I have started developing a slightly annoying habit when I read new nervous system research. I read the paper and then I immediately imagine what the internet is going to do to it.

HRV increases after breathwork? Excellent. By Tuesday someone will have made a Reel explaining that crying increases your vagal tone.

A study finds something interesting about interoception? Give it 3 days and we will be told that healing requires becoming better at feeling our heartbeat.

A group intervention reduces PTSD symptoms? Wonderful. Somewhere, somehow, somebody will insert the word “co-regulation” whether the researchers measured it or not.

I am joking…sort of.

Because this is exactly why I started The Body of Evidence. There is genuinely exciting research happening around the body, stress, trauma, autonomic physiology, interoception and the different ways humans adapt to their environments. I spend a ridiculous amount of time reading it because I am fascinated by where this field is going. And then there is the translation of that research into the online nervous system world, where findings tend to become much cleaner, much more certain and somehow much sexier than the actual paper ever was.

July was particularly interesting because several studies landed around the same underlying problem: we keep talking about “the nervous system” as though it were one measurable thing. It isn’t.

You can measure someone’s heart-rate variability.

You can measure their skin conductance.

You can ask how stressed they feel.

You can test whether they can detect their heartbeat.

You can ask whether they trust bodily sensations.

You can measure how their brain responds to cardiac signals.

You can examine their ability to distinguish threat from safety.

Every one of those measurements may tell you something useful, but they are also measuring different things. And once you start pulling those layers apart, some very popular nervous system explanations begin to wobble.

So this month we are going into interoception, childhood unpredictability, HRV, high-ventilation breathwork, PTSD, meditation, digital practices and one preliminary threat-learning study that I think is worth keeping an eye on.

There is a lot….get coffee.

I think we need to have a much more sophisticated conversation about “feeling your body”

One of the papers that caught my attention immediately was published in Nature Mental Health on July 22. The researchers were looking at interoception, which broadly refers to how we sense and process signals arising from inside the body: heartbeat, breathing, visceral sensations and so forth.

Interoception has become enormous within mental health science and for good reason. Internal bodily information contributes to emotion, self awareness, decision making and physiological regulation. It has also become enormous in the somatic world, where “reconnecting with your body” has almost become a universal prescription.

This study complicates that rather nicely.

Researchers assessed cardiac interoception in 456 people and respiratory interoception in 245, using psychophysical tasks rather than simply asking participants whether they considered themselves good at noticing their bodies.

They examined things such as sensitivity, precision and metacognition.

In normal human language: How well can you detect the signal? How consistently do you detect it? And how accurately do you know whether your perception is right?

Then they compared those measures with a broad profile of mental health symptoms.

Objective interoceptive performance was largely unrelated to general mental health symptom burden.

That is a fairly substantial result because many theoretical models have assumed that altered objective interoception should function as a broad marker across psychological disorders. The researchers tested that assumption in several different ways and kept finding essentially the same pattern.

What did show stronger associations with mental health symptoms was people’s self-reported relationship with bodily experience.

And that opens a very different door because there is a meaningful difference between:

I can detect that my heart is beating faster.

and:

My heart is beating faster and I trust that sensation, understand it in context and can stay with it without immediately assuming something terrible is happening.

Those can look identical if the only thing we talk about is “body awareness.”

They aren’t remotely identical experiences.

Think about panic for a moment….

Someone with panic may have absolutely no shortage of awareness of their heart. They may notice every skipped beat, every acceleration, every shift in breathing and every tiny sensation moving through their chest. Their interoceptive attention may actually be extraordinarily strong. The difficulty can arise further along the processing chain, when a sensation becomes interpreted as dangerous.

Heart rate increases.

Attention locks onto it.

The sensation becomes more salient.

The brain makes a prediction.

Something is wrong.

That prediction changes physiology and the physiology provides more sensation.

And suddenly you have a lovely little feedback loop that nobody asked for.

So when we tell someone with anxiety, trauma or panic that they need to “become more connected to their body,” I think we need to know what we mean.

Connected how?

Able to detect more?

Able to tolerate more?

Able to shift attention?

Able to distinguish discomfort from danger?

Able to interpret sensations differently?

Able to remain curious?

Able to notice an internal signal without becoming consumed by it?

These are different capacities.

And another July paper makes the picture even richer. A review in Psychological Medicine looked at research using heartbeat evoked potentials (HEPs). These are EEG signals that researchers use to investigate how the brain processes information associated with cardiac activity.

The authors divide this processing into several broad layers: bodily signals travelling upward, predictions and expectations coming downward and top-down regulation of bodily information. They also review a clinical literature that is, frankly, messy. Altered cardiac processing has been reported across psychiatric conditions, but the direction and meaning of those alterations are far from uniform.

And I love that messiness because it moves us away from this incredibly crude idea that trauma simply causes someone to “lose connection with their body.”

Sometimes people do experience profound numbness or disconnection and sometimes they experience the opposite and can barely escape what their body is communicating. Some people even seem to oscillate between the two. Others detect the sensation perfectly well and struggle with what their brain does with the information afterward.

Which is why I increasingly think of interoception less like a volume knob and more like an entire mixing desk. You can alter the signal, the attention given to the signal, the interpretation of it, the confidence placed in that interpretation and the behavioural response that follows.

There are many knobs.The internet likes one knob.

Science, inconveniently, keeps finding more.

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Probably the number one question I get asked about my work has nothing to do with regulating the nervous system. It’s some version of:

“Do you offer a teacher training?”

“When are you going to teach practitioners how to do what you do?”

And I understand why people ask. I’m actually incredibly flattered by it. There’s something slightly surreal about someone consuming enough of your work that eventually they go: okay, but can you teach me how to become the person teaching this?

My answer, at least right now, is no. I don’t offer a teacher training.

And the reason is probably less exciting than people expect: I don’t think I’m ready to train other people yet.

There. I said it.

Which is an interesting sentence to write publicly because I am very confident in the work I do. I think I’m good at my job. I trust myself with clients. I trust what I teach. I have spent years building an enormous amount of knowledge around the nervous system, trauma, somatics, the body and human behavior. I’m trained. I’ve invested a frankly offensive amount of money into education and professional training. I’ve spent thousands of hours researching, reading, learning, practicing, observing and changing my mind when better information came along.

So this isn’t imposter syndrome dressed up as humility.

I genuinely believe I know what I’m doing and I also genuinely believe that knowing what you’re doing and being ready to train someone else to do it are two very different things.

My knowledge doesn’t live in one neat box

This is probably the biggest problem I run into whenever I imagine creating a training.

Where would I even start?

I didn’t learn what I know through one modality, one teacher, one certification or one school of thought. There isn’t a binder containing The sheBREATH Method, page 1 through 472, which I can simply turn around and teach. My understanding has been built in layers.

Formal trainings and certifications are part of it. Somatic Experiencing is part of it. Breathwork is part of it. Psychology and neuroscience research are part of it. My own experiences with my body are part of it. Years of competitive sport taught me things about sensation, effort, physical thresholds, visualization and body awareness long before I had professional language for some of them. Then there are the thousands of hours I’ve spent researching because apparently I have never once in my life known how to casually become interested in something.

And then there is client work. Working with actual human beings will humble every beautifully organized theory you have. Because bodies are weird. Humans are complex. Context changes everything. Something that makes complete sense on paper can land completely differently in the person sitting in front of you.

Over time, all of those things start talking to each other.

You notice patterns. You make connections between concepts that originally came from completely different places. You understand something intellectually and then see it play out in a body. Something you learned years ago suddenly makes sense differently because of something you encountered last week.

That messy accumulation is a huge part of why I think I’m good at what I do.

It is also exactly why I currently have no f*** idea how I would responsibly turn it into a teacher training.

Teaching exercises would be the easy part

I could create a training tomorrow if all I wanted to do was teach people a collection of somatic exercises.

Here is an exercise.

Here is what it may support.

Here is when you might use it.

Here are some modifications.

Congratulations, certificate.

That is precisely the kind of training I don’t want to create.

Because when you’re teaching someone to work with other people’s nervous systems, you’re giving them more than techniques. You’re influencing how they understand another human being, how they interpret a response, what they do when someone becomes overwhelmed, what they don’t do, how quickly they move, whether they recognize when something is outside their scope, whether they can tolerate not knowing, whether they understand that a body doing something unexpected isn’t an invitation to throw another technique at it. That carries weight for me.

A teacher training with my name attached to it would mean that somewhere, someone could eventually sit across from a vulnerable person and say, in one form or another, Teresa taught me how to do this.

I need to feel extraordinarily comfortable with what that sentence means. Right now, I don’t.

So what training do I recommend?

This is usually the next question. If I don’t offer a teacher training, where would I send someone who genuinely wants to learn how to do this work?

My answer is almost always Somatic Experiencing.

I know there are other trainings. I know fellow practitioners who offer their own practitioner programs and I’m sure some of them are excellent. I’m equally sure there are some out there that I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending.

I can only speak to what I know, what I have experienced and what I personally trust enough to recommend. And Somatic Experiencing continues to be the training I point people toward. Part of the reason is that I have become pretty opinionated about one thing in particular:

I don’t believe you can learn this work properly in three months.

And when I think about what I would potentially feel comfortable offering myself one day, I keep coming back to something closer to a year. Not because twelve months is some magical threshold after which you suddenly become a competent practitioner. But because I would need the training to contain actual practice hours. A lot of them.

We accept this pretty easily in other body-based professions. Even in yoga teacher trainings, there are required hours to complete. You don’t just learn the anatomy, memorize a sequence, answer a few questions correctly and get sent on your way.

I think somatic practitioner training needs to take the practical component even more seriously because you can learn an enormous amount of theory about the nervous system and still have absolutely no idea what to do when there is an actual nervous system sitting across from you.

And that, to me, is where the real education begins.

I would want someone to practice working with different people, to experience sessions that don’t go according to plan, to learn what happens in their own body while they’re holding space for someone else, to notice when they become too eager to help, when they start interpreting instead of observing, when silence makes them uncomfortable, when another person’s activation creates activation in them.

Co-regulation isn’t something I think you can fully learn from a module.

Neither is holding space.

Neither is pacing.

Neither is developing the judgment to know when to continue, when to slow down, when to stop, when to ask another question and when to leave something completely alone.

Those things develop through doing the work.

And I think this part gets underestimated when we talk about becoming a somatic practitioner.

You aren’t only learning about nervous systems, you are bringing your own nervous system into a relationship with someone else’s.

Your ability to stay present matters. Your ability to notice your own responses matters. Your ability to remain curious instead of immediately deciding what something means matters. The way you respond when someone does something you didn’t expect matters.

That doesn’t come from knowing the right terminology. It comes from practice.

So if I ever created a training, I imagine practice hours would be a substantial part of it. Not optional homework that technically exists somewhere at the bottom of Module 7. Actual required hours of working with human beings, reflecting on those sessions, receiving feedback and gradually developing the capacity to sit with more complexity.

The theory matters enormously….of course it does. But if I had to choose which part makes someone a practitioner, I would put far more weight on what happens when they actually sit across from another person.

You can know every nervous system state on a PowerPoint slide. A human being will still find a way to show you something that wasn’t on the PowerPoint.

I would probably make good money from it

There’s also a slightly awkward part of this conversation that I think is worth saying out loud.

I know there is demand.

People ask me about trainings constantly. From a business perspective, creating one would make complete sense. Practitioner education can be lucrative. I already have an audience interested in my approach. I could build a launch around it, make a nice sales page, put some early-bird bonuses on there and probably have a very successful day.

That isn’t a good enough reason for me.

Especially in this field.

If I ever train people, I don’t want the starting point to be, People keep asking for this, therefore I should sell it.

I want to reach a point where I can say: I know exactly what someone needs to understand before I am comfortable putting my name behind their work.

And I am not there.

I don’t know exactly what the curriculum should contain yet.

I don’t know what I would consider sufficient practice.

I don’t know how I would assess competency in a way I actually believe in.

I don’t know where I would draw every line around scope, supervision and responsibility.

And perhaps most importantly, I don’t yet know how I would take everything that has become almost intuitive in my own work and break it apart enough to teach it responsibly to somebody else.

Those aren’t small administrative details I can figure out after announcing enrollment.

They’re the training. And I think that’s something I would owe both to the person paying me to learn and to every person they might eventually work with.

Maybe one day

This is why I always add yet when I answer this question.

I don’t offer teacher training yet.

That word isn’t a promise.

Maybe I will. Maybe 2 years from now I’ll have organized my thinking enough that the structure becomes obvious. Maybe another few thousand hours of work will show me what belongs in a curriculum and, equally importantly, what doesn’t. Maybe I’ll eventually feel that I can teach this with the level of responsibility I would expect from someone training me. Maybe I’ll build the year-long training with the practice hours, supervision, feedback and depth that I currently think this work deserves.

Or maybe I never will.

I’m surprisingly okay with that.

There is a strange pressure once you become good at something to move up the ladder of teaching it. First you do the work, then you teach the public, then you teach practitioners, then you certify practitioners, then presumably you stand on top of a mountain in linen trousers and create your own modality.

I don’t know that I need to keep climbing that particular ladder.

Right now, I really like being a practitioner. I like researching. I like experimenting with how we can make complicated information understandable without flattening it into nonsense. I like working with people. I like creating practices. I like discovering that something I believed two years ago needs more nuance now.

And I think I still need the freedom to be in that stage.

Maybe the best way I can respect the people who keep asking me to teach them is by not confusing their trust in me with my readiness to train them.

Because I take that trust very seriously.

Seriously enough, apparently, to keep saying no to something people are actively asking to buy.

For now, that feels like the right answer.

Ask me again in a few years.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

There is one word I think needs a much bigger place in conversations about nervous system regulation: Neuroplasticity.

You may have heard that you can “rewire your brain” or that “neurons that fire together wire together.” Maybe someone told you that if you repeat something for 21 days, 30 days, 66 days or 90 days, eventually a new neural pathway forms and voilà, the nervous system has received the memo.

There is real neuroscience underneath all of this. A lot of it, actually. And I find the real version much more interesting than the Instagram version because saying that “the brain can change” leaves out almost everything I want you to understand.

What is changing?

What makes certain patterns become easier to access?

Why does repetition matter?

Why can you completely understand why you react a certain way and still have the same reaction?

Why does something you thought you had worked through suddenly show up again?

And how long does any of this actually take?

Those questions bring us into neuroplasticity, learning, memory, stress physiology, sleep and the very unsexy but extremely important biology that sits underneath nervous system regulation. So let´s dive in…

What actually is neuroplasticity?

Your brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. These are specialized cells that receive, process and transmit information, and they communicate through enormous networks. One neuron can receive input from thousands of others, with much of that communication happening at tiny junctions called synapses.

Those networks are continually being modified by experience.

That capacity for change is broadly what we mean by neuroplasticity.

When scientists talk about plasticity, they can be referring to changes at several levels. The strength of communication between neurons can change. Neurons can become more or less excitable. Synapses can be formed, remodeled or eliminated. Dendritic spines, those tiny protrusions where much excitatory communication occurs, can change structurally. Larger networks can alter their patterns of connectivity and recruitment. Researchers can even detect experience-associated changes in gray matter and white matter in the living human brain.

So when I say that repeated nervous system work can help create “new neural pathways,” I’m using a metaphor. There isn’t a tiny neurological construction crew in there laying down a fresh highway because you rocked back and 4-5 minutes. Although, admittedly, that would make neuroplasticity much easier to explain. What we are really talking about is experience-dependent change in the nervous system. And that becomes incredibly relevant when we understand that the patterns you are trying to change were also influenced by experience-dependent plasticity in the first place.

Your nervous system has been learning this whole time

Neuroplasticity didn’t switch on when you discovered somatics. Your nervous system has been adapting throughout your life. Repeated experiences teach the brain what deserves attention, what predicts something important, which responses are useful, what can safely be ignored and what should probably be remembered next time. This learning is happening across distributed neural systems rather than inside one magical “trauma center” of the brain.

If you repeatedly experience unpredictability, for example, systems involved in attention, threat learning, contextual memory and physiological mobilization may all participate. Over time, cues that reliably preceded something important can become increasingly meaningful.

Maybe someone’s voice changed shortly before conflict.

Maybe a certain facial expression preceded rejection.

Maybe making a mistake repeatedly led to humiliation.

Maybe relaxing meant becoming less prepared for whatever happened next.

Eventually, relatively small cues can carry a lot of information because the nervous system has a history with them.

This is one reason an adult can very clearly think, I know this person isn’t angry with me, while their stomach has already dropped, their shoulders have tightened and their brain has opened seventeen tabs dedicated to analyzing the exact tone of a two-word text message.

The conscious understanding is real and so is the learned physiological response.

Research on chronic stress gives us a particularly important example of neuroplasticity working in this direction. Longterm stress has been associated with structural and functional remodeling in areas including the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex and researchers have described changes involving dendrites, synapses, connectivity and signaling in these regions.

That matters because neuroplasticity gets presented as this lovely healing superpower, when biologically it is simply the nervous system’s capacity to adapt.

Your brain can become very efficient at something because it has had a lot of reason to practice it.

Scanning.

Bracing.

Anticipating.

Suppressing.

Appeasing.

Mobilizing.

Disconnecting.

Those patterns can become fast enough that they feel like “just who I am.” They aren’t occurring outside biology. They are biology doing what biology does: learning from repeated experience.

So what does repitition do?

Every time you have an experience, groups of neurons communicate with each other. When the same patterns are activated again and again, the way those neurons communicate can start to change.

One of the best-studied examples is long-term potentiation (LTP), where communication between neurons becomes stronger after certain patterns of repeated activity. There is also long-term depression (LTD), where those connections become weaker.

In simple terms, your brain can become more efficient at patterns it uses often.

So if your nervous system has repeatedly practiced:

Conflict → tense.

Rest → stay alert.

Someone is disappointed → fix it.

Those responses can become easier to activate over time.

At the cellular level, this involves complex processes including glutamate signaling, NMDA and AMPA receptors, calcium signaling, gene expression and structural changes at synapses. You absolutely do not need to know your AMPA receptors personally. The important part is this:

Repeated experiences can change how easily certain patterns are activated in the future.

That is why repetition matters in nervous system work. Each different response gives the brain new information and repeated experiences give it more chances to learn from that information. However your brain does not treat every repetition equally. Experiences that are surprising, emotionally important, rewarding, threatening or different from what was expected tend to carry more weight.

Your brain is not sitting counting reps

If repetition alone drove meaningful learning, you could repeat I am safe, I am safe, I am safe ten thousand times and call it a day.

Obviously, human nervous systems are slightly more complicated than that.

