stimulus and response.

It's accessing interoception accurately: "This is excitement, not danger. This is fatigue, not depression."

It's your window of tolerance expanding so you can handle more uncertainty, more intensity, more sensation without flipping into survival mode.

The neural pathways that kept you stuck can be supplemented with new pathways that support regulation. The brain that learned those protective patterns can learn new ones. But it requires working with your body, not just your thinking. It requires repetition. It requires patience and self-compassion.

Your nervous system has been working overtime to protect you. It deserves acknowledgment, not judgment. And with the right practices, it can learn that protection doesn't require constant vigilance anymore.

You can teach it breath by breath, movement by movement, moment by moment what safety actually feels like.

I’m a yoga therapist, and I help people who feel anxious, overwhelmed, or stuck learn how to work with their nervous system—not against it. Through gentle, body-based practices, I support you in building resilience, restoring a sense of safety, and finding more ease in everyday life.

If you’re curious about a more compassionate, body-focused approach to anxiety, I’d like to invite you to join my online community The Inner Calm Collective.

Start with the free Inner Calm Collective membership tier and when you’re ready for more guidance, join the Elevated Membership for live classes, deeper support, and a space where your healing is fully supported. Join for free today!