The Hidden Stress Loop: Why Your Nervous System Stays Stuck in Anxiety and Exhaustion

The Hidden Stress Loop: Why Your Nervous System Stays Stuck in Anxiety and Exhaustion

Many people attend therapy seeking support because they feel constantly tired, tense, wired, or exhausted. Some have read self-help books, listened to podcasts, tried meditation, have visited their doctors or have been told they need to “just relax” or find more balance in their lives. And yet their mind remain busy, looping, sleep doesn’t come easily, and they often continue to experience tightness in the chest and belly. Basically, no matter what they do, their nervous system refuses to settle. Sound familiar?

From experience in my somatic therapy and integrative counselling practice – offering in-person sessions across the northern rivers, Palm Beach and the Gold Coast, and online worldwide, what I see time and time again is that most people are trying to calm the mind, when the real issue is happening deeper in the body’s stress system. What they are caught in is something one can refer to as the hidden stress loop.

The Nervous System Is Not Just About Stress

Often when speaking with clients it becomes apparent that they do not know much about the nervous system. Your nervous system is constantly scanning the environment beneath your conscious awareness and asking one fundamental question: Am I safe right now?

When the body senses safety, it naturally moves into states of rest, connection, creativity, and clarity but when it senses danger, the system shifts into survival responses commonly referred to as:

• Fight (anger, control, tension)
• Flight (anxiety, restlessness, overthinking)
• Freeze (shutdown, numbness, exhaustion)

They are biological survival mechanisms that have helped we as humans stay alive for thousands of years and are not psychological weaknesses. The challenge that I see today is that many people’s nervous systems have learned to stay activated long after the original stress has passed. In other words, the body keeps running the same protective program, even when life is actually safe on the outside.

The Hidden Stress Loop

When stress becomes chronic, the body can get caught in a feedback cycle or loop between the brain and nervous system.

The systems involved include:

• the autonomic nervous system
• the stress hormone system (HPA axis)
• inflammatory and immune responses
• brain regions responsible for threat detection and emotional processing

When these systems repeatedly activate, they begin reinforcing each other.

The brain detects threat → the body mobilises stress → the sensations reinforce the brain’s perception of danger. The loop continues, which is why many people say things like, “Nothing is wrong in my life, so why do I still feel stressed.” Your nervous system may simply be running an unfinished stress cycle.

Why Thinking Your Way Out Rarely Works

One of the most common mistakes people make is trying to regulate their nervous system purely through thought telling themselves, for example, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “Everything is fine,” “Just calm down.”

The issue is that the nervous system doesn’t respond primarily to logic, it responds to physiological signals. For example:

• Slow breathing can reduce stress responses in the brain
• Physical grounding practices can increase parasympathetic activity
• Movement can help complete stress responses stored in the body

This is why somatic therapeutic approaches focus on working with the body first, which allows the mind to settle afterward.

Signs You May Be Stuck in a Stress Loop

People often assume dysregulation only looks like anxiety, but it can present in a number of ways:

• constant muscle tension
• racing thoughts
• chronic fatigue
• emotional overwhelm
• difficulty relaxing
• digestive issues
• feeling disconnected or numb
• reacting strongly to small triggers

Many people describe feeling like their system is always “on”, or like their body cannot return to normal or neutral.

In online discussions about nervous system dysregulation, people often describe feeling trapped in cycles of fight, flight, or freeze, even during normal daily activities. This is the nervous system trying unsuccessfully to complete a protective response.

The Body Needs Completion, Not Suppression

One of the core ideas in somatic therapy and what I see in practice is that stress responses need to complete.

When animals experience threat in the wild, they often discharge that energy through shaking, running, or physical movement once the danger has passed. Humans frequently interrupt or override this natural completion process with.

• intellectualising
• suppressing emotions
• staying busy
• pushing through exhaustion

Over time, the unfinished stress remains in the system as either chronic activation or shutdown. Somatic work gently helps the body to complete what it started.

How the Nervous System Begins to Regulate Again

Regulation is not something that can be achieved by force. Rather it is something the body returns to when the right conditions are present.

This often includes practices such as:

1. Standing shaking practice

Stand with your knees softened and begin to gently bounce from the knees. You will find that the rest of your body starts to bounce also. Shake for 3-5 minutes – to a favourite song or two. Take slow deep inhalations and then audibly exhale (noise) as you breathe out.