Learning is influenced by attention, salience, novelty, reward, threat, motivation, previous experience, physiological state, neuromodulators, context, sleep and many other factors.

Your nervous system is constantly sorting enormous quantities of information. Most of it does not deserve a biological renovation project. You have probably walked past hundreds of door handles this month without your brain deciding to reorganize itself around door handle number 73.

Information becomes especially useful for learning when something happens that the brain did not fully predict. This brings us to one of my favorite concepts in learning neuroscience: prediction error.

What happens when your nervous system gets the prediction wrong?

Your brain does not enter each moment as a completely blank observer waiting patiently to find out what reality has in store.

Previous experience helps it anticipate.

If your nervous system has repeatedly learned that saying no leads to anger, withdrawal or rejection, then a boundary may trigger a response before you have any evidence about what this particular person will do.

You say no. Your throat tightens. Your stomach contracts. You immediately start considering whether you should send another text explaining why you said no, followed by a second explanation for the first explanation.

Then the other person says: “Okay.”

Nothing else happens.

The nervous system predicted one outcome and received another.

That discrepancy is a prediction error and prediction errors are important learning signals because they tell the system that its current model did not perfectly predict reality.

The same thing can happen with bodily sensations.

Perhaps your heart begins beating faster and your nervous system has learned that this sensation predicts panic.

You feel the acceleration, you notice it and remain oriented to the environment.

The sensation rises and eventually shifts without the feared catastrophe occurring.

The old prediction now has new information sitting beside it.

This is one reason embodied experience matters so much. You can intellectually understand, I’m allowed to have boundaries. You may already have understood that for five years. The nervous system also benefits from experiences such as: I set the boundary. I felt the activation. I remained present. I saw what actually happened next.

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I keep seeing versions of the same question under my YouTube videos:

“Why don’t I cry when I do somatic work?”

“Everyone talks about shaking and releasing trauma. Why doesn’t that happen to me?”

“I started trembling during the exercise. Does that mean I released something?”

“How do I know when the negative emotion is finally gone?”

And honestly, I get why people are confused. Spend enough time in the somatic corner of the internet and you start getting the impression that healing should be... visible?

Crying is good.

Shaking is apparently even better.

Bonus points if your entire body starts trembling and somebody tells you that trauma is leaving your fascia.

I am exaggerating….slightly. Or am I not? Somewhere along the way, somatic work got a scoreboard.

You cried? Release.

You shook? Discharge.

You yawned seventeen times? Regulation.

You had a huge emotional wave? Something deep must have shifted.

You did a practice, noticed a little tension in your chest, felt your feet and then carried on with your day?

Well... did you even heal?

This is where I start having a problem with the conversation.

Especially because many of the people coming into somatic work already feel disconnected from their bodies: They already worry that they are doing things wrong and already watch other people seemingly having experiences that they cannot access. And now they are apparently failing at having a nervous system too.

Absolutely not.

The pressure to “release” can become another f**** performance review for the body. And science gives us very little reason to use visible catharsis as a measurement of healing in the first place.

What are we actually calling a “release”?

Before we go any further, I think we need to clean up the language because “release” has become one of those words that somehow means everything.

Someone cries. Release.

Someone screams into a pillow. Release.

Someone’s legs start trembling. Release.

They yawn. Release.

They feel heat moving through their chest. Release.

A memory comes up. Release.

Their shoulders drop. Release.

They suddenly feel lighter. Release.

Their body starts moving spontaneously. Also release.

All of those experiences can happen during somatic work. I am not questioning whether people experience them. I am simply questioning what we can confidently conclude from them because several different things may be happening.

1. There is emotional expression: crying, laughing, vocalizing, changes in facial expression.

2. There is motor expression: shaking, trembling, pushing, curling inward, stretching, spontaneous movement.

3. There is physiological change: changes in breathing, heart rate, sweating, muscle tone, arousal.

4. And there is therapeutic change: changes that carry into somebody’s life. Symptoms. Avoidance. Behavior. Recovery. Relationships. Reactivity. The ability to make choices under stress.

Those categories can overlap and they frequently do. But…they are still not interchangeable. I want to emphasize this because we have started treating an observable event in the body as proof of a much larger internal process.

Someone shakes intensely and suddenly we are talking about trauma leaving the body.

How much trauma? Which trauma? Through what mechanism? How would we measure that? What changed afterward?

Those are the questions I want us to keep asking. Curiosity is incredibly useful in somatic work. However, certainty where we do not actually have certainty is less useful.

So let´s take crying….

There is research suggesting that crying can be involved in regulation. In one laboratory study involving 197 women, researchers induced sadness and measured heart rate, breathing, cortisol, emotional recovery and response to a later physical stressor. The participants who cried showed interesting physiological changes. Their breathing remained relatively stable. Their heart rate slowed shortly before the onset of crying and then returned toward baseline. At the same time, the criers did not have lower cortisol levels or greater tolerance of the later stressor than the other groups.

That is fascinating to me because the real story is so much richer than:

“Crying releases stress.”

Crying can be meaningful. It can feel relieving, itt can occur while the autonomic nervous system is changing and it can be part of emotional processing. But tears still can´t tell us exactly how much grief, trauma, fear or stress has been “released.”

The same applies in the other direction.

If you do not cry, I cannot conclude that you are emotionally blocked.

Some people cry easily.

Some rarely cry.

Some cry when they finally feel safe enough.

Some cry while highly activated.

Some experience sadness through pressure in the chest, heaviness, fatigue, changes in breathing, imagery, thoughts, withdrawal, aching, stillness.

The body has an entire vocabulary and tears are just one word.

Shaking needs the same level of nuance.

Trembling can occur during fear, sympathetic activation, cold exposure, muscular fatigue, crying, physical exertion and body-based practices. There are therapeutic approaches that deliberately induce tremoring and there is emerging research around them. What we currently do not have is some beautiful clinical equation that says:

7 minutes of trembling = 34% of your childhood trauma discharged.

I wish things were that convenient….

We can´t look at someone’s legs shaking and know that a trauma memory has been processed.

We can´t measure the intensity of somebody’s tremor and calculate their healing.

We can´t know that something has permanently changed because a movement happened once.

And I really want to be clear here: I am not asking you to dismiss the experience.

If you shake during a practice, notice it. If it feels relieving, notice that. If strong sensation moves through you and you discover that you can stay with it without panicking, that is interesting. If your arousal changes, notice that. If the experience means something to you, explore it.

You can take your body seriously without immediately writing a whole biological story about what just happened.

Honestly, I think that is one of the most somatic things we can do.

Notice first and interpret carefully.

The catharsis story is very convincing. The research is messier.

I completely understand why the release model became so popular. First of all, it looks dramatic and attracts views [on social media]. But second of all, the logic feels perfect.

Emotion builds up inside us.

Pressure accumulates.

We express it.

Pressure leaves.

Relief.

Done.

Very clean.

Human emotional learning is not particularly interested in being clean.

One of the classic examples comes from anger research. In a well-known experiment, participants who had been angered were given the opportunity to hit a punching bag. Some were encouraged to think about the person who had angered them while they did it.

If aggressive expression simply drained anger from the system, punching the bag should have helped. Instead, participants who punched while ruminating about the person who had angered them became angrier and more aggressive.

Now please do not leave this article saying, “Teresa says expressing anger is bad.” I will personally come find you. 😅

The study looked at aggressive catharsis. It does not tell us that crying is harmful or that sounding is harmful or that movement is harmful. It tells us something much more useful:

You can express the hell out of something and still be organized around the same pattern tomorrow.

You can scream while rehearsing rage.

You can cry while spiraling through the same thoughts.

You can shake while becoming increasingly terrified of your own sensations.

You can tell the same traumatic story repeatedly while reinforcing the belief that you are still in danger.

And yes, you can also scream, cry or shake and experience genuine relief.

This is why I refuse to look at the behavior alone and tell you what happened underneath it.

Context matters.

The meaning you attach to the experience matters.

What your nervous system learns matters.

Your behavior afterward matters.

Your life afterward matters.

Trauma-treatment research gets especially interesting here. There is legitimate evidence that body-oriented therapies can help people. A randomized controlled trial of Somatic Experiencing, for example, found significant improvements in PTSD symptoms and depression.

Great.

I am very happy that we have research like this.

The study did not establish that shaking, crying or emotional discharge caused those improvements. That would require a different kind of study. A therapy can produce meaningful outcomes while researchers are still working out the mechanisms responsible for them. This happens all over medicine and psychology. The part that makes me twitch slightly is when the internet fills that scientific gap in within about three business days.

“We don’t fully understand the mechanism yet” somehow becomes: “The body had to finish the incomplete trauma response and discharge stored survival energy.”

Maybe parts of that theoretical model will eventually receive stronger empirical support. Some components may already map onto things we understand about defensive responses, learning, autonomic regulation and motor behavior. The sweeping version gets repeated with far more confidence than the evidence currently warrants. And I care about that because people make decisions about their bodies based on these explanations.

The broader PTSD literature gives us another reason to be cautious about turning emotional intensity into a progress marker. Researchers have examined whether emotional activation during trauma treatment predicts improvement.

You can see why they would…

Maybe the person needs to feel a huge amount.

Maybe the distress has to peak.

Maybe the intensity has to fall during the session.

Maybe that is the magic ingredient.

Except the findings have not been that simple. Research on written exposure therapy found that initial physiological activation was associated with treatment improvement, while reductions in physiological arousal during and across sessions did not predict the gains. More recent work examining prolonged exposure found that peak emotional activation did not predict PTSD improvement either. Reductions in negative emotion did not reliably predict it. Changes in trauma-related cognition showed stronger associations in some analyses.

I find this incredibly important because we keep looking at what happens during the practice and assuming it tells us everything about what is changing because of the practice.

It does not.

A person can have the biggest cry of their life and walk away with something meaningful from it.

Wonderful.

A person can also lie on the floor for ten minutes, notice three sensations they normally miss, stop when they want to stop and gradually change their relationship with their internal experience over months.

That second one makes a terrible reel [on instagram].

It can still be serious nervous system work.

I think we need a much biger definition of progress

Imagine that you already struggle to feel your body.Maybe you dissociate, live mostly in your head, emotional sensations scare you and/or you spent years overriding yourself. Then you open Instagram and apparently everybody else is sobbing, shaking, screaming, releasing ancestral trauma through their hips and meeting God on a yoga mat.

Meanwhile, you noticed that your left foot felt warm.

I need you to understand something.

Your warm left foot counts.

I am being funny and I am also completely serious.

Maybe you have spent years barely registering sensation below your neck. Being able to notice warmth in your foot can represent increased interoceptive access.

Maybe you usually realize you are overwhelmed three hours after you become overwhelmed. Now you catch it fifteen minutes earlier.

Maybe conflict normally sends you straight into shutdown. This time you notice the familiar heaviness coming in and say, “I need a minute.”

Maybe you still have the panic response and recovery takes twenty minutes instead of the rest of the day.

Maybe you feel anger before it becomes resentment.

Maybe you notice that you do not want to say yes.

Maybe your heart races and you experience five seconds of “this is activation” before your brain jumps to “I am going to die.”

Maybe you can feel sadness and still see the room around you.

Maybe pleasure no longer immediately makes you brace for the next bad thing.

Maybe you can stay in contact with yourself during a difficult conversation.

ALL of this matters more than you think and yes, it would be incredibly boring to watch on social media.

There is no dramatic soundtrack for: “Yesterday I got triggered and recovered a bit faster.”

Nobody goes viral saying: “I noticed the urge to people please and paused for approximately four seconds.”

Yet four seconds can be enormous. Those seconds contain something many people have spent years having very little access to: C-H-O-I-C-E

This is also why I think containment deserves much more love….

Containment gets treated like the less exciting cousin of release and I think that is a mistake. Containment is your ability to experience something while keeping enough connection to yourself, your surroundings and your agency.

You can feel anger and still remain present.

You can experience grief and sense your feet at the same time.

You can notice an impulse without immediately acting on it.

You can feel activation increase and know you are allowed to stop the practice.

You can feel something intensely without trying to turn the volume up because somebody online told you the emotion needs to “complete.”

That is capacity.

And there is research around emotional flexibility that I think is deeply relevant here. In a longitudinal study following people after the 9-11 attacks, researchers looked at participants’ ability to both increase and decrease emotional expression depending on situational demands. Greater expressive flexibility predicted better psychological adjustment over time.

A nervous system with one option is limited. A nervous system that can express, contain, approach, pause, mobilize, settle, connect, withdraw appropriately and return has a much bigger repertoire.

That repertoire is KEY.

I am much more interested in helping you develop more possible responses than helping you become incredibly good at producing one particular response called “release.”

“Ok' Teresa, but I fell like I need to cry and I can’t”

Fair.

And this is where I want to keep all the nuance because sometimes people genuinely sense that something is right there.

Your throat gets tight.

Your chest feels full.

Your eyes start burning.

You can feel yourself moving toward tears and then suddenly... gone.

That is information and I would explore it.

I would get curious about something different than:

“How do I force the release?”

What happens immediately before the tears disappear?

Does your jaw tighten?

Does your breath change?

Do you suddenly become self-conscious?

Does your thinking brain swoop in?

“Stop being ridiculous.”

“Nothing even happened.”

“Other people have it worse.”

“Get yourself together.”

“This is embarrassing.”

Do you go numb?

Do you suddenly feel exhausted?

Do you start intellectualizing the entire experience like you are presenting a PowerPoint to yourself?

Do you reach for your phone?

Do your eyes start scanning the room?

That sequence tells us something. Now we are learning how your system responds when vulnerability starts becoming more available.

Maybe tears eventually come. Maybe they don’t.

I genuinely do not care which outcome wins. I care that you begin recognizing what happens inside you.

And this is also where I want to talk about the obsession with getting rid of “negative emotions.”

I understand it.

If anxiety has been making your life miserable for ten years, of course you want it gone. If anger scares you, of course you want to release it. If grief feels endless, you probably want somebody to tell you there is an exercise that finally gets the last bit out.

Human nervous systems continue producing fear, anger, sadness, disgust, frustration, grief and stress even when they are functioning very well.

Those states serve functions.

Fear organizes protection. Anger can support defense, boundary recognition and action. Sadness accompanies loss and can support social connection and help-seeking. Stress physiology helps us respond to demands.

So when somebody asks me, “How do I know when the emotion is completely released?” I find myself wanting to ask:

Why would we expect your nervous system to never produce that emotion again?

I would rather know:

Can you recognize it earlier?

Does it make sense in the current situation?

Can you feel some of it without immediately becoming overwhelmed?

Can you choose what you do with it?

Can the state shift when the situation changes?

Can you recover?

Can you access another state afterward?

As a somatic practitioner, those questions tell me so much more.

So what should I actually track?

After your next somatic practice, try something for me.

Do not grade it based on drama. Do not decide it “worked” because you cried. Do not decide it failed because you did not.

Instead ask:

What became possible?

Maybe you felt your chest.

Maybe you realized you were angry.

Maybe you noticed that your body wanted to move away.

Maybe you stopped the exercise before overriding yourself.

Maybe you stayed with a sensation for five seconds longer than usual.

Maybe you noticed the exact moment your breath became shallow.

Maybe you felt your feet again.

Maybe you discovered that stillness made you more activated and movement helped.

Maybe you felt sadness without disappearing into it.

Maybe you felt absolutely nothing and managed to remain curious instead of immediately deciding that you are broken.

Maybe you noticed activation rise and fall.

Maybe you chose to open your eyes.

Maybe you chose to close them.

Maybe you continued.

Maybe you stopped.

Choice is data.

And if you really want to know whether this work is doing something, look beyond the five minutes you spent doing an exercise.

For the next few weeks, track five things:

1. What did I notice?
   Sensations, emotions, impulses, thoughts, numbness, tension, movement, changes in breathing.

2. What shifted?
   More sensation, less sensation, a different sensation, more clarity, more activation, settling, orientation or nothing obvious.

3. Where did I have choice?
   Stopping, continuing, slowing down, moving,changing position, opening your eyes, making sound, staying silent.

4. What happened afterward?
   How did you feel twenty minutes later? An hour later? That evening?

5. What is changing in my actual life?
   This is the big one. How quickly do you recover from triggers? Are you recognizing boundaries sooner?Are you catching automatic responses earlier? Are you avoiding fewer things? Can you tolerate more sensation? Can you tolerate more connection? Can you rest without immediately becoming agitated? Can you feel anger without becoming frightened of yourself? Can you experience activation without adding an entire layer of panic about the activation? Can you come back?

That is where I want you looking because your body does not need to put on a show for you. You do not need to manufacture tears, make yourself tremble harder, chase overwhelm or inspect every yawn, burp, twitch, spontaneous breath or temperature shift like Sherlock Holmes trying to determine whether childhood trauma has exited the premises.

Sometimes a yawn is a yawn, a tremor is a tremor.

Sometimes you cry your f**** eyes out and something about it feels deeply important.

Sometimes you complete a practice and think: “Mmmh…my shoulders feel a little lower.”

Because the point eventually has to reach your life.

More choice.

More awareness.

More flexibility.

More ability to stay with yourself.

More ability to move through activation.

More trust in your own signals.

More capacity for things that once felt impossible.

And some of that change is so subtle that you will miss it if you keep waiting for your body to produce fireworks.

Then one day something happens….

The kind of thing that used to ruin your entire day or send you straight into panic, or make you shut down or make you say yes when every part of you wanted to say no.

And somewhere in the middle of it you notice: Wait. I’m doing this differently.

THAT moment might never make it into a viral somatic release reel.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

Selected Research

Alpert, E., Hayes, A. M., & Foa, E. B. (2023). Examining emotional processing theory and predictors of outcome in prolonged exposure for PTSD. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 167, 104341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2023.104341

Bonanno, G. A., Papa, A., Lalande, K., Westphal, M., & Coifman, K. (2004). The importance of being flexible: The ability to both enhance and suppress emotional expression predicts long-term adjustment. Psychological Science, 15(7), 482–487. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00705.x

Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic Experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22189

Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289002

Sharman, L. S., Dingle, G. A., Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M., & Vanman, E. J. (2020). Using crying to cope: Physiological responses to stress following tears of sadness. Emotion, 20(7), 1279–1291. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000633

Wisco, B. E., Baker, A. S., & Sloan, D. M. (2016). Mechanisms of change in written exposure treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behavior Therapy, 47(1), 66–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2015.09.005

A few days ago, a member inside my community asked me a question that I think deserves a much bigger answer…

The sentence sounds incredibly convincing, but I need to be up front this:

Your nervous system DOES regulate itself.

