Your nervous system is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. When danger was your normal for a long time, safety feels wrong. Your body learned to equate calm with impending disaster because that's usually what happened next. So even when everything is actually fine, your system is scanning for threats that aren't there.
The problem is that your threat detector got stuck in the on position during the dangerous times and never reset to neutral. When you're constantly in survival mode, your body produces stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline as if there's still a tiger in the room. Your heart rate stays elevated. Your muscles stay tense. Your mind keeps racing through possible scenarios. All of this is happening automatically, below your conscious awareness.
Calm actually feels unsafe to a system that was wired for danger. When things are peaceful, your brain interprets the quiet as suspicious. It's like being in a house where the door is unlocked—you can't settle in because you're waiting for someone to break in. So you create your own chaos. You find things to worry about. You anticipate problems that haven't happened. You generate your own stress because safety feels unfamiliar and uncertainty feels like home.
The Cost of Staying Unaware
When you live in a state of constant low-grade anxiety, you never get to experience what it feels like to be truly at rest. Your baseline becomes survival rather than living. Relationships suffer because you're always bracing for impact, which makes it hard to connect. Decision-making becomes compromised because your brain is operating in threat mode rather than executive function mode. You exhaust yourself managing fears that don't exist, leaving no energy for what actually matters. Over time, you forget what safety feels like.
The Shift
The shift isn't about forcing yourself to calm down or trying to think your way out of anxiety. It's about gradually teaching your nervous system that it can register safety without assuming disaster. This happens through somatic work—actually feeling calm in your body rather than just thinking about it. It involves staying present with the anxiety without trying to make it go away, so your system learns that uncomfortable sensations aren't actually dangerous. Over time, the threat detector recalibrates.
You are not anxious because there's something wrong with you. You're anxious because your system learned to expect danger. As you teach your nervous system that safety is real and not a trap, the anxiety doesn't disappear—it becomes appropriate. The fear that remains is the fear that belongs to the present moment, not the fear that belongs to the past.