2. Neurogenic tremoring

This is inspired by trauma-release methods such as Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE). Animals usually naturally shake/discharge after stressful events. Gentle tremoring allows the nervous system to discharge excess activation. It also activates the parasympathetic nervous system and releases deep muscular holding patterns.

One practice that I do regularly is to lie on your back with knees bent, feet flat on floor. Lift hips off the ground (3-6 cms) and let natural shaking arise in the legs (and sometimes the pelvis.) Allow tremors to move through on their own accord.

3. Orienting to Safety

Slowly look around the room or environment – notice shapes, colours, light, distance – and allow your eyes to settle on things that feel safe. Allow the body time to ‘register’ that the present moment is safe. This down-regulates threat circuits.

4. Slow physiological breathing/gentle breath regulation

Slowing the breath consciously (aka. controlled breathing) directly affects heart-rate variability, activates the parasympathetic system and reduces physiological stress.

Two effective patterns that I use in my daily practices and teach clients are:

Physiological sigh: inhale through the nose, take a short second inhale, followed by a long slow exhale through the mouth. I prefer to perse my lips.

Extended exhale breathing: inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 6-8 seconds.

5. Interoceptive body scanning

A nice practice of slowly moving attention through the body, noticing sensations without trying to change them (e.g. I notice tension in my left buttock, I notice slight tension in my jaw, I can feel heat in my chest, I can feel a flutter in my belly, etc), and you will likely find that tension gradually softens as your awareness increases. Awareness interrupts unconscious muscular contraction.

6. Tracking Sensations

Learning to notice body sensations without immediately reacting to them.

An example: Sit on a firm chair, feel your feet on the ground, buttocks evenly balanced, imagine a thread on the crown of your head supporting you skyward and lengthening your spine, allow the jaw and shoulders to soften.

Breathe regularly for 5 breaths then simply check inside the body and see if you can find something that stands out and is easy to focus on. For example, an area of mild tension, or heat, or fluttering in the belly, jaw, throat, chest, spine. Next, simply take your attention to that area and sensation (e.g. tension) and allow the sensation to be fully present, without trying to comfort, soothe or change it. Simply breathe and presence with it. As you sit with the sensation you will usually get a clearer sense of it – a shape, a texture, an image, a colour, a size, a movement. See it you can observe it and over time you find that it starts to move. See if you can track (follow) the movement and notice what happens next…

7. Fascial release/myofascial work

As a simple image, visualise fascia as a web-like tissue that surrounds and supports every cell, tissue, organ, muscle bundle, bone, joint, nerve, blood vessel of the body. Chronic stress often creates fascial tension patterns, common hotspots being in the diaphragm, psos, jaw, neck, lower back, and feet.

Fascia release is one of the ways to help release this via slow yin-style stretching practices, foam rolling, using various massage balls, and manual therapy (myofascial work such as Rolfing.) I do these practices daily and have manual therapy every month or so as an additional tune up.

8. Vagus nerve stimulation through sound

Vibration through the throat and chest stimulate branches of the vagus nerve around the vocal cords and ear canal down-regulating or calming the nervous system. Examples such as humming, chanting, singing, or prolonged “OM.”

Healing Happens Gradually

Many people expect nervous system regulation to happen quickly but as I remind clients, when patterns have been running for years or sometimes decades, the body needs time to relearn safety. So, it’s more about wiring in such pathways and building capacity versus forcing change. Capacity to feel, to be present, to be patient, to be curious, to be able to move through stress without becoming overwhelmed. As this capacity grows, the hidden stress loop begins to soften, as the nervous system begins to remember ease and safety.

Final Thoughts

If your nervous system won’t calm down, remember that is not broken. You are simply experiencing a learned, engrained, response or your system that has become stuck in the red zone.

Somatic Therapy

My in-person and online work in somatic therapy, integrative counselling, and trauma resolution supports individuals and couples to gently unwind survival patterns, restore balance, and experience greater ease, connection, and emotional safety.

Somatic work invites a gentle approach to meeting your body where it actually wants to be met – a slower is faster approach versus a too much, too fast, too soon approach. So, it is not about fighting your body or suppressing feelings, sensations or emotions, but learning to listen to it, gently, patiently, respectfully, compassionately, trusting that under the right conditions, the innate wisdom of the body will return it to balance. Sometimes it just needs the right support.

To arrange an initial consultation to explore how I can best support you.

Book here: [introductory call] or [schedule a session].