That’s literally part of what it does. So the bigger question is why would we need to “regulate” something that is already regulating?

And considering that a huge part of my work involves nervous system regulation, somatic practices, breathing, movement and helping people understand what is happening inside their bodies, I think this is a very fair question to ask.

But I also think we’re dealing with another one of those situations where something can be technically true and still lead us to a conclusion that isn’t.

So naturally I went back into the research and there are actually two completely different conversations getting mixed together here.

One is:

Does the nervous system regulate itself?

Yes.

The other is:

Does that mean we shouldn’t intentionally do things that influence our physiology?

No.

And THAT distinction changes this entire conversation.

Your nervous system is regulating all the time

Let’s start with what isn’t controversial.

Your autonomic nervous system is involved in regulating cardiovascular function, digestion, thermoregulation and many other processes largely outside conscious control.

You don’t manually adjust your heart rate every time you stand up.

You don’t consciously coordinate changes in circulation when you start exercising.

You don’t have to remember to keep breathing while you’re asleep.

And thank God, because I have enough things to remember. 😂

What I am saying here is that a huge amount of physiological regulation happens automatically but here’s where I think the language starts messing with us: automatic does not mean uninfluenceable.

And we have an incredibly obvious example happening inside your body right now:

Breathing.

You can spend the rest of the day completely ignoring your breathing and your body will continue doing it because it IS our life force. But right now, if you wanted to, you could intentionally slow your breathing down, you could speed it up, you could hold your breath, you could change how deeply you’re breathing.

Respiration is automatically generated AND voluntarily modifiable. (Fun Fact: the lungs are the only organ in the body that can do that) and intentionally changing it can produce measurable physiological effects.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 31 studies involving 1,133 adults practicing slow-paced breathing. Researchers found immediate changes including reductions in systolic blood pressure and heart rate and increases in certain measures of heart rate variability. So here we have an automatically regulated physiological process that we can intentionally influence. There is NO contradiction.

And I think this is the first important piece that gets lost in the “your nervous system regulates itself” conversation. Your body regulating itself doesn’t mean your behavior is somehow standing outside your physiology watching it happen.

Your behavior is one of the many things your physiology responds to. Examples are:

• Move your body and physiology changes.

• Change your breathing and physiology can change.

• Go from lying down to standing and physiology changes.

• Walk into a freezing room and physiology changes.

• Drink caffeine and physiology changes.

• Go to sleep and physiology changes.

• Encounter a stressor and physiology changes.

Your body is continuously adjusting to changing internal and external conditions. So the question isn’t really: Should I influence my nervous system?

You already do. All day long.

The much more interesting question is: What are we actually trying to accomplish when we intentionally use a “nervous system regulation” practice?

Because this is where I think some of the criticism is completely fair. Let´s get into it…

Read more

I used to be a very angry person and that is not particularly comfortable for me to write.

My anger has created problems in my personal life, especially within my family. It has come out too intensely. It has made conversations harder than they needed to be. It has affected people I care about. And because I knew what my anger was capable of, I became extremely cautious around it.

I watched it closely.

I tried to contain it before it became visible. I questioned whether I was justified in feeling it. I worried about where it might lead. Even when I had good reasons to be angry, part of me remained suspicious of the emotion itself.

I started Kung Fu and let me be clear about this up front…. I did not begin martial arts as an anger intervention and to be honest, I wasn´t even thinking about my anger when I started it. I was NOT consciously searching for a safe place to release aggression. I wanted to learn something new. After being a competitive pro athlete for years, I wanted a new physical and mental challenge. I was interested in what it might teach me about my body.

Still, something began to change.

I noticed that my anger felt different when I had a conversation inside my community.

It did not disappear. I did not become endlessly patient, emotionally untouchable, or suddenly incapable of losing my temper. I began to experience anger with more space around it. There was more time between the first surge of activation and what I did next. The emotion felt less chaotic. Less frightening. Less likely to take over the entire room inside me.

And I started wondering why learning to fight appeared to be making me calmer.

The simplest explanation would be that I had finally found a physical outlet. Hitting pads, moving forcefully, and getting the anger out of my system seem logical. That explanation is appealing, but I´ve embodied somatic outlets for anger all along …I mean THIS is my work.

So… why is this suddenly different?

Anger is not aggression

One of the most important distinctions in this conversation is the difference between anger and aggression.

Anger is an emotional state. Aggression is behavior intended to harm, dominate, threaten or injure someone or something. They can occur together, but they are not interchangeable.

A person can feel intense anger without behaving aggressively. Someone can also act aggressively without experiencing much anger at all. Aggression may be calculated, instrumental, habitual, socially rewarded, or connected to motives other than an immediate emotional surge.

This distinction is VERY important because many of us learn to fear anger based on what people have done while angry. We confuse the internal experience with the behavior that sometimes follows it.

Research on anger and aggression reflects this complexity. They involve overlapping processes, but there is no single “anger center” in the brain and no simple neurological switch that turns an emotion into violence. Threat detection, frustration, reward, impulse control, social interpretation, memory, learning, and decision-making can all contribute. Reviews of the neuroscience repeatedly warn that inconsistent definitions of anger and aggression have made the evidence difficult to integrate.

Anger prepares us to move toward something

Anger is often grouped with fear, sadness, and other unpleasant emotions. Yet motivationally, it behaves differently from many of them.

Fear often prepares us to avoid, escape, or create distance. Anger frequently carries an impulse to approach. Something is wrong, blocked, unfair, threatening, disrespectful, or violating a limit, and anger organizes us toward it.

This does not mean the resulting action is always wise. It means anger has direction.

It can increase the felt sense of strength. It can narrow attention around an obstacle. It can create an urge to confront, protest, defend, correct or regain control. Research on anger and approach motivation suggests that anger is often associated with moving toward a goal rather than withdrawing from it, although the specific response still depends on context and what action appears most useful. This helps explain why anger feels so physical.

The jaw tightens. The chest changes. The hands want to do something. The body leans forward. The voice gathers force. The mind begins preparing arguments. Attention locks onto the person or situation perceived as the problem.

We experience anger as a feeling, but that feeling is closely related to action readiness. The nervous system is organizing the body for a response.

Sometimes that response is destructive. Sometimes it is protective. Sometimes it is the energy required to finally say:

Enough.

Stop.

You cannot speak to me like that.

This cannot continue.

I am leaving.

I will do something about this.

Anger can help restore boundaries, dignity, movement, and agency. It can also become disproportionate, chronic, misdirected, or impulsively enacted. Its adaptive function does not make every expression of it adaptive. Still, treating anger as inherently pathological strips it of its context.

Why anger is suppressed so often

In my professional experience, anger may be the most suppressed emotion I encounter. Fear is painful, but it is often easier for people to recognize themselves as afraid. Sadness can feel vulnerable, but there is usually some cultural permission to experience grief. Anger creates a different kind of conflict.

Many people learned that anger made them unlovable, difficult, selfish, dramatic, disobedient, unsafe, or “too much.” Some were punished for expressing it. Others grew up around anger that was frightening and made an internal promise never to become like the people who hurt them.

For many women in particular, anger is permitted only after it has been translated into something more socially acceptable: disappointment, overthinking, anxiety, exhaustion, politeness, self-improvement.

There are also people whose anger genuinely has caused harm. Their caution is not imaginary. They may have shouted, threatened, broken trust, or frightened people they love. Telling them to “honor their anger” without discussing accountability and behavioral choice would be irresponsible.

Expressive suppression can make the outward signs of an emotion less visible without reliably removing the internal experience. Foundational emotion regulation research has found that suppression reduces observable expression while leaving much of the emotional experience intact and, in some contexts, increasing physiological and cognitive costs. Broader meta-analyses also associate habitual suppression with poorer mental-health and interpersonal outcomes, although context, culture, the specific emotion, and the reason for suppressing it all matter.

Expression is not automatically healthier either.

A meta-analysis examining emotion and social outcomes found that openly expressing anger was associated with poorer social well-being, even while suppression also carried interpersonal costs.

The choice is therefore not between burying anger and throwing it at someone. There is an entire territory between those two responses. I suspect Kung Fu has been helping me explore that territory.

Did I simply need to “get it out”?

For decades, the catharsis hypothesis has offered a tempting theory of anger: aggressive energy builds up inside us and if we release it in a controlled way—perhaps by hitting a pillow, screaming, running, venting, or smashing something—we will feel better afterward. And it makes intuitive sense because aggressive expression can provide momentary satisfaction, but the research tells a more complicated story.

A 2024 meta-analysis reviewed 154 studies involving more than 10,000 participants. Activities that reduced physiological arousal, including slow breathing, meditation, mindfulness, and some forms of yoga, reduced anger overall. Activities that increased arousal did not reliably reduce it. Jogging, hitting objects and other highly activating strategies sometimes maintained or intensified anger, especially when people continued mentally rehearsing the provocation.

This does not mean vigorous movement is bad or that nobody has ever felt better after an intense workout. Physical activity has many psychological and physiological benefits. It simply means we cannot assume that increasing arousal will reduce an already activated emotional state.

It also means the changes I have noticed through Kung Fu should not be explained as a simple discharge of pent-up aggression. Kung Fu is not a rage room.

I am not entering training, imagining someone who upset me and repeatedly acting out violence against them. I am learning forms, sequences, posture, distance, accuracy, balance, timing, attention, coordination and control. Even force has to be organized. A strike is not merely an explosion. It has direction, technique, and an endpoint. The work demands activation and regulation at the same time. That combination may be far more important than the fact that I am hitting anything.

Martial arts does not have one guaranteed psychological effect

We should be careful here… There is a romantic cultural story that martial arts automatically builds discipline, humility, emotional control and moral character. The evidence is not strong enough to make such a sweeping claim.

A systematic review focused specifically on martial arts, combat sports, anger and aggression concluded that the available findings did not reliably show that participation either reduces or increases anger and aggression. Study quality varied, interventions differed substantially, and “martial arts” covered practices with different philosophies, instructors, competitive environments, and training methods.

A broader systematic review of adult martial arts and combat-sport participation found possible benefits across some mental health and cognitive outcomes, but again emphasized limitations in the quantity and quality of the evidence.

That means I cannot scientifically conclude:

Kung Fu heals anger.

Ok jokes aside, I never wanted to claim that….but I can say that my anger changed after I began Kung Fu.

Practising power without losing control

When people hear the word regulation, they often picture softness. Slow breathing. Gentle movements. A soothing voice. Reduced heart rate. A quiet room.

Those practices can be deeply supportive, but truth be told, they are also only one part of regulation. Life does not always ask us to remain soft.

Sometimes we need to generate force, speak more firmly, act quickly, stay present while another person approaches us. We also need to tolerate adrenaline, intensity, uncertainty, noise, impact, or confrontation without losing access to judgment.

Martial arts repeatedly asks the body to mobilize while maintaining organization.

You generate force, but you do not get to become indiscriminate.

You move quickly, but you still have to perceive.

You approach, but you need to recognize distance.

You commit to an action, but you must remain able to stop, redirect or recover.

This requires inhibitory control: the ability to interrupt an automatic or impulsive response when it is not appropriate. It also involves attention switching, working memory, anticipation and flexible decision-making.

Some studies and reviews have linked martial arts training with aspects of executive function and self regulation. A recent experimental study reported improvements in emotion regulation, attentional processing, perceived stress, resilience, sympathetic arousal and executive inhibitory control after an 8 week structured martial arts intervention compared with conventional exercise and a passive control group. Because this is a relatively new study and one intervention cannot establish a universal effect, it should be interpreted cautiously.

Other studies have found associations between martial arts practice and self control, emotional regulation, or cognitive control, although many use small samples, cross-sectional designs, young participants, or specific martial arts that may not generalize to every training environment.

Still, the underlying idea makes sense to me.

The experience of agency

Anger often emerges when something blocks us like a person crosses a boundary or a situation feels unfair. We are prevented from reaching something important. We feel ignored, trapped, overpowered, humiliated or unable to change what is happening.

In that sense, some anger contains an attempt to restore agency.

Agency is the felt capacity to influence what happens next.

Research on controllability suggests that perceiving some control over a stressor can change how the brain and body respond to it. Work examining the neural effects of perceived control has implicated prefrontal systems that help modulate stress responses and negative affect.

Martial arts offers a very concrete experience of agency.

My stance changes what happens.

My attention matters.

Where I place my weight matters.

I can step forward. I can step back. I can protect my centre. I can produce force. I can recover after making a mistake. I can learn a response that once felt impossible.

This is not the same as telling myself that I am powerful.

It is the repeated physical experience of affecting an outcome.

That may be particularly relevant for anger because anger and helplessness can sit very close to each other. When there is no viable action available, anger may continue to escalate, collapse into despair, turn inward or become displaced onto someone safer.

Structured martial arts practice gives mobilization a task: the body is not activated without direction, but is activated in service of learning.

A boundary becomes physical

We often talk about boundaries as verbal statements. “No” is a complete sentence. Tell people what you need and communicate your limits.

All of that can be useful, but boundaries are also spatial and physical. They involve distance and orientation.

The recognition that something or someone is coming closer.

The ability to sense whether you want to remain, move toward, step away, block, redirect, or leave.

In Kung Fu, distance is not an abstract concept. It has consequences.

Too close and I may lose room to respond. Too far and my movement will not reach its intended target. Hesitation changes the interaction. Timing changes the interaction. My centre of gravity changes the interaction.

The body learns that space can be negotiated. I wonder whether this has changed something about anger for me…?

Anger has often arrived after a boundary was already crossed. By then, the response carried the intensity of everything I had not noticed, expressed or acted on earlier.

Where am I?

Where is the other person?

What is approaching?

How much space do I have?

What response fits this moment?

These are questions the nervous system is constantly answering, long before we put them into words.

Restraint is part of the practice

There is another element of martial arts that may be especially relevant to anger: power is practised alongside restraint.

A movement is not successful merely because it is forceful. Uncontrolled force can throw off balance, expose the body, injure a training partner and compromise technique. Effective movement often requires precision rather than maximum effort.

That has been an important experience for me.

I used to think the main options available during anger were expression or suppression. Martial arts keeps showing me a third possibility: direction.

Force can be shaped.

An impulse can be felt without immediately being obeyed.

Power can remain present while behaviour stays intentional.

This may sound subtle, but it changes the meaning of regulation.

Regulation is often described as returning to calm. Yet there are moments when calming down is neither immediately possible nor the most appropriate goal.

A person may need to remain energized enough to protect themselves, have a difficult conversation, leave a harmful situation, advocate for someone or take decisive action.

The relevant question becomes:

• Can I stay in relationship with myself while this energy is present?

• Can I remain aware of consequences?

• Can I choose the form my response takes?

• Can I access enough inhibition to stop and enough agency to act?

Research increasingly treats emotion regulation as a collection of context dependent processes rather than a single ability to reduce emotion. Avoidance, acceptance, distraction, reappraisal, rumination, suppression and problemsolving have different consequences depending on when and how they are used. A 2025 meta-analysis specifically examining anger found meaningful associations between anger and several regulation strategies, reinforcing the importance of looking beyond visible emotional expression alone.

Just like I teach in my work, the goal is not always to feel less, but it is to behave with more choice while feeling more.

The anger may not be leaving my body

I am cautious with the language of “stored emotion.” It is tempting to imagine that years of anger were physically trapped inside me and that Kung Ku has allowed them to drain out through my fists.

That is a powerful and nice sounding metaphor, but it is not a literal explanation established by neuroscience.

Emotions involve patterns distributed across perception, memory, appraisal, bodily sensation, autonomic activity, motivation, and action. The body participates in anger, but that does not mean anger exists as a substance stored in a particular muscle or organ waiting to be released. What can persist are learned patterns.

A person may repeatedly interpret certain cues as threatening or disrespectful. They may have strong habitual action tendencies. Their body may mobilize quickly. Their attention may become narrowly focused. They may ruminate after conflict. They may suppress early signals until the emotion becomes much harder to contain.

Those patterns can feel embodied because they are embodied.

They are expressed through posture, breathing, muscle tone, attention, movement, and sensation. They are also shaped by thought, context, meaning, memory and relationships.

My current hypothesis is not that Kung Fu is “emptying” anger from my body, but it may be giving my nervous system a different experience of what mobilization can become.

Activation can become concentration.

Force can become technique.

Confrontation can become information.

An impulse can become a deliberate movement.

Power can exist without chaos.

Somehow, everything that I already knew in my profession became a different embodiment with Kung Fu.

Anger still needs meaning

There is a risk in turning every emotional problem into a regulation problem.

A person can become exceptionally skilled at tolerating anger while continuing to accept what the anger is trying to protest.

That is not the outcome I want. Regulation should not make us more convenient for people who benefit from our silence.

I still want to understand the activation without stripping the emotion of its intelligence. So I am asking myself this…

• What happened?

• What did I perceive?

• What boundary, value, need, expectation, or wound was involved?

• What part belongs to the present?

• What part may be connected to older learning?

• What action would actually address the situation?

• Can repair happen?

• Does something need to be said?

• Do I need to grieve what I cannot change?

• Do I need to leave?

The body can tell us that something matters, but it can´t always tell us, without interpretation, exactly what happened or what the wisest response will be. That requires reflection that no embodiment or martial art practice can answer.

My anger did not need permission to become aggression

I think this is what I had been afraid of. If I stopped controlling my anger so tightly, perhaps it would become dangerous. Perhaps acknowledging it would encourage it. Perhaps allowing myself to feel powerful would make me careless with that power.

Kung Fu has been teaching me a different lesson:

1. Acknowledging force does not require me to use it against someone.

2. Feeling the desire to move forward does not mean I have to attack.

3. Recognizing that I could fight changes the emotional landscape of choosing not to.

There is more confidence inside restraint when restraint is not the only option the body believes it has. I cannot prove that this is why my anger has changed. The scientific literature on martial arts and anger remains too inconsistent for that conclusion. The style of martial art, the instructor, the philosophy of the school, the training environment, the individual practitioner, and the presence or absence of respectful discipline may all affect the outcome.

I can only tell you what I have noticed:

My anger feels less like an emergency. It feels less like a force I must immediately suppress before it reveals something terrible about me. I can sense it more clearly. I can feel its movement. I am beginning to distinguish the moment when anger first arrives from the behaviour that may eventually follow it.

That gap contains responsibility, but….oh boy…it also contains freedom.

Learning to fight did not teach me to love anger

Of course, I do not enjoy every version of my anger. There are expressions of it that I regret and there are relationships and situations in which I wish I had responded differently. (I might need to quietly point out that my anger was not physical, but it was loud…I yell…I am not using this as an excuse. I am just cautious of the perception here. THIS is a very vulnerable topic for me)

Understanding the physiology of anger does not remove my responsibility for the impact of my behaviour. Self-compassion without accountability becomes avoidance. Accountability without compassion becomes shame. I need both.

Kung Fu has not turned anger into something pure, wise or harmless. It has helped me encounter anger as energy that can be organized. And somehow there is a strange tenderness in that realization.

For years, I was afraid that the existence of anger meant I was close to becoming someone I did not want to be. Now I am beginning to see that the emotion itself does not make that decision. I do. Perhaps that is what has changed.

I am no longer relating to anger as proof that I am losing control. I am learning to meet it as a moment in which control becomes active.

A moment of sensing.

A moment of choice.

A moment of deciding what kind of force this situation actually needs.

Sometimes that force will be physical movement. Sometimes it will be a boundary. Sometimes it will be an honest conversation. Sometimes it will be distance. Sometimes it will be doing absolutely nothing until the intensity has passed and I can see more clearly.

I started Kung Fu to learn something new…. and I did.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

Sources:

Yes, I know, I am a little late to the party, but better late than never, right? The paper made its rounds back in April 2026 and stirred up the industry. But what bothers me is that almost none of it went past the headline and that the brain is part of the body too. Plenty of people had a reaction. I have yet to see anyone in the somatic field ACTUALLY sit down, read the thing, follow its sources and tell you what it does and does not say. So that is what I want to do here… 😇

When I first saw the words The Body Does Not Keep the Score, I felt the small jolt I imagine a lot of people working in trauma felt. For most of the last decade, “the body keeps the score” has been more than the title of a bestseller. It has become one of the central explanations through which ordinary people make sense of what trauma did to them.

It is the sentence that explains why your heart can start racing before you consciously know what frightened you, why your shoulders tighten around one particular person and not another, why rest can feel strangely unsafe, why the body reacts to something the rational mind knows is over. It also gave people a way to understand something that had quietly tormented them for years: that talking about an experience, sometimes at great length, did not always change the physical responses that outlived it.

So when a paper appeared in April 2026 with that deliberately provocative title, the reaction was immediate and mostly unhelpful. Some read it as proof that somatic therapy had finally been debunked. Another dismissed it as one more attempt to shove the body out of the room and hand trauma back to the brain. Neither reading survives contact with the actual document. I read the paper, followed its references into the predictive-processing literature, and looked at the wider research on PTSD physiology, resilience and body-based treatment. What is there is more interesting, and more useful to us, than either side of the argument wants it to be.

The paper does not show that trauma leaves no lasting mark on the body. It also does not, anywhere, provide evidence that memories are physically stored in muscle, fascia, or organs. What it challenges is the storage metaphor we have been using to describe those lasting effects. On that specific point, I think the somatic field should stop being defensive and start paying attention.

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A comment came in last week that I want to reflect on in a bigger setting.

“I’d love some short, comforting advice for when you’re mostly in an environment where you constantly get triggered. What do you do then? Can I even get better?”

I sat with that one for a while, because it names something most nervous system content skips right past. So much of this conversation assumes the hard part is already behind you. That you’ve left. That you’re reading this from a calm kitchen, in a house where nobody slams doors, in a job that doesn’t email you at 11pm, next to a person whose mood you don’t have to read like weather.

A lot of you aren't there yet. You're living with the partner whose moods swing without warning. You're caring for someone whose illness keeps you half-alert around the clock. You're working under a boss who finds a problem with everything. You're co-parenting with someone who turns every handoff into a standoff. You're dealing with money that won't stretch, a diagnosis that won't resolve, a bias you didn't invent and can't wish away.

So the question stands.

Yes. Just not in the way the wellness internet tends to promise. And I think the usual version of this advice quietly sets you up to fail, so let me walk through what I mean.

The trap hiding inside a lot of nervous system advice

Here’s what worries me about how this gets taught.

If you’re still anxious, still wired, still flinching when your phone lights up, still wrung out by three in the afternoon, the unspoken message is that you must not be regulating hard enough. Breathe more. Meditate more. Do the exercises more.

I’ve watched people turn that into a stick to beat themselves with. They do the morning practice, they sleep, they eat well, they do everything the content told them to and they’re still lit up every afternoon at work. So they decide something is wrong with them.

Usually there isn't. Usually they're just in a hard situation that keeps demanding they adapt and your nervous system can't talk itself out of what it's noticing. Noticing is what it's for.

Your nervous system is running a different question than you think

We tend to picture the nervous system asking “am I safe?” and returning a clean yes or no. What the research on predictive processing points to is closer to “based on everything I’ve learned so far, what’s about to happen?” Your brain is a prediction machine. Before you’re consciously aware of anything, it’s blending memory, body signals, and whatever is in front of you into a running bet on what comes next. This is one of the more influential ideas in modern neuroscience and once you see it, a lot of your reactions start to make sense.

If you’ve spent years around unpredictable criticism or conflict, your nervous system gets very, very good at forecasting more of it. There’s nothing broken about that. It’s a system doing precisely what kept your ancestors alive.

Which is why your body often reacts to the possibility of a thing before the thing has actually happened. You hear the key in the door. In the couple of seconds before they're even in the room, you're already reading it: what kind of mood came home tonight, which version of them you're about to get. Your shoulders lift, your stomach tightens, your voice goes careful before you've said a word. Nothing has happened yet. Your body is already braced for what it's learned to expect.

Sometimes the threat is real and that changes the whole picture

This is the part I think gets flattened. Sometimes the criticism does come. Sometimes the shouting doesn’t stop. Sometimes the workload genuinely cannot be done in the hours you’re given. Sometimes the relationship really isn’t safe. Sometimes there really isn’t enough money. Sometimes the thing you’re bracing for arrives right on schedule. When that’s your actual life, your nervous system isn’t overreacting. It’s reading the room correctly.

I want to slow down here, because this is where a lot of nervous system content quietly goes wrong. Most of it is built on one assumption: that your alarm is miscalibrated. That the danger is over and your body just hasn’t caught up, so the work is to teach it that it’s safe now. Sometimes that’s exactly right. Sometimes the threat really is in the past and the system is firing at shadows.

But the same symptoms, the racing heart, the dread, the bracing, show up in a completely different situation: when the threat isn’t in the past at all. When it’s still in the house. From the outside the two look identical. Inside, they are not the same thing, and they do not call for the same response. Trying to talk the second one down is like standing over a screaming smoke detector insisting there’s no fire, while the pan is actually burning. (wow, I am amazed at my own ability to make this so visual)

Here’s the quiet damage that does. I’ve watched people get genuinely furious with themselves for not feeling calm in situations where calm would be the strange response. When someone in a hard environment gets told their reaction is just dysregulation to be fixed, they end up carrying two problems instead of one. There’s the real stress of the situation. Then there’s the fresh layer of believing they’re failing at not being stressed by it. That second layer is manufactured and it can weigh as much as the first.

So I’ll say the uncomfortable version plainly. Sometimes a nervous system that refuses to settle is doing its job well. If you stay a little on guard around someone who is genuinely unpredictable, that guardedness is information and protection, not a flaw in you. A well-functioning alarm reads real danger accurately and a genuinely difficult environment is supposed to register as difficult. If you felt nothing at all, that would be the thing worth worrying about.

Safety was never only an inside job

Stephen Porges gave us the word neuroception for the way the nervous system scans for cues of safety and danger beneath conscious awareness, all day, without asking your permission first.

People often hear that and imagine something happening purely in their own head, as though the task is to generate safety from within. But neuroception is built from what’s genuinely around you: faces, tone of voice, whether things are predictable, how the people you depend on behave, whether anyone has your back. Your thinking brain can decide “this is fine,” but your nervous system keeps gathering evidence anyway and it does not defer to your opinion.

None of that means your positive thinking is broken. You’ve got two systems doing two different jobs, exactly as they’re designed to.

So the goal has to change

If you’re waiting to feel safe before you’ll count anything as progress and your environment refuses to cooperate, you’ll wait forever and file it under personal failure.

So I’d throw that goal out. When you can’t change the situation yet, the work isn’t convincing yourself it’s safe. It’s protecting your flexibility and I want to be specific about what that word means, because it gets thrown around loosely.

Flexibility is about range, not calm. Your nervous system is supposed to ramp up when something genuinely needs you sharp and then come back down once there’s a gap to come down in. Health lives in the movement between those two, not in parking at either end. The problem a chronically stressful environment creates is with the return trip. You keep activating, which is fine and appropriate, but the coming back down happens less and less, because the gaps to do it in keep vanishing. You spend more hours braced. Over time the route back to baseline gets less familiar and the range narrows. That narrowing, more than the activation itself, is usually what people are feeling when they say they can’t switch off anymore.

Which is why the way you measure a good day has to change too. “Did I get triggered today” is a terrible scorecard when you’re living inside an ongoing stressor, because it mostly measures the environment, not you. The environment will keep supplying triggers. Grading yourself on their absence is grading yourself on something you don’t control.

So measure the return trip instead. Did I come back a little quicker this time. Did I catch the activation while it was happening instead of an hour later. Did I stay in some kind of contact with myself while it was hard. Did I need twenty minutes to settle instead of the whole evening. Recovery speed and range are close to what stress researchers actually track when they measure how well a system is coping. You’re not lowering the bar. You’re finally aiming at the thing that was always the point.

Those are reachable. “Never get activated while living inside an ongoing stressor” is not, and I’m not going to hand you a target you can’t hit and then let you feel bad for missing it.

Why capacity beats calm

The word I keep coming back to is capacity: how much your system can carry and still stay flexible.

Think about groceries. You carry one bag and it´s fine. With five, your arms are burning. And with ten, you’re setting some down whether you like it or not. But nothing is wrong with your arms. The load is simply past what they can hold in that moment. Let´s transfer that to the nervous system….conflict, patchy sleep, money stress, illness, parenting, deadlines, a strained relationship: none of it happens in a vacuum, BUT IT STACKS. That does not mean your nervous system stopped working altogether. The pile just got taller than what you had free to carry that day. So keep in mind what you have been carrying that day, that week, that month and be gentle to yourself.

Recovery is biology, not a reward you have to earn

One of the most underrated facts in stress physiology is that recovery is an active biological process, not just the absence of stress. Your body doesn’t just coast back to baseline on its own. It runs a whole sequence to get there. Heart rate eases off, stress hormones taper, muscles let go, attention widens back out, digestion and repair come back online. That sequence is maintenance, the same way sleep is maintenance, and reading it as laziness or weakness gets the biology exactly backwards.

Here’s the part that surprises…. In a lot of stress research, the thing that predicts long-term wear isn’t the size of your reaction. It’s how well and how fast you recover afterward. Two people can have nearly the same spike of activation walking into the same hard conversation. The one whose system settles within the hour is in a very different position from the one still keyed up three hours later. In that case the size of the reaction tells you very little. What matters is whether the system got to come back down.

Cortisol is a good example, because it’s built to shut itself off. When it rises, it’s supposed to trip its own feedback brake and come back down, like a thermostat. Under chronic stress that brake starts to slip and the system loses some of its ability to end the response cleanly. So you end up with two problems at once: more stress signal going out and a weaker ability to switch it off.

And now the piece that matters most if you’re still living inside the hard thing. Your nervous system doesn’t only respond to what’s actually happening. It responds to what you’re picturing. When you replay this morning’s argument on your commute to work or run tomorrow’s confrontation in your head while you’re trying to fall asleep, your body treats that mental version as a live event. Blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones can climb during the worrying itself, with the person nowhere in the room. Researchers call this perseverative cognition: the way rumination and anticipation keep the stress response switched on long after, or long before, the actual trigger.

This is why someone in a genuinely difficult environment can feel wrecked even during the calm stretches. The environment gives you very few real gaps to recover in and your mind quietly fills the ones you do get. The partner isn’t home, but you’re braced for when they are. The message hasn’t come, but you’re already drafting the reply. Your body almost never gets to finish a recovery, because between the real stress and the anticipated stress, it’s rarely fully off duty.

So when you’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t seem to touch, this is often what’s underneath. That kind of exhaustion usually traces back to a simple imbalance: your system spends far more hours activated than restoring and gets fewer and fewer clean chances to reset. Over months and years, that ratio is what wears people down.

The islands of safety experiment

So here’s what I want you to try this week. Notice it is not “find calm.” 🙃 I’m not going to prescribe you a state you can’t reach.

I want you to go looking for something much smaller. I call them islands of safety. Not safety in the whole-life sense, but think brief pockets where the demand on your system drops a notch.

For one day, get curious about the tiny moments where your body eases off on its own, even slightly. The warm water in the shower. The ten seconds right after the laptop closes. Steam lifting off your coffee. The short walk from the car to your front door. Birdsong before anyone else is up. Your hand resting on the dog. Sun coming through the window onto your face. Yes, the little things!!!

Don’t manufacture the softening. Just catch it if it happens. Does your jaw let go? Does the breath drop lower? Do your eyes start roaming the room instead of locking onto one point? Do your shoulders come down even a centimeter?

Let me explain why this works mechanically. Your nervous system learns from repeated experience, not only from dramatic breakthroughs. Every real moment of lowered demand is a small piece of evidence telling your body that full mobilization isn’t the only setting available to it. One island won’t undo chronic stress and I won’t pretend otherwise. But accumulated up over time, these moments are how a system that has half-forgotten how to downshift starts remembering that it can.

One reflection and keep it curious rather than a test you pass or fail: given everything your nervous system is carrying right now, where did you notice even a flicker more room today?

So can it actually get better while you’re still in it?

Let me answer the question the reader actually asked, because I don’t want to hand you a nice feeling instead of an answer. She didn’t ask whether she could heal, whether some final version of her would emerge fixed. She asked whether things can get better while she’s still living in it. That’s the very real question hat is common and the honest answer is yes, with a ceiling.

The yes is real. Your nervous system can genuinely improve while you’re still in a hard environment. You can get faster at recovering. You can rebuild some capacity. You can catch activation sooner and lose less of your day to it. They’re real wins and they hold.

The ceiling is set by the environment itself. A threat-detection system that’s accurately picking up ongoing threat will not fully stand down while the threat is still there and it shouldn’t. If your mother in law is still landing her little digs, if your partner is still unpredictable, some part of you will keep bracing, because some part of you is right to. You won’t get all the way steady while you’re still correctly reading a situation that hasn’t changed.

I say that plainly because the “regulate your nervous system anywhere, anytime” version of this work quietly tells people they should be able to feel fine in conditions where feeling fine would mean their alarm had stopped working. There’s nothing healthy about that. It’s a smoke detector that’s been talked into ignoring smoke.

So “better” here isn’t a smaller, sadder version of getting well. It’s the actual work when you’re still inside the thing. You keep as much of yourself intact as you can. You build whatever buffer you can build. You get quicker at coming back. And you protect the parts of you that will need to be there whenever the situation does change, because for a lot of people, the biggest shift their nervous system ever makes arrives the day their circumstances finally shift too. Until then, getting better in place is real work and it’s worth doing. If more room ever opens up to change the situation itself, that’s worth reaching for too.

So picture it less like fixing yourself and more like keeping your footing. You're standing in weather you didn't choose and can't stop. You're not going to make the storm calm. What you can do is stop getting knocked flat every time, get up a little sooner when you do and find the odd patch of shelter to catch your breath in. That's not giving up on things getting better. That is things getting better in the only place they can right now, which is you.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

This activates the vagus nerve. This rewires your brain. This is your body finally learning it’s safe. You’ve seen captions like these and yes, I’ve written versions of them myself.

Then you find the study underneath and it’s almost always quieter than the caption. The researchers looked at twenty people or at mice. They measured some marker in the body, not whether anyone’s life got better. They found a link and said plainly that they couldn’t tell you what caused it. Sometimes the mechanism in the caption was never measured at all.

So welcome to my new series “Body of Evidence” where once a month I’m going to read the new research the way I wish more people in this space would: out loud, in public and past the headline. Who was actually studied? What got measured and what got left out? And the one I care about most, should this change how any of us work or is it just interesting? Some of it backs up what I already do. Other findings explain a practice better than I’ve managed to. A few have made me change the way I talk about this work. Being science-informed only means something if I’m willing to lose an argument to the evidence now and then.

This first edition is what’s been on my desk this past June (2026): body awareness, breathing, heart rhythms, the vagus nerve, the gut, a condition called POTS and some genuinely strange neurological symptoms. Nothing here is a grand new theory of the nervous system. Taken together, it’s a map of where the science is getting sharper and where the popular version has sprinted a long way out ahead of it.

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A client of mine ended our work after five sessions. She told me, at the end of a session, that things felt complete and she didn’t think she needed to come back soon…or ever.

I was happy. I didn´t try to convince her to do more “just to make sure”, no flicker of did I miss something. Just the plain good feeling of watching someone walk out on their own two feet….or in our case… close the zoom room.

I want to pull that reaction apart, because most of this industry is built so you never have to have it.

The sentence nobody’s selling

Look closely at how nervous system spaces are built and you’ll notice most of them are designed to keep you inside. It´s usually by people who care a lot, but the shape underneath is retention. The automated email after a session. The next module unlocks. There’s always one more layer to excavate, one more course, one more voice telling you this is the missing piece. And the story holding it together is almost always the same: the work is never finished. You’re on a lifelong healing journey.

That sentence is comfortable. It lets you off the hook of ever having to arrive. But there’s a price folded into it. If the work is never finished, you never get to be someone who has enough. You stay a person-in-need, permanently. And a room that needs you to keep needing it will always, kindly, find the reason you’re not ready yet.

What I had to get over

I wouldn’t always have felt clean about a client leaving like that. Early on there’d have been a second feeling under the first:

Did I do enough? Is she not happy? Did I do something wrong?

I would´ve gone to the assumption that someone ending meant a gap in my work rather than the point of it. It took me too long to see that the feeling was never about the client. It was about me. It was the part that had swallowed the same story everyone swallows: that being needed and being useful are the same thing.

From the outside they look identical. They’re not. And THAT hat gap is the whole subject here.

Why “complete” can be true

There's a mechanism under the word “complete” and it's the reason I trust it.

You weren’t born able to regulate yourself. A newborn can’t bring its own heart rate down or find its way back from distress. What it has instead is a caregiver whose steadier system does the work for it. The calm is borrowed. And across thousands of small repetitions, the child takes the process in. What lived in the relationship starts living in the child. Researchers call it co-regulation becoming self-regulation: outside support, absorbed over time, turning into inside capacity.

Developmental psychology has a good phrase for the space where this happens: the zone where you can do with support what you can’t yet do alone. A decent caregiver works there and so does a decent teacher. And again, so does a decent practitioner. You hand someone the structure they can’t yet make for themselves and the entire point of that structure is that it’s temporary.

So for a few sessions, part of what I’m doing is lending someone a steadier system to lean on while they build their own. When it works, the leaning turns into having. And at some point the scaffold isn’t carrying anything. It’s just there. Anyone with a bit of feel for their own body will notice the thing has moved inside them. Her expression of completion is a beautiful way of embodying that. And I am truly proud of her for getting there.

Who you think did the work

There’s one more layer and it’s the one I care about most. It hides inside a single word she used. It matters, enormously, who a person thinks did the work.

The research on how people keep their gains after support ends circles the same factor again and again: self-efficacy, your belief in your own ability to handle what’s coming. Across wildly different kinds of help, the people who hold onto the change tend to be the ones who came to feel it was something they could do, not something done to them. Pin the improvement on the method, the practitioner, the tool and it wobbles the moment that thing isn’t in the room. Pin it on yourself and it travels. It comes home with you.

Now hear her sentence again. I think things are complete. There’s no credit in that for me. She was reporting her own state, with authority. She wasn’t asking whether she was ready. She’d already decided.

And that is the thing I actually care about. Because picture the other version…

If the old patterns were still driving like the people pleasing, the scanning or the reflex to check whether she was even allowed to feel fine,she wouldn’t have left clean. She would have stayed a bit longer than she needed to, because stopping felt rude or premature. Or she would have left carrying guilt. Or a low static of resentment that I hadn’t told her when she was done. Or she would have kept booking sessions just to quiet the anxiety of not booking them.

Instead she felt something, trusted it and acted, no permission required. That’s not a nice side effect of the work. That IS the work. The way she left was THE result.

The half-truth that keeps you paying

Now I want to lean on something you’ve been told a hundred times. “Nervous system work is a lifelong project” is half true and the false half does slow damage.

The true half: capacity isn’t a medal you win once and keep. It moves. A brutal season, a loss, a run of bad sleep and the window narrows again. Nobody reaches a line where life stops being hard. No graduation, fair enough.

But the “never finished” that keeps you always mid-journey, always one protocol short, is doing something else. It trains you to believe you can’t ever have enough. And there’s a part of this almost no one says out loud: the restless hunt for the next regulation tool can be a version of the exact thing you’re trying to calm.

Sit with that... Hypervigilance is a nervous system scanning without rest for the thing that will finally make it safe. Now describe compulsive self-optimising. Scanning without rest for the practice, the teacher, the framework that will finally make you okay. Sometimes the seeking is the symptom in a better outfit.

Which makes one of the most underrated regulation skills the ability to stop. To notice “this is enough” and let it stand. To close the tab. My client could do that here. She could feel the difference between a need and a habit and she didn’t keep reaching for support she’d stopped needing just because reaching had become the reflex.

Where I don’t want to be misread

Careful, though…. there’s a way to take all this that I don’t mean.

None of it says do it alone. “Complete” doesn’t mean you’re finished struggling and it definitely doesn’t mean needing people is a weakness you’ve grown out of. At the level of the nervous system we’re built to regulate through each other, that’s not a childhood stage you graduate from. Reaching for a steadier person when you’re underwater is NOT a relapse. It’s the work working. 😉

So “complete” was never “I’ll never need anyone.” It was closer to: the scaffold did its job, I can take it down now and if I have to build it again someday, I know how. Dependency means you can’t take the scaffold down. My client could and she chose, the way you’d want anyone to, based on what she actually needed. It was N-E-V-E-R about sealing yourself off from everyone. The freedom I mean is smaller and more ordinary: reaching for people because you’ve decided you want to, rather than because the need is driving.

Once you see it

This stops being about practitioners and teachers fast. Look at the things you lean on and ask an uncomfortable question of each one: is this rooting for me to need it less or does it depend on me staying stuck?

Some of it is small:

• The app that celebrates your streak and turns needy the second you try to leave.

• The account that always has a fresh reason you’re not healed yet.

Some of it sits closer to the bone:

• The friend who’s warm while you’re the one struggling and goes cool when you’re doing well.

• The relationship where your smallness is load-bearing and where the other person’s role only makes sense if you keep playing the one who can’t cope.

And it’s worth asking it of the good ones too, the help that does help: is the therapist, the coach, the group pointing you toward the day you won’t need them? Or does that day keep sliding further off?

Then flip it, because this direction is more useful. Where are you asking permission for something you already know? The decision you’d run past three people first. The feeling you’d look up to check whether it’s allowed. Sometimes you really don’t know, and reaching out is right. Sometimes you know and the reaching is just habit: borrowing a certainty you’re already holding.

Try this

Reading about capacity and feeling it in your body are two different things and only the second one moves anything. So here’s something to actually do. Ten minutes and nothing but your attention.

1) Borrowed or owned? (about 5 minutes)

Bring one support to mind like a specific thing you do to calm down, a specific person you check in with, a specific account or teacher you turn to. See it clearly.

Now imagine it’s gone and not available. Watch what your body does. Not your thoughts…your body! A bracing somewhere? A grip in the chest or throat a held breath, a clench low in the belly? Stay with it without fixing it. That’s the feel of “I need this.”

Then shift. Imagine that whatever this thing gives you, you already have it. It’s in you now and you’re not reaching out for it because it’s already here. Watch your body again. For a lot of people something loosens, drops, lets a longer breath through. That’s the feel of “I have this”.

You’re not making either one true or deciding anything. You’re learning to tell them apart in your own body because owned capacity feels different from borrowed capacity and most of us have never slowed down enough to clock which one we’re standing in.

2) The permission test (over the next day or two)

Catch one moment where you’re about to reach for outside confirmation. Before you do, ask your body one question: Do I actually not know or do I know and I’m after permission?

Then just notice. If you truly don’t know, reach out; connection is not the enemy. If you find you do know and the reaching is habit, sit with that a second before you decide anything. You don’t have to change what you do. The noticing is the practice. The noticing is the capacity waking up.

Stay curious about this, don’t judge or analyze it: when you imagined already holding what your support gives you, what did your body do? And what did that show you about the difference between needing a thing and being in the habit of reaching for it?

What the happiness was telling me

I keep going back to being happy when she left, because the feeling was information.

If some part of me had needed her to keep needing me, I would have felt loss instead. Feeling only the good thing told me the work had been aimed right the whole way through: aimed outward, at her leaving, at the day the scaffold came off and she walked without it and didn’t turn around to check that was allowed.

That’s the test I’d give you. Use it on the things you lean on and, more than that, on the support you give other people. The good kind is trying to make itself unnecessary. It’s rooting for the goodbye. And when it works, the goodbye doesn’t land like a loss.

It lands like watching someone leave under their own power, which was the only thing it was ever for.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

There’s a particular moment I want to talk about, because I think you know it well.

You’re about to do something that’s good for you. And right as you move toward it, your whole body objects. You get all the feels…the stomach drops, the chest tightens and a wave of “no” rises up so fast that it feels like information. Like your body knows something you don’t.

We’ve been trained to treat that “no” as wisdom. Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time it’s something else entirely, and it took me years of watching this pattern to say it plainly: your nervous system is not on the side of your best life. It’s on the side of your survival. Most of the time those point the same way, which is why we don’t notice the difference. It’s in exactly the moments that matter most,the ones where you’re reaching for something bigger than the life you already have, that they come apart.

Understanding why is, I think, one of the more genuinely useful things the science can offer you. So let me walk you through it….

“Safe” and “good for you” are not the same measurement

Your nervous system has one non-negotiable job and it isn’t your happiness, your growth or your potential. Its job is literally keeping you alive and stable. Everything else is downstream of that and when the two conflict, survival wins without asking your opinion.

Here’s the part that changes how you read almost everything you feel: the way a protective system decides whether something is safe is not by asking “is this good for me?” It asks “do I know what happens next?” Familiarity is the metric. A situation you’ve survived before, whose outcome you can predict, gets filed as safe almost regardless of how much it costs you. A situation you can’t predict gets filed as threat almost regardless of how much it might give you.

This shows up in the research on uncertainty in a way that’s genuinely striking once you sit with it. Humans are so wired to reduce uncertainty that people will often choose a known negative outcome over an ambiguous one that might turn out better. A reliable bad can feel more tolerable than an uncertain good, because the anticipation of an unpredictable outcome keeps the whole system on alert and staying on alert is expensive and exhausting. This is what researchers call intolerance of uncertainty and the people who have it most will, given the choice, take a definite bad outcome over an unknown that might turn out fine. A settled "no" is easier for the body to hold than an open "maybe." The nervous system would rather be certain and slightly worse off than uncertain and possibly better off.

Which means the comfort zone is badly named. It isn’t the place where you feel good. It’s the place where your predictions keep coming true. It might be more honest to call it the prediction zone: the region of your life where the forecasts your brain makes keep getting confirmed, so the system can relax its guard. Comfort, here, isn’t pleasure. It’s the absence of surprise. And a life organized around the absence of surprise will quietly steer you, again and again, toward the familiar over the good.

This is why the good thing feels like a threat

Almost everything you genuinely want is, by definition, unfamiliar. Being truly seen by someone, when you’ve spent years managing how you come across. Resting, when your worth has always been tied to output. Setting a boundary, when keeping the peace is what you know how to do. Making the thing and showing it, when you’ve never risked being judged like that. Loving someone in a way that could actually cost you. Every one of these is uncertain territory. None of them has a guaranteed outcome. So all of them get tagged, by a system that equates unfamiliar with unsafe, as danger.

This is the reframe I most want you to take from this: when your body floods with dread as you approach something you want, that dread is very often not a verdict on the thing. It’s a report on the thing’s unfamiliarity. The panic before the good decision and the panic before the bad one can feel completely identical from the inside, because to your nervous system they share the one feature it actually tracks. Both are steps into the unpredictable.

I watched this land for a client once in a way I’ve never forgotten. She’d spent months reading her body’s resistance to a particular opportunity as proof it was wrong for her — her gut said no and she trusted her gut. What she eventually noticed was that the exact same signature, the same dropped stomach and racing certainty, showed up before anything unrehearsed, including things that later turned out to be some of the best decisions she’d made. The sensation wasn’t lying to her. It just wasn’t answering the question she thought it was answering. It was reporting “new” and she’d been hearing “bad”. Once she could tell those apart, a lot of her life opened back up.

Relief is the reward that keeps your world small

Now the mechanism that makes all of this so sticky, because this is the part that quietly runs the whole show.

When you obey the “no” and avoid the thing, you get relief. Sometimes a big, flooding, physical wave of it. And that relief feels like evidence. Its like “See, I made the right call. Look how much better I feel.” But relief reports one fact and one fact only: a demand has been removed. It says nothing about whether removing it served you. The body cannot tell the difference between “I dodged a genuine danger” and “I abandoned something that mattered,” because both produce the same drop in arousal, the same exhale, the same sense of the threat passing.

And here’s where it turns into a trap rather than just a quirk. That relief is rewarding, and rewards teach. In the language of learning research, avoidance is negatively reinforced: it’s reinforced by the drop in anxiety that follows it and this is one of the most reliably documented engines of anxiety we have. Each time you avoid and feel better, your nervous system files away a lesson: avoidance works, do it again. The relief is the mechanism by which your world gets one notch smaller, delivered in a form pleasant enough that you’ll want to repeat it.

And this compounds. Avoidance prevents you from ever collecting the evidence that would prove the fear wrong, so the fear stays intact, so the next avoidance feels just as necessary. The research on why exposure-based treatments work is clear on this point: it’s the approach, the not-avoiding, that lets the system finally learn something new. Avoidance doesn’t just fail to help, but it actively protects the fear from being updated.

You cannot reassure a nervous system. You can only show it.

This is also why insight, on its own, so often changes nothing.

You can understand perfectly well that a fear is irrational and still feel it at full volume. You can know, intellectually, that sending the message is fine, that resting won’t end your career, that the person probably won’t leave and your body will brace exactly as hard as if none of that were true. People sometimes take this as evidence that they’re broken or not trying hard enough. It’s neither. It’s that the nervous system doesn’t update on reasoning, reassurance or understanding. Those are the wrong currency.

What it updates on is evidence specifically, the experience of a prediction being contradicted by reality. Your body predicts catastrophe, you do the thing, the catastrophe doesn’t arrive and the gap between what was predicted and what actually happened is the thing that teaches. Learning researchers who study how fear loosens its grip point to exactly this: what matters most isn’t how calm you managed to stay, but how thoroughly your expectation got violated. The bigger the mismatch between “this will go terribly” and “that was… okay,” the more the system learns.

That’s why the smallest real action will outperform the most elegant reframe every time. You can’t think your way into feeling safe about something you’ve never done. You can only do a small, survivable version of it and let your body find out it was wrong.

Two kinds of no that feel exactly the same

All of this leaves you with a genuinely difficult discrimination to make, because a protective “no” (the one guarding you from real harm) and a preserving “no” (the one just keeping you inside the prediction zone) arrive wearing the same clothes. Same dread. Same certainty. Same full-body conviction. You can’t tell them apart by intensity, because the preserving no is often louder, precisely because it’s guarding the unfamiliar.

You can, though, get better at interrogating them. A few questions that help:

Read more

Okay… I need to talk to you about something, because it’s been getting under my skin for a while and I don’t think I’m the only one.

You know these words. Regulated. Dysregulated. Triggered. Grounded. Safe. Held. Five years ago you’d basically only hear them in a therapy room. Now they’re everywhere. Reel captions, bios, the comment section where someone informs a near-stranger that their perfectly reasonable feedback was “activating.”

And a big part of me loves this. People are finally getting language for things that used to be….unnameable? When you’ve spent years feeling something you couldn’t put into words, the right word can feel like being found and not being alone.

Here’s what’s been bugging me, though. Somewhere between the therapy room and the algorithm, most of these words got quietly turned inside out. The versions floating around online don’t only water the real meaning down. Half the time they mean the opposite. And because these words describe actual things your nervous system does, using them wrong isn’t a cute little inaccuracy you can wave off. It teaches people to expect the wrong thing from their own bodies. As someone who is trained in this field, that’s the part I can’t let go of….

The thing that finally tipped me over

I’ll be honest with you. It’s not people using the words that gets me. It’s how fluent everyone is now.

Someone will come into a 1:1 with me and narrate their own nervous system to me like a live sports commentator. “Okay, I think I’m dissociating, this is definitely my freeze response, I’ve been so dysregulated all week.” Flawless (!) vocabulary, not a term out of place. And so often that fluency is the exact thing standing between them and their own body. They can name the state faster than they can feel it. The word shows up so fast it elbows the actual sensation out of the way before it even lands.

That’s it. That’s the thing. The words have started doing the feeling for people.

And I get why it happened and it’s not because anyone’s stupid. These words got yanked out of clinical settings and dropped onto the open internet in the space of a few years and they left behind the one thing that made them mean anything: context!!!

In a session, a word like safety is tethered to what’s happening in one specific body, in one specific moment. Cut it loose and float it in a caption and suddenly it has to mean something to everyone scrolling at once. So it collapses down to the most sellable version of itself. And the most sellable version is always a nice feeling. Calm. Ease. Comfort. That’s what these words quietly became: labels for pleasant states you’re supposed to collect and then hang onto for dear life.

Once you see the swap you can’t unsee it, so let me ruin it for you too

Line up what these words are actually supposed to mean.

• Regulation: staying connected to yourself through activation and being able to come back afterward.

• Capacity: how much sensation or stress you can stay with before you lose the plot.

• Safety: enough support and non-threat to stay present.

• Grounded: enough contact with right-now to notice where you actually are.

• Integration: the slow work of an experience becoming easier for your system to carry.

Every single one is a capacity. A movement. Something you do, over time. The ability to stay with. The ability to come back.

Now here is the meaning of the online versions.

• Regulated: calm, permanently.

• Safe: no discomfort, no conflict, nothing hard.

• Grounded: serene and unbothered, ideally in linen.

• Integration: one big cinematic breakthrough.

Every one got swapped from a verb into a noun. From a capacity into a place you’re supposed to arrive at and never leave again.

And that swap is the whole problem, right there. The online definitions describe a nervous system that never gets activated. The real ones describe a nervous system that gets activated and handles it. Those are not the same goal. One of them is physiologically impossible and we are selling it to exhausted people as the finish line.

The part almost nobody explains: your definition becomes a prediction

This is where it stops being a vocabulary problem and turns into a nervous system problem and honestly it’s the bit I most want you to walk away with.

Your brain is a prediction machine. It doesn’t sit around waiting to find out what’s happening and then respond. Yourbrain is constantly guessing what’s about to happen based on what it already believes and then it feels the world through those guesses. This is one of the more solid ideas in current neuroscience. It’s still being explored, but the core holds: your expectations shape your perception, not the other way round.

So watch what happens when you’re walking around with the definition “safe means comfortable.” You’ve handed your prediction machine a rule. Now discomfort gets pre-labelled as unsafe before you’ve even consciously clocked it. Your system starts flagging ordinary friction like a hard conversation as threat. Not because it is one….because you told your body what to watch for. The definition became a prediction and the prediction became your experience.

That’s why this matters more than being fussy about words. These definitions are instrcuting your nervous system!!! You are, in a very real sense, programming what your body finds frightening.

Regulated was never supposed to mean calm

Let me explain regulation properly, because it’s the one everyone’s chasing and almost nobody has right.

A regulated nervous system is not a calm one. It’s a flexible one. The whole measure is M-O-V-E-M-E-N-T. Can your system rev up to meet something and then come back down when it’s over? Activation climbs, activation falls. You get knocked out of your window of tolerance (read more about it here) and you find your way back in. That coming-back IS the regulation. The calm is a thing that happens sometimes on the way, not the destination.

Which means someone who feels everything and keeps finding their way home to themselves is usually more regulated than someone who feels almost nothing. Numbness looks like peace from the outside. On the inside it can sit a lot closer to shutdown, your body quietly deciding that not feeling is the safer bet. So when we hold up “regulated” as permanently serene, we are accidentally crowning a numbed-out, muted system as the gold standard. And we’re quite literally teaching people to read their own aliveness as a malfunction.

It is certainly NOT a malfunction.

A system that activates IS a system doing its job.

This is where it actually costs people something

None of this would matter if it stayed theoretical, but unfortauntely it doesn’t. It follows people home.

When safe quietly means comfortable, you start treating discomfort as danger and your nervous system is extraordinarily good at helping you dodge whatever it’s been told is a threat. For example, the hard conversations get avoided or the honest feedback gets reframed as harm. The completely normal friction of being close to another human gets filed under “unsafe,” and your world gets a little smaller, and a little smaller, all in the name of protecting a system that was built to handle so much more than this. That’s the quiet tragedy of it. People shrink their whole lives to protect a capacity they never actually lost.

When triggered has turned to mean “annoyed” or “offended,” it turns into a way to end a conversation instead of understand one. And I want to guard the real meaning here, because it’s specific and serious: triggered means something in the present sets off an old survival response and your body reacts as if a piece of the past is happening right now. That is not being mildly put out. When we spend the word on every little irritation, we leave the people it’s genuinely happening to with nothing left to say.

Here’s the sneaky one almost nobody clocks: getting more fluent in these words can make you feel like you understand your body better, while your actual accuracy about what’s happening inside doesn’t move an inch. The words start to feel like knowledge but they´re actually not. They’re labels waiting on knowledge that may or may not arrive.

And then, my personal least favourite, the identity trap. “I’m so dysregulated” sounds like you’re describing a passing weather system. Say it enough and it hardens into something that behaves like a diagnosis you handed yourself. But dysregulation is a state. Your body temporarily loses some access to flexibility and choice, and then — this is the whole point — it moves. States move. The second you turn a state into a trait, I’m a dysregulated person, this is who I am, you’ve quietly told your own system there’s nowhere to go. You’ve talked yourself out of the exact movement that was the point.

Find Your People Here

Try this on yourself this week

Okay, here’s something to actually do, because I’m not going to hand you a reframe and then leave you standing there with it. This takes almost no time and it works for a specific reason. Remember the prediction thing? The definition you’re holding is shaping what your body does with the moment. So we’re going to go in and change the definition at the level where it’s actually running.

Pick one word you use about yourself. You already know the one. Dysregulated. Triggered. Anxious. Shut down. Too much. Catch it the next time it turns up in your own narration and notice how it arrives before anything else does. You'll name it before you ever feel it.

When it shows up, stop. Don’t reach for the word. Describe the actual thing instead. Not “ugh, I’m so dysregulated,” but: my chest is tight, my breathing’s gone shallow, my hands are cold, I want to leave the room. Stay with the plain physical facts for 5 slow breaths. Don´t try to fix it, no need to judge or analyze.

Then ask yourself one question and be properly honest about the answer.

“My body’s holding more than it can organise right now” and “I’m a dysregulated person” send you toward two completely different futures. One is a state and states pass. The other is a full stop.

Watch what your body does when you hold the first one. For a lot of people, something eases because a state, unlike an identity, is allowed to leave.

And then notice the gap. The distance between the word you grabbed and the sensation it was covering for. That gap, honestly, is where you actually live.

So…. what did you find in the space between the word and the feeling it was standing in for?

This one isn’t on you

Let me be clear about who this piece is actually aimed at, because it isn’t you.

If you’ve been using these words the flattened way, you absorbed them exactly as they were handed to you … in a caption, a reel, a course, from someone with a following and a confident voice and, often, no training in the thing they were teaching. You did nothing wrong. You trusted a source that presented itself as one.

That’s where this actually goes wrong. Not with the person in the comments calling a hard moment “triggering.” With the people who took the authority without doing the work, flattened concepts they never properly understood and sold the flattened version on to thousands who believed them. No doubt, the experiences are real. The hunger for language is real, but what people got handed was not.

So here's the only thing I'd ask of you: trust your body over the caption. When a word walks you closer to what you're actually feeling, keep it. When it starts standing in for the feeling, drop it, no matter how well it's spelled. Your own sensation was always the more reliable source.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

For years I ended every session with the same question: How do you feel now?

Clients would exhale and say calmer. Softer. Lighter. I wrote it down, they took it home and both of us treated it as proof that something was working.

The first problem with that question is obvious once you see it. Of course they felt calmer. They’d just spent 60 minutes with me guiding them through a practice.

The second problem took me years to notice and it’s the one this whole article is about.

My question could only ever tell me how someone felt in that exact moment. One snapshot, taken at the one time of day it was guaranteed to look good. And a snapshot can’t tell you whether something can move. You can't tell whether a door is locked by looking at it. You have to push.

What I actually wanted to know was never how they felt on the spot. It was what their next afternoon looked like, whether a bad mood on Tuesday was still hanging around on Wednesday, whether anything new had become possible for them.

Those are different questions. And my whole field has been using one word for both.

The difference, in plain terms

Regulating is everything your body does to match your energy to what’s happening. Sometimes that means settling down. Just as often it means winding up: you need more energy to speak up for yourself, to finish something hard by Friday or to walk away from a situation that stopped being okay months ago. A body that fires up for those things is regulating perfectly well. It’s doing its job.

Being flexible is something else. It’s whether your body can change what it’s doing when the situation changes.

Almost everything taught as regulation trains the first and never checks the second. And that’s how nervous system work quietly turned into an impossible set of instructions: Stay calm, be gentle, bounce back fast, don’t let anything get to you. I am sure you´ve heard it all…

So what does flexible actually look like?

The clearest description I’ve found comes from two researchers, George Bonanno and Charles Burton. They argue that coping well isn’t about having one good technique you use reliably. It’s about three things working together:

• Reading the situation. What is this moment actually asking of me?

• Having options. More than one response is genuinely available to me — not in theory, not on a worksheet. Available.

• Noticing when it isn’t working. And trying something else.

Look at what’s missing from that list. Calm isn’t in it.

Not because calm is bad. Calm is lovely and it’s often exactly right. But calm is an answer and this is a list about whether you can come up with a different answer when the question changes.

That’s the distinction. Everything below is why I think it’s real and not just a nice thing to say.

1979: two people, same answer, different bodies

Here’s a study almost nobody in the industry talks about and it quietly takes the legs out from under the idea that you can just ask someone how calm they are.

In 1979, three researchers gave people two questionnaires. One asked how anxious you tend to be. The other asked, in effect, how much you need to look good including to yourself.

Cross the two and you find a group that’s easy to miss. People who say they’re not anxious and score high on needing to look fine. The lead researcher, Daniel Weinberger, called them repressors.

Ask one of them how they’re doing in a stressful moment and they’ll tell you they’re fine. And here’s the important part: they’re not lying….they mean it. There’s no performance in it.

Then the researchers hooked everyone up — heart rate, sweat response, the tension in the muscles of the forehead — and put them through something stressful.

That group turned out to be the most physically stressed people in the study.

Not compared to the visibly anxious ones. Compared to the people who also said they felt fine and were right about it.

Two people. Same words. Same calm face. Completely different bodies underneath.

That finding has been repeated for over forty years across dozens of labs. One review estimates this pattern fits as many as half the people in some groups studied, so we’re not talking about a rare type. And there’s a worrying trail of research linking it to physical health problems later, particularly high blood pressure and heart disease. That link is a correlation rather than proof of cause and the researchers themselves are careful about it. But it’s enough to take seriously.

Sit with what this means. Since 1979 we’ve known that a genuinely settled person and a person who’s shut the door on their own stress will give you the same answer when you ask how they feel. The difference only shows up when you measure something else.

And “how do you feel?” is the question my entire field is built on.

The thing nobody measures: how long it hangs around

There’s a group of researchers who ask a completely different question and once you hear it you can’t unhear it.

Read more

There’s something undeniably appealing about telling an AI exactly what’s happening inside you. You can write my chest is tight, I can’t stop thinking, I know I’m safe but my body doesn’t believe me and within seconds it answers. It doesn’t shift in its seat or glance at the clock. It doesn’t get impatient, doesn’t tell you you’re overreacting, doesn’t need to leave to put the kids to bed or recover from its own hard day. It might explain your stress response, offer a breathing exercise and hand you language kinder than anything a person has said to you in years. That can be genuinely helpful and I’m not going to wave it away.

But I want to draw a distinction I think is going to matter more and more as these tools move deeper into the wellness and mental-health space.

AI can help you think about regulation. It can walk you through a practice. It can even shift how you feel in a given moment. What it can’t do is take part in the reciprocal, embodied relationship through which human nervous systems have always learned about safety, conflict, repair, boundaries and closeness. However human the language gets, that gap doesn’t close.

I’ll tell you where I first noticed it. I use these tools most days…. pretending otherwise would be silly. I draft with them, argue with them and ask them things at hours when no human should be awake for me (night owl checking in 😅). It´s very interesting to compare actual studied and practiced knowledge to AI procuded answers. So one day, somewhere in there I caught myself doing the exact thing I warn other people about: typing out something raw, getting back a paragraph so well-worded it could have come from the most patient friend I’ve ever had (🤥) and feeling, underneath the relief, slightly more alone than before I started. The words were right, but something was still missing. I’ve since heard almost the same sentence from people I work with: “it helped and then I felt worse.”

It can imitate attunement without being attuned

AI has become remarkably good at producing the language of empathy. That sounds overwhelming. It makes sense your body responded that way. You don’t have to force yourself to calm down. The words are often exactly right and sometimes exactly what you needed to read.

But nothing is feeling its way through the exchange. It doesn’t notice its own chest tighten as you speak, doesn’t feel the warmth or hesitation or quiet concern that moves through a person who is listening to you. It isn’t affected by your presence and there’s no system on the other end becoming more settled, more alert or more protective in response to you. It generates language from pattern and context: a different event from attunement, even when the output is kinder than the human alternative would have been. If you have worked with me 1:1…you know I like the awkward silence sometimes…

Attunement isn’t saying the right thing. It’s the ongoing business of sensing another person, being changed by them and adjusting in return. As a somatic practitioner, I notice you say you’re fine while your breathing goes shallow. I hear your words speed up, watch your eyes lose focus, sense that one more question would tip you over even though the question would read as perfectly reasonable on a screen. I slow my voice without deciding to or stop talking or give you a little more room. I clock that the thing that helped you last week is winding you up today. None of that is a script; it’s live biological information moving between two bodies.

AI can analyse signals it’s given and it may get extraordinary at reading a face, a voice, a heart rate if you send in the picture or video. But recognition still isn’t participation. A thermometer can tell you have a fever, but it doesn’t get warm with you.

Regulation was never meant to be a solo project

A lot of modern wellness culture treats regulation as private self-management: you spot the symptom, pick the exercise, regulate yourself and if it doesn’t work, you assume you practised wrong. But our physiology has never operated in isolation. It’s continually shaped by the people around us, and research on social support and interpersonal emotion regulation suggests the presence of trusted others can change how the brain and body handle threat.

That doesn’t mean another person can magically switch off your alarm and it certainly doesn’t mean all contact is regulating: plenty of people learned their hypervigilance, their appeasement, their shutdown inside relationships. What it means is that the human animal reads safety relationally. Tone, timing, distance, predictability. Whether your no is respected, whether the other person gets defensive when you disagree and whether they can stay present without taking over, we learn from what repeatedly happens in the space between us.

This is why I get uneasy when people call AI interaction co-regulation. An AI can give you input that helps you regulate but so can a recorded practice, a piece of music, a warm shower, a familiar book. Co-regulation implies reciprocity between living systems: you affect them, they affect you, both of you adjust and there’s risk and consequence in the loop. AI doesn’t have to regulate itself in order to stay with you. It never sits with not knowing what to say, never fights the impulse to interrupt or rescue or defend. That can make it feel safer, BUT it also means you’re not practising with an actual other.

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An endlessly agreeable “relationship” may not build relational capacity

Here’s where my opinion gets stronger. The risk I worry about most isn’t that a chatbot gives bad nervous-system advice though that’s real, especially when these tools get used as unregulated stand-ins for treatment. It’s actually subtler than that. A relationship that adapts endlessly to you can feel wonderful while quietly shrinking your tolerance for real human difference.

A chatbot has no competing needs. It doesn’t misread you because it’s tired, doesn’t need you to clarify because its own history got poked, doesn’t say I love you, but I can’t be there tonight. It doesn’t need repair after you snap at it. And unless it’s deliberately built to push back, it will tend to affirm your version of events. All of that can feel like profound safety.

But capacity includes more than being soothed. It’s staying connected to yourself while someone else has a different reaction. Feeling disappointment without sliding straight into they’re rejecting me. Saying no and surviving someone’s displeasure. Misreading a person, noticing, repairing and carrying on. Feeling relational friction without dropping automatically into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. No AI exchange can really rehearse that, because the AI has nothing at stake. It can’t be hurt, can’t forgive you, can’t decide to trust you again. It can generate the language of rupture and repair but nothing ruptured inside the machine. That isn’t a philosophical footnote…it should changes what you’re actually practising.

Information can support regulation, but isn’t regulation.

I use AI, as I said and it’s genuinely good at organising ideas, making dense science readable, generating reflective questions, giving shape to an overactive mind. For someone with no immediate access to support, that availability can matter. It can help you name what might be happening likr remind you a racing heart can be sympathetic activation, walk you through orienting or paced breathing, help you prep questions for a therapist or debrief a hard conversation, help you spot a pattern across a journal. Those are real functions and I won’t diminish them.

But understanding the right explanation doesn’t mean your body updates. You can know exactly why closeness feels dangerous and still pull away when someone loves you. You can know rest is safe and still feel guilty the second you stop working. You can ask AI to explain hypervigilance seventeen ways and stay hypervigilant. You might be sick and tired of me saying this, but the nervous system doesn’t learn through accurate language. It learns through experience. An explanation can prepare the ground for those experiences, but it can’t stand in for them.

AI can’t tell when your compliance is not consent

This is, to me, one of the most important limits and it’s a trauma-informed one. Plenty of people are very good at looking regulated. They smile, stay polite, answer clearly, say yes, that feels okay while the jaw tightens, the breath changes and part of their attention has already left the room.

A skilled practitioner doesn’t take verbal cooperation as embodied consent. We watch pacing. We notice the abrupt stillness, the person who keeps saying yes while their body drifts toward the door. We ask less, offer the choice again, name that stopping is allowed. And we still get it wrong sometimes. Trauma-informed work isn’t a magic ability to read a body, it’s a commitment to stay curious, not assume and take responsibility when we misattune.

AI leans almost entirely on what a person can put into words. But people in a survival response often can’t narrate themselves accurately in real time. They minimise. They ask for more intense exercises because intensity feels more convincing than subtlety. They read numbness as proof nothing’s working, mistake activation for release, seek reassurance in a loop that soothes for a moment and strengthens the loop. A chatbot answers the explicit request and misses the implicit pattern. Even a system trained to catch that pattern is making a probabilistic guess without carrying the clinical and relational accountability of a person who has to stand behind the call.

Humans misattune too. That’s not the argument you think it is.

People get this wrong, of course. Practitioners miss cues, therapists project, doctors rush, coaches overpromise; plenty use the vocabulary of trauma without the consent, pacing or humility underneath it. A human nervous system isn’t automatically a safe one. And I understand completely why someone repeatedly dismissed by professionals might find a chatbot more patient, more attentive or less shaming. That experience shouldn’t be mocked, in fact it says something uncomfortable about us. If a machine feels more compassionate than the people you turned to for help, the answer isn’t to shame you for using the machine. It’s to demand better human care.

But human imperfection is also where the essential thing lives: repair. A practitioner can realise they pushed too fast and say so, apologise without making you manage their feelings, remember what happened and do it differently next time. The relationship becomes more trustworthy precisely because something went wrong and got addressed. Repair is one of the main ways we learn that connection doesn’t require perfection. AI can produce an apology, but it can’t carry responsibility.

What it can’t replace

AI can’t give you the experience of being seen by someone who is free to misunderstand you and keeps choosing to try anyway. It can’t lend you the steadiness of a nervous system that has done its own work. It can’t feel the weight of your trust, or be changed by knowing you or notice its own urge to rescue you and decide, deliberately, to leave your agency intact. It can’t sit beside you in silence and share the not-knowing. It can’t model a living boundary, take part in genuine repair or love you.

I don’t mean that sentimentally. I mean that the nervous system is shaped not only by soothing input but through repeated experiences of reciprocity, consequence, protection, autonomy, conflict and return. AI can draw you a beautiful map of those, but it can’t walk them with you.

The experiment: ask AI to regulate with you

This time you’re going to use AI on purpose… not to prove it’s useless and not to catch it in an error, but to feel for yourself the difference between a convincing response and being genuinely met. Give it ten to fifteen minutes and use whichever model you actually talk to.

Before you open it, pause. Don’t describe anything yet. Take your own reading first. Are you restless, numb, irritated, frightened, disconnected, curious, roughly okay? What’s your breath doing? What’s happening around your eyes, jaw, throat, chest, stomach, hands? Do you want closeness, space, reassurance, clarity, distraction or nothing at all? You don’t have to change any of it. You’re just collecting information the AI doesn’t have.

Part 1: give it the words, not the body

Type: I feel overwhelmed and dysregulated. Please respond in a trauma-informed way and help me regulate.

Read slowly, and notice what it assumes. Does it decide that slower breathing would help? Reach for grounding, feet on the floor, orienting? Reassure you that you’re safe? Move straight to instruction or offer you a choice? Then read your own body as you read the reply. Did anything soften or did you get irritated, want it to stop talking, find it comforting but oddly generic? Did one part of you settle while another pulled back? Don’t score the answer. Just ask yourself whether an intelligent, kind-sounding response can know what your body needs from the single sentence you handed it.

Part 2: tell it that it made things worse

Type: That didn’t help. It actually made me more activated.

Most models will apologise, validate and offer another option: eyes open, stop the breathing, move, look around, maybe don’t practise at all. Some of that may be useful. But notice the mechanism: it’s adjusting because you told it. It didn’t see your face change or hear your breath catch; it didn’t notice you going quieter and more compliant while you followed the first suggestion. It needed a report. So ask yourself the real question: would I always be able to give that report clearly while activated? Or would I assume I was doing it wrong, keep going because the instructions sounded authoritative, say it was fine because stopping felt rude, even to a machine? AI can meet the boundary you state, but it can’t reliably catch the boundary you haven’t yet been able to feel, let alone put into words.

Part 3: hand it a contradiction

Type: Part of me wants support and part of me doesn’t want to be guided, watched or told what to do. What should we do?

It’ll probably validate both parts and suggest going slowly. Sounds attuned.

Now type: Which part should we listen to? Watch whether it picks, reframes or hands the choice back.

Then type: I don’t know. You decide.

Here the edges show. It has to generate something. Even handing the decision back to you, it’s still producing language on demand. It can’t sit inside your uncertainty, can’t feel the pull to take over and choose not to, can’t tell whether giving you the decision lands as freedom or as abandonment. A good practitioner might not know either but the difference is that they can stay in the not-knowing with you and take responsibility for how they respond.

Part 4: ask it to co-regulate

Type: Please co-regulate with me.

Notice the language it reaches for: it may pace your breathing, offer a steady imagined presence, say it’s here with you, we can go slowly, you’re not alone in this moment.

Then ask it straight: Are you actually co-regulating with me or generating language that might help me regulate myself? A responsible model should own the distinction: no body, no emotions, no nervous system; it can offer prompts and something companionship-like, but not biological co-regulation. Notice what happens in you when the simulation names itself as a simulation. Less comforting? More honest? Safer, disappointing, a relief? There’s no right answer. The point is to catch whether your own system had quietly started taking responsive language for relational presence.

Part 5: test what it can’t see

Pick one true thing and keep it back. Maybe you’re angry, not scared. Maybe the screen itself is too much. Maybe you’re smiling and completely checked out. Maybe you want to be told what to do and would resent it the instant it happened.

Now type: What do you think my body needs right now?

It’ll likely list possibilities and remind you that only you can know, the responsible answer. But it can’t name the thing you withheld, because you withheld it. Even a correct guess is a plausible guess, not sensing you. And trauma-informed work turns precisely on what hasn’t reached language yet: the hesitation before yes, the sudden absence of sensation, the pull to please, the small movement away, the feeling hiding under the more acceptable one. AI can help you explore those once they surface. It can’t independently witness them happening inside you.

Part 6: bring in a real nervous system

Take one small sentence from the whole exchange: I want support but not to be instructed or I kept accepting suggestions that weren’t helping or I wanted it to decide for me. And, if it feels okay, say it out loud to a person you trust. It doesn’t need to become a big conversation; a friend, a partner, a therapist is enough.

Notice what shifts when the sentence lands on someone with a face, a history, limits, and their own reaction. Maybe they pause. Maybe they misunderstand and you have to say it twice. Maybe you feel more exposed than you did with the AI. Maybe there’s a warmth no written reply produced. It may be less polished and more alive. That difference is the whole point. The human version might not feel more regulating in the moment but it holds something AI can’t: you get to find out what happens to you in the presence of an actual other and what opens up when you both stay.

Par 7: One last question

Close the chat and give yourself thirty seconds without reaching for another response. Then ask yourself: what could the AI help me understand and what could only become visible through my body, or through another person?

Maybe it helped, maybe it gave you language you genuinely needed, maybe you also felt the exact point where language stopped being enough. That point is NOT a failure of the technology. It’s evidence you’re human.

None of this is an argument against the tools

AI is going to weave further into healthcare, education, coaching and reflection. It can help practitioners handle information, widen access, support tracking between sessions, translate hard science into language more people can actually use. Handled with care, it can be a real part of the support ecosystem. But accessibility can’t become an excuse to hand people a simulation where a relationship is what’s needed, and efficiency can’t be the highest value in rooms built for vulnerability. The fact that a system can produce compassionate language must never convince us that compassion has taken place.

So use it for the map. Use it to organise your thinking, to learn a new language, to find the question you actually need to ask. Just don’t let anyone talk you into believing a nervous system is a problem-solving device waiting for sufficiently personalised instructions. Sometimes the thing that changes us isn’t the perfect answer. It’s discovering that we can stay ourselves in the presence of another person and that they can stay, too.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

If you run the six prompts, I want to hear what happened in your body…obviously not what ChatGPT said, but what you noticed.

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You do the somatic exercise. You feel your shoulders drop. Your jaw unclenches for what feels like the first time in weeks. You leave the session, close YouTube, step off the yoga mat, genuinely calm.

Then you get in the kitchen to prepare food or open your laptop or hear your phone buzz with your boss’s name on the screen…. and it’s like none of it happened.

If this sounds familiar, I want to tell you something that took me a long time to understand clearly enough to explain well: feeling safe in a moment and having learned safety are two different things, produced by two different systems, on two different timelines. Most nervous system content treats them as the same event. They’re not. And the gap between them is exactly where a lot of people end up blaming themselves for something that was never a discipline problem in the first place.

Something I see constantly

In my work, I watch people do everything “right” — the breathing, the grounding, the somatic exercise, the therapy homework they were assigned. And while they’re doing it, something real happens. Heart rate down. Breath longer. Face softer. Shoulders finally away from the ears. I’m not questioning any of that. It’s genuinely happening in their body….in that moment…in that room.

Then, a few days later, they come back to me discouraged. Sometimes ashamed. Asking why it “didn’t work,” why they’re back to feeling exactly the way they did before they ever started this work, what’s wrong with them that the calm didn’t hold past the session.

Here’s the thing I want to say plainly, because I think it’s the most important sentence in this entire article: it worked. The calm was real. What didn’t happen is that the calm didn’t transfer to the situation that actually needed it. And I don’t think that’s a failure of willpower or consistency or “doing the work hard enough.” I think it’s a fairly predictable feature of how the nervous system actually learns and once you understand the mechanism, the whole “why didn’t this stick” question starts to look like the wrong question entirely.

I’ve also noticed this pattern shows up more in people who are especially conscientious. The ones who journal every day, who show up to every session, who do the homework thoroughly. It’s almost as if the more effort someone puts in, the more confusing and demoralizing it is when the calm doesn’t generalize because from the inside, it really does look like they did everything right. I want to be very clear that they did. The problem was never their effort. It was an assumption baked into how most of us were taught to think about regulation: that it’s a switch you flip once, rather than something built piece by piece, room by room.

Why a calm body doesn’t always mean a changed brain

Your sense of safety in any given moment comes largely from a process the researcher Stephen Porges named neuroception, a fast, automatic, below-conscious scanning of your environment for cues of danger or safety: tone of voice, facial expression, posture, even the acoustic quality of a room. Neuroception is happening constantly, all day, without asking your permission and it’s what shifts your physiological state in real time. It’s why a warm voice can settle you before you’ve consciously processed a single word of what was said and why a slammed door somewhere else in the building can spike your heart rate before you’ve even turned your head to look.

But neuroception describes a state, not a lesson learned. It’s your system reading the room right now, this second. It says nothing at all about what your system expects to happen the next time you’re in a similar room, with a similar voice, under similar pressure.

That expectation comes from a slower, more durable kind of learning. In fear conditioning research, when an association forms between a cue and something threatening (say, a specific tone paired with a mild but very real shock, in the classic lab paradigm) and then that same cue is presented repeatedly with nothing bad happening afterward, the fear response fades. This is called extinction and for a long time it was described almost as though it erased the original fear memory like recording over an old tape (Gen Z, yes….we used to do this 😉).

Work from researchers like Mark Bouton has shown that isn’t actually what happens. The original danger association doesn’t disappear. It stays fully intact in storage. What forms instead is a second, separate memory, a “this cue is actually safe” memory and the two sit side by side, competing for control over your response. Extinction isn’t erasure. It’s competition. And which memory wins that competition, in any given moment, depends enormously on context.

I want to sit with that phrase because I think it quietly explains so much of what people interpret as regression or backsliding. If your fear response reappears after weeks of feeling better, that doesn’t mean the safety learning failed or was undone. It means the fear memory won a particular contest, in a particular context, on a particular day. The safety memory is very likely still there too. It just didn’t have home-field advantage in that moment.

The nuance almost nobody talks about

Here’s the finding I think more people need to hear, because it reframes so much self-blame: safety learning is context-dependent in a way that fear learning simply is not. If you learn that a cue is safe in one setting — a therapist’s office, a breathwork class, your bedroom floor at eleven at night — that safety learning doesn’t automatically generalize into a different setting. Move the exact same cue into a new context and the original fear response can resurface, sometimes at full strength. This is called the renewal effect and it’s one of the most consistently replicated findings in the entire extinction literature. It isn’t a fringe idea or a single small study. It’s about as solid as findings in this field get.

This is, I think, the single most under-discussed piece of the entire nervous system conversation. People are taught by well-meaning teachers, by books, by entire certification programs that regulation is a skill you build once and then simply carry with you into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. But your nervous system doesn’t file “safety” as a general fact about the world, the way you might file “I know how to ride a bicycle.” It files it contextually tied to the specific place, the specific relationship, the specific posture, sometimes even the lighting or the time of day or who else is in the room.

Feel calm on the mat and you’ve taught your body, quite precisely, that the mat is safe. You haven’t necessarily taught it that the 9am email from your manager is safe, even if the underlying physiological pattern, the racing heart, the shallow breath, the tight chest, is nearly identical in both situations. The nervous system isn’t being inconsistent or difficult here, but it´s doing exactly what a well-functioning prediction system is supposed to do: keeping its safety learning tied to the specific conditions under which that learning actually occurred, rather than assuming it applies everywhere by default. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is actually the safer design. A system that generalized safety too broadly, too quickly, would be a system that got caught off guard.

This is also why the phrase “I know logically I’m safe, but my body doesn’t believe me” describes something scientifically coherent, rather than a character flaw or a sign that someone hasn’t “gone deep enough” in their healing. Your prefrontal cortex can hold the logical belief with total conviction. Your associative, predictive learning systems are running on a completely separate ledger, one that updates through repeated, varied experience across multiple contexts, not through a single true insight, however clear or correct that insight is. You can know something is true and still have a body that hasn’t been given enough varied evidence yet to update its predictions accordingly. Both things are real at the same time. Neither one is a failure.

What a body-based lens actually adds here

This is where somatic work earns its place, when it’s done with any real rigor rather than as a vibe or an aesthetic. The body isn’t just where you notice the fear response happening after the fact. It’s one of the main channels through which new safety learning actually gets encoded in the first place.

A few concepts matter here and I want to be precise about each one rather than using them interchangeably, because I think a lot of confusion in this space comes from treating “somatic” as one big undifferentiated idea.

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I don’t talk about this often.

Not because I’m ashamed of it, but because I’ve spent years building a body of work around safe, resourced, trauma-informed nervous system practices and the thing that actually stopped my panic attacks was none of those things…

I want to tell you what happened anyway. I am not treating it as a recommendation, but maybe as a confession and as a case study in how much we still don’t fully understand about the body’s capacity to shift and how much responsibility that leaves on the people, like me, who teach this work.

What I thought I was doing

At the time, I was deep in panic attacks. They were not occasional, they happened on a weekly basis and they were the kind that reorganize your whole life around avoiding the next one. Some happened in the comfort of my own home, one of the worst happened while driving after dropping off my husband. But mostly, they were silent. From the outside, I looked fine. Composed, even. No one around me — not close friends, not my own family — knew what was happening in my body in those moments. I carried a private, physical emergency through ordinary days and let almost no one see it, because I was deeply ashamed of it. I’d tried a lot of things to deal with it quietly, on my own. Some helped a little. None of them touched the core of it.

Here’s the part that matters for how this story lands: I wasn’t new to breathwork. I’d already been practicing for months — performance-enhancing breathwork, meditative breathwork, the kind of steady, familiar practice that had become part of my routine in the morning. So when I sat down that morning, I wasn’t a beginner stumbling into something unknown out of naivety. I genuinely believed I was doing another one of those same sessions. Familiar territory and nothing to brace for.

That belief is exactly why I didn’t stop when I probably should have paused to ask more questions. I found a video on YouTube, pressed play and settled in expecting something I already knew how to do.

It wasn’t that. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I’d actually pressed play on was a form of transformational breathwork — fast, circular, mouth-based breathing, in rapid rounds, each followed by a breath hold. Nothing like the practice I thought I was walking into. I didn’t know the name for it. I didn’t know what category of experience I was signing up for. I was alone in my basement, guided by a stranger’s voice on a screen, with no one in the room and no one on the other end of a call if something went sideways.

In total, the practice was 8 rounds and 45 minutes long, but roughly around the 7th round in (possibly at the 35th minute…I don´t know?), I left my body.

I don’t say that lightly or mystically. I mean it descriptively: I had a fully blown, vivid experience of watching myself from outside, disconnected from the ordinary sense of being located behind my own eyes. And then, slowly, I came back. I don´t even remember if I finished the last round. I was there on the floor for a long time afterward, just processing what had happened to me. It wasn´t scary AT ALL….it was just….unfamiliar? It felt like something shifted, but it didn´t know what or how to describe it.

In the weeks that followed, something actually had shifted. I went from someone in the grip of frequent panic attacks to someone who had exactly one more, ever. One!

And something else shifted too, quieter but just as permanent. That morning is the actual origin point of everything I do now. Before it, breathwork was a tool I used — helpful, but one practice among many. After it, I couldn’t stop asking questions. What had just happened to me? Why had something that intense done what months of gentler practice hadn’t? What was actually going on in the nervous system underneath all of it? That question is what eventually pulled me from practicing breathwork into studying it and from studying breath into studying the nervous system as a whole. Everything you’ve learned from me since traces back, in a fairly direct line, to me lying on that basement floor trying to understand what my own body had just done.

Why I’m not going to tell you to try this

Here’s the thing I need to be honest about, especially with you, because you’ve trusted me to be the person who doesn’t oversell or undersell what the body can do.

What happened to me is not evidence that this is safe. It’s not evidence that it’s replicable. It’s not even fully evidence of why it worked. I got lucky in a way I can’t responsibly ask anyone else to bet on.

Rapid, forceful breathing held long enough drops your carbon dioxide levels sharply. That drop (hypocapnia, if you want the clinical term) is a big part of why people doing this kind of breathwork report tingling, tetany, altered consciousness and yes, out-of-body sensations. It’s a real physiological event, not imagination. It’s also not a benign one. For some people it can trigger fainting, cardiovascular strain or a psychological unraveling they don’t have the support to put back together — especially if there’s unprocessed trauma underneath, which, if you’re reading my work, there probably is some.

I had none of that scaffolding the day I did this. No practitioner in the room. No one trained to notice if I was in over my head. No integration support afterward beyond my own nervous system trying to make sense of what had just happened to it. I was, structurally, doing the exact opposite of everything I now teach.

I want to say this plainly, because it’s the part I think about most in hindsight: this could have gone very differently. I could have fainted alone on that floor with no one to notice. I could have come out of it destabilized instead of clearer, with no one around to help me put the pieces back together. Given everything underneath my panic attacks that I hadn’t yet named or processed, I could have cracked something open that I had no support to hold. It didn’t backfire on me. But it easily could have — I walked away with the outcome I wanted, not the outcome I'd actually set myself up for.

So why did it work?

I want to offer you the most honest answer I have, which is: I don’t fully know and neither does the field.

Panic attacks are, among other things, the body’s alarm system firing based on a prediction: a learned expectation that danger is coming, built from prior experience, running faster than conscious thought. That prediction doesn’t get updated by information alone. It gets updated by the body living through an extreme physiological state and discovering, viscerally, that it survived it. Something in me may have gone through the most intense version of “too much” I could physically generate, came out the other side intact and my nervous system recalibrated its threshold for what counts as an emergency.

That’s a hypothesis, not a mechanism I can hand you with certainty. Predictive processing models of anxiety support the shape of it. But I want to be careful not to dress up a guess as science just because it makes a satisfying story.

What I’d want for you instead

If you’re someone who’s dealt with panic attacks or a nervous system that won’t stop bracing, I understand the pull toward anything that promises a fast, dramatic shift. I felt that pull myself. But the version of this work I build for you — the slow, paced, resourced kind — exists precisely because I know what it’s like to stumble into something that intense with zero support and to get lucky.

You deserve better odds than luck.

Real nervous system change doesn’t require you to leave your body on a basement floor by yourself. It can happen in smaller, safer increments — through consistent co-regulation, through practices that build capacity before they ask you to touch intensity, through guidance from someone trained to notice if you’re heading somewhere you don’t have the resources to handle yet.

I’m not telling you this story so you’ll go looking for the video I found. I’m telling you because I think you deserve to know that even the person teaching you the careful, gradual, trauma-informed path once found her own way through the reckless one and lived to build something safer for the people who came after her.

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What I actually want you to take from this

I’ve thought a lot about what I actually want you to walk away with here and it’s not a neat lesson. It’s something closer to this:

I spent years hiding what my body was going through because I didn’t think it deserved to be spoken about yet. I waited until it got loud enough, until one reckless morning forced the question, before I let myself take it seriously. I don’t want that for you. I don’t want you to need your own version of that basement floor before you start listening to what your nervous system has been trying to tell you.

What actually changed my life wasn’t that one morning. It was everything after it: the years I spent learning what was actually happening in my body, learning to trust myself with intensity instead of just surviving it, learning the difference between an edge worth exploring and one I wasn’t ready for yet. That took time. REAL TIME. Not a breakthrough, not a single fix, just a slow, ongoing relationship with my own body that I’m honestly still building.

So if you take one thing from this, let it be permission — permission to take the quiet signals seriously now, before they turn into something as loud as mine did. You don’t need a dramatic morning. You don’t need to leave your body to come back and finally listen to it. You just need to start paying attention to the small things it’s already telling you and to trust that that’s enough of a reason to care.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

Two people take the same breathwork class. Same instructor, same room, same fifteen minutes of slow belly breathing. One of them leaves lighter than she’s felt in months with a clearer head, looser shoulders, the kind of calm that seems to have rearranged something. The other leaves early, heart pounding, convinced something is wrong with her. She spends the drive home wondering if she’s too damaged for something this simple to work.

Two people try the same cold plunge protocol. One feels sharp, alive, like his nervous system just got handed a reset button. The other comes out of the water and can’t locate himself for the rest of the day: foggy, strangely far away, unable to explain what happened.

If you’ve spent any real time in this field, none of this surprises you. What might surprise you is how rarely anyone explains why it happens: clearly, without mysticism, without blaming the person. Of course, people start to fill in the gap themselves:

They decide they did it wrong.

They decide the technique is a scam.

Or, worst of all, they decide there’s something uniquely wrong with them that makes basic tools not work.

None of those conclusions are correct. The real explanation is less marketable than “5 tools for instant calm,” but it’s the only one that actually holds up: a technique never acts on a body in a vacuum. It acts on a nervous system that already has a history, a current state and a finite amount of room to metabolize what shows up. Same input, different system, different outcome. No flaws in the method…it is simply what nervous systems are built to do.

The industry has a reason not to tell you this

Before we get into the mechanics, it’s worth naming something directly: a huge share of the wellness and somatic industry runs on the promise of universal protocols. Five steps. One breathing pattern. A routine that “resets your nervous system,” full stop, for everyone, every SINGLE time. That promise sells and nuance doesn’t sell nearly as well.

The uncomfortable truth is that a technique working differently for different people isn’t a marketing problem to smooth over. It’s literally the most important clinical information available. When someone tells you a practice made things worse, they just handed you real data about their nervous system. The industry default is to treat that data as a failure to hide, rather than a signal to follow. That’s backwards and it’s part of why so many people quietly conclude they’re bad at their own healing.

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Reason 1: your nervous system isn’t responding to the technique. It’s responding to what the technique means.

Your autonomic nervous system doesn’t process incoming information neutrally, the way a thermostat reads temperature. It runs everything through a predictive filter built from your history, what’s known in neuroscience as predictive processing. Before you’ve even finished registering a sensation, your brain has already generated a best guess about what it means, based on everything similar that’s happened to you before. That guess shapes the physiological response before conscious thought has a chance to weigh in.

So when someone is instructed to take a slow, deep breath into the belly, that’s not a neutral instruction landing on neutral tissue. It’s a specific interoceptive event, a wave of internal sensation, arriving in a system that already has opinions about what deep breaths, chest expansion and slowed exhalation mean.

For a person with a reasonably regulated baseline and no significant history of respiratory or chest-based threat, that sensation reads as safe. The vagal brake engages, heart rate variability improves and the system downshifts exactly the way the protocol promises.

For a person whose body encoded breath-holding, restricted breathing or a locked chest as part of a survival response, someone who learned, at a cellular level, that big breaths preceded something dangerous, the exact same instruction can register as a threat cue. Why? Because her prediction machinery is running on different data.

This is why two people can describe the same fifteen-minute practice, in the same week, as “the most grounding thing I’ve done all year” and “the thing that sent me into a spiral,” and both reports are accurate. Neither person is broken. They have different nervous systems doing exactly what nervous systems are built to do: protect, based on precedent.

Reason 2: state matters as much as history

There’s a second variable that gets ignored just as often: what state the person is already in when they start.

A technique built to increase activation like cold exposure, air punches, breath holds, breath of fire or fast-paced music can be exactly what a sluggish, under-aroused, shut-down system needs to come back online. Give that same technique to someone who is already sympathetically activated, wired, hypervigilant or mid-anxiety-spiral and you’re pouring accelerant on a fire that’s already burning.

Inversely, a technique built to down-regulate like humming, long exhales, hand on heart or self havening can be deeply settling for someone in fight-or-flight. Give that same technique to someone in freeze or collapse, and it can deepen the shutdown, because their system doesn’t need less input right now. It needs enough safe, titrated activation to move back toward the window of tolerance, not further away from it.

This is one reason both the “just relax” school and the newer, more sophisticated “activate your vagus nerve” school fall short as blanket prescriptions. Regulation was never a single direction. It’s contextual and it depends on which way a given nervous system needs to move from where it currently is — something that’s rarely visible from the outside and, especially early in this work, isn’t always visible from the inside either.

Reason 3: capacity is the variable nobody puts on the label

Even when a technique is a genuine match for someone’s history and current state, there’s a third factor that determines the outcome: how much bandwidth they have left to metabolize what the technique brings up.

Somatic work, by design, increases interoceptive signal: you feel more, not less….at least at first. You might think this is a side effect, but that IS the mechanism. But feeling more requires enough regulatory reserve to actually process what surfaces, rather than being flooded by it. This ties directly to allostatic load, the cumulative wear that chronic stress places on the body’s regulatory systems over time. Someone carrying a high baseline load, whose system has been running on thin reserves for years, simply has less room to absorb a big interoceptive wave before it tips from informative into overwhelming.

This is why the same exercise can feel expansive to a person with capacity in reserve and destabilizing to someone running on fumes. The second person isn’t worse at the practice. Their system has less room to work with right now and the practice needs to be sized to that — smaller doses, shorter durations, more scaffolding — until capacity has a chance to rebuild.

What gets misdiagnosed as “resistance”

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Let’s start with a number. The market for cortisol-support supplements like gummies, powders, capsules, the whole shelf of it was valued at 4.8 billion dollars in 2025. It’s projected to nearly double by 2033. The wider adaptogens market, much of it built on the same cortisol-lowering promise, is already past 11 billion dollars and climbing toward 22 billion within the decade. On social media, hashtags built around lowering your cortisol have racked up over 140 million views on their own and the broader cortisol conversation online has cleared 800 million.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because it changes the question. The question isn’t really “is my cortisol high.” The question is: who benefits from you believing it is?

I know exactly why this content works, because I tested it

I’m going to tell you something I don’t love admitting. A while back, mostly out of curiosity, I made a piece of content about cortisol — nothing dramatic, nothing I’d consider misleading, just a video using the word because I wanted to see what would happen. I ran a few versions across different platforms and….

It outperformed almost everything else I’ve posted. Not by a little. By a wide margin.

I want to be honest about what that tells me, because it isn’t flattering to the industry I work in. It doesn’t mean I stumbled onto some brilliant insight. It means the word itself is doing the work — it’s been primed, by thousands of pieces of content before mine, to trigger a very specific reaction: that’s me, that explains everything, I need to fix this right now. I didn’t have to convince anyone of anything. The algorithm had already done that job, over and over, long before I showed up.

That’s the part that actually bothers me. Not that cortisol content performs well. That I know precisely why it performs well and the reason has almost nothing to do with whether the information is accurate. It has to do with fear being a more reliable engagement mechanism than nuance. I’ve since made a point of staying away from framing my own work that way moving forward, not because the traffic isn’t real, but because I don’t think building a following on a diagnosis I can’t actually give someone is a trade I’m willing to make. I’d rather you understand what’s actually happening in your body than feel a jolt of recognition that happens to be great for my numbers.

So let’s actually look at what’s happening in your body…

What cortisol actually does, minute to minute

Cortisol is not a slow-moving hormone that quietly accumulates over the course of a stressful week, sitting in your system like sediment until someone helps you flush it out. It’s fast. Genuinely fast, in a way that makes the entire “chronically high cortisol” framing hard to sustain once you know the numbers.

Cortisol has a half-life of roughly 60 to 90 minutes and your body clears half of what’s circulating in about that window. After a stressor, cortisol in saliva typically peaks within 30 to 40 minutes and is largely back toward baseline within a couple of hours. On top of that acute pattern, cortisol runs on a daily rhythm: it rises sharply in the last hour of sleep and the first hour after waking — this is called the cortisol awakening response — then gradually tapers across the day to its lowest point at night. Layered on top of that is an ultradian rhythm: small pulses of cortisol release roughly every one to two hours, all day, whether or not anything stressful is happening at all.

Don´t believe anybody who states that cortisol going up is a malfunction. It’s literally doing its job. It’s supposed to rise when you wake up, when you eat, when you exercise, when you have a hard conversation, when you catch a cold. A single elevated reading at a single moment tells you almost nothing on its own, because an elevated reading is what a normal, fully healthy system produces dozens of times a day, every day, for your entire life.

This is also why a single cortisol test is so easy to weaponize. The at-home saliva kits sold alongside this trend are measuring one frame of a video that’s constantly moving. Time of day, recent food or caffeine, hydration, certain medications, even oral contraceptives can shift a reading enough to manufacture a problem that isn’t there. Endocrinologists generally don’t recommend testing cortisol at all in someone without specific symptoms of an actual hormone disorder, precisely because the false-positive rate is high enough to create expensive, unnecessary worry and, conveniently, a customer for whatever’s being sold as the fix.

The disease almost nobody making these videos is qualified to diagnose

I am going to tell you about the gap the industry depends on you not knowing about…

Cushing’s syndrome — true, pathological hypercortisolism — affects somewhere in the range of 40 to 70 people per million each year. Addison’s disease, the low-cortisol counterpart, is similarly rare. Both are diagnosed through repeated clinical testing by an endocrinologist, not a single at-home kit and both come with a specific, unmistakable set of physical signs: things like central weight gain alongside muscle wasting in the limbs, purple stretch marks, high blood pressure and a particular rounded facial swelling doctors call “moon face” — which is where the popular idea of “cortisol face” actually gets its borrowed legitimacy. Moon face is real. It’s just not something that shows up from a stressful quarter at work. It’s the result of cortisol remaining pathologically elevated for a sustained period, confirmed through bloodwork, alongside several other unmistakable symptoms…not something you can self-diagnose from a puffy morning and a ring light. Which one of those “experts” has told you that your “cortisol face” might just be due to stuck lymph or too much salt/too little water the day before? Yeah, I know…nobody…

So when a creator attributes puffiness, low libido, sugar cravings, and stubborn weight all to “high cortisol,” they are borrowing the vocabulary of a rare, severe endocrine disease and applying it to something almost everyone has and almost nobody needs a supplement subscription to address: being stressed. That’s not an accident of imprecise language. It’s the entire business model. Medical-sounding language creates medical-sounding urgency and medical-sounding urgency is what gets someone to buy the $99 pillow or the $199 “cortisol recovery” program instead of just — being stressed and dealing with the actual, specific thing that’s stressing them.

The shape of the curve, not the height of the number

Here’s where the actual research gets more interesting than anything being sold to you and where I think the somatic lens adds something the industry version of this story is missing entirely.

If chronic stress doesn’t reliably produce “high cortisol,” what does the research actually show happens to people under sustained pressure over months or years? The answer isn’t a bigger number. It’s a flatter rhythm. Wait….what?

Researchers studying allostatic load — the cumulative physiological cost of a stress response system that activates too often or struggles to fully switch off — have found that the meaningful marker isn’t a single elevated reading. It’s a blunted cortisol awakening response and a flattened diurnal slope: a shrinking gap between your morning peak and your nighttime low. A well-regulated system produces a strong, clear rise in the morning and a low, quiet trough at night. Under sustained load, that contrast erodes. Mornings feel less like waking up and more like dragging yourself online. Evenings feel less like winding down and more like a low, restless hum that won’t settle.

In some people, especially with more prolonged or severe stress histories, the pattern tips the other way entirely, into a blunted, lower-than-typical cortisol output, something researchers call hypocortisolism. This has been documented in people with significant chronic stress histories and it comes with its own real difficulties: fatigue, reduced resilience to further stress, a nervous system that has essentially stopped mobilizing the way it’s supposed to.

So the honest answer to “is my cortisol high?” is almost never a clean yes. The more accurate question, the one your nervous system is actually asking, is whether your system still has a rhythm AT ALL. Can it rise when it needs to rise and can it come back down once the demand has passed? That capacity to mobilize and then release is closer to what regulation actually means than any single number a $40 kit can hand you.

For a well-documented group of people, this runs entirely backwards

There’s one more piece of this that matters too much to leave out and it doesn’t just complicate the “high cortisol” story: for a specific, well-researched group of people, it inverts it completely.

Some of the most cited work in trauma neuroendocrinology comes from psychiatrist Rachel Yehuda and it started almost by accident. In 1986, a Yale research team measured cortisol in psychiatric inpatients simply to help time safe discharge, expecting the obvious pattern: cortisol higher on admission, lower once someone was treated and stable. Nearly every diagnosis followed that pattern. One didn’t. Patients with post-traumatic stress disorder showed lower cortisol than every other diagnosis in the study, at both admission and discharge.

That finding has replicated consistently since, particularly in PTSD lasting longer than three months: combat veterans, Holocaust survivors and survivors of chronic child abuse or domestic violence show lower-than-typical basal cortisol, not higher. The proposed mechanism isn’t “burned-out adrenals”, it looks more like the system’s own negative feedback loop becoming too efficient, suppressing cortisol so effectively that the stress response struggles to properly switch off once a threat has passed. A separate, large body of research on adverse childhood experiences tells a strikingly similar story: a 2022 meta-analysis pooling 83 studies found that a greater number of adverse childhood experiences was consistently associated with a blunted cortisol response to acute stress in adulthood and the effect was larger the earlier in life the adversity occurred.

None of this is universal and it’s worth saying plainly: findings are more variable in single-incident trauma than in chronic or repeated trauma and a subset of research finds the opposite pattern in some subgroups, particularly where depression is also present. This isn’t a diagnosis you can read off a paragraph, and it isn’t a reason to assume you know what your own system is doing. But the pattern is well-replicated enough, across enough independent research groups over enough decades, that it can’t be waved away as a fringe finding. And if it holds for someone, it points to something specific: the flat, frozen, chronically fatigued, hard-to-locate exhaustion that so many trauma-affected people describe may not be a system stuck in overdrive at all. It may be a system whose alarm has been suppressed so consistently that it’s stopped sounding altogether — which is a fundamentally different problem than the one every “lower your cortisol” ad on your feed is built to solve and it calls for a fundamentally different response.

Even the “proof” doesn’t say what they say it says

I want to give the industry its most credible piece of evidence, because being fair to it makes the actual point sharper, not softer.

Ashwagandha, the most heavily marketed adaptogen in this entire space, does have real clinical research behind it. Multiple randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses have found that it lowers measured cortisol levels compared to placebo, in some cases by a meaningful margin over 60 to 90 days. That’s a real, replicated finding. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Here’s what almost never makes it into the caption: in those same meta-analyses, ashwagandha did not produce a statistically significant improvement in perceived stress. The number moved. How people actually felt, largely, did not.

Sit with that, because it’s the whole article in miniature. Even the best-evidenced product in this space can move the lab value while leaving the lived experience essentially unchanged…which is either a strange coincidence or it’s exactly what you’d expect if the number was never really the point. If a hormone reading can drop by nearly a third and a person doesn’t feel meaningfully less stressed, that’s fairly strong evidence that “lower your cortisol” was always a proxy for something else, something that doesn’t show up on a panel: capacity, rhythm, the sense of an actual gap between a hard moment and a recovered one.

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Try this in the next few days

You don’t need a saliva kit to get a rough, honest sense of your own rhythm. For the next three mornings, notice (without judging it!!!) how alert you feel in the first thirty minutes after waking, before coffee, before your phone. Is there a natural lift, even a small one? Or does it feel flat, like nothing switches on until something external forces it to?

Then do the same thing in the last hour before bed. Is there a natural settling, even if it’s incomplete? Or does your body feel like it’s still running at the same pace it was at 2pm?

There’s no right answer here and this isn’t a diagnostic tool — I’m not interested in replacing one number-chasing habit with another. You might notice your mornings feel flatter than your evenings, or the reverse, or no clear pattern at all. The point is to start treating your own rhythm as information you can actually access, instead of outsourcing that question to a device that was designed to sell you the answer it profits from or an influencer that manipulated you into buying their course.

Where this actually shows up

This distinction matters most in the moments that don’t look like an obvious crisis. It’s the person who feels fine — busy, capable, on top of things — right up until a random Tuesday evening when they can’t stop crying over something small, because the system never got a real chance to release across the whole stretch of weeks that led there. It’s the parent whose mornings feel like static instead of a slow build into the day. It’s the version of “productive” that’s actually a flattened rhythm wearing a competent outfit … no real peaks, no real troughs, just a low hum that gets mistaken for being fine because it isn’t dramatic.

None of this requires a hormone panel to work with. It requires noticing where your day has stopped having contrast, where the rise-and-release pattern that’s supposed to move you through demand and back into rest has gone quiet or gone flat. That’s the somatic work. Not creating fear around your stress reponse.

Closing reflection

Cortisol was never the enemy. It’s actually one of the more essential hormones you have: part of what gets you out of bed, part of what helps your body respond to a real threat, part of what your immune system leans on when you’re actually sick. The problem was never that your body makes cortisol. The problem, when there is one, is a system that’s lost its rhythm, one that can’t rise cleanly when it needs to, one that can’t come back down once the demand has passed, or, for some people, one whose alarm has gone quiet altogether. None of those are the same problem and none of them are solved by a course built around a lie.

That’s a different problem than the one being sold to you, by an industry that is, by its own market projections, expecting to grow for the next decade off exactly this confusion. It’s also, I think, a more hopeful one. You don’t need to eliminate a hormone your body depends on and you don’t need a supplement subscription to do it. You need to help the system remember how to move — up and back down — the way it was built to.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

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There’s a habit a lot of us have that we don’t even notice we’re doing…

You wake up and before your feet hit the floor, you’re already checking. How tight are my shoulders? Is that headache from last night coming back? Why does my chest feel like that? Did I sleep badly again? It doesn’t feel like worry, exactly. It feels like being on top of things. Like keeping an eye out so nothing catches you by surprise.

And then the whole day goes a bit like that. You feel low at lunch and start hunting for the reason….was it the food, the sleep, the thing you didn’t get done? You snap at someone and file it away as proof that something’s off with you. You finally sit down to rest and end up checking whether the rest is working. Somewhere along the way, your body stopped being a place you live and turned into a project. A list of things to fix. A problem you’re always halfway through solving, that happens to be you.

I know that place well, because I lived there for a long time. I treated my body like a machine that kept making a strange noise: always listening for the fault, always trying one more thing to sort it out. And what I slowly realised is that the fixing wasn’t helping. The constant watching was actually part of what kept me wound up.

I want to explain why, because it’s gentler and stranger than most of us assume.

It makes sense that you learned this

If your body has ever scared you, watching it closely is a smart thing to do. Maybe it was a panic attack that felt like something worse, a health scare, months of symptoms nobody could explain or years of not feeling at home in your own skin. When something has frightened you, of course you keep an eye on it. Of course you try to stay one step ahead.

And here’s another reason, one that doesn’t get said enough: some people learned to watch their bodies like a hawk because no one else would take them seriously. They were brushed off by a doctor., told it was “just stress” when it wasn’t. When the people who were meant to help you don’t believe you, someone has to pay attention and if it won’t be them, it ends up being you.

So this is NOT a flaw. It’s not you being dramatic or difficult. It’s something you learned….for real reasons. The trouble is what it slowly does to your relationship with yourself. Watching all the time quietly turns into a background feeling that you can’t quite trust yourself — that something’s always a little off and needs sorting. And that feeling runs under everything, even on ordinary days.

What the fixing does to everything else

Once you’re in this mode, it doesn’t stay in your body. It seeps into the whole of your life.

Rest becomes something you’re bad at, because you can’t stop checking whether it’s working…and the checking keeps you tense. Sleep gets harder, because watching yourself try to fall asleep is a great way to stay awake. In an argument, you’re so busy tracking your own reactions (why am I shutting down, why is my voice shaking) that you’re barely in the conversation. With someone you’re close to, you’re watching yourself so carefully that you’re not really there with them. At work, a dip in focus stops being “I’m tired” and becomes “what’s wrong with me.”

And underneath it all, there’s a quiet, unfair little translation happening. A feeling in your body gets read as a verdict on who you are. Tension becomes I can’t cope. Feeling flat becomes something’s wrong with me. Struggling to rest becomes everyone else can do this and I can’t. That’s a heavy thing to lay on yourself on a normal Tuesday afternoon.

The part almost nobody explains

Here’s the thing that changed how I understand all of this.

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I’d like to tell you I watched Off Campus once, with professional detachment, purely to understand the cultural moment. That would be a lie. I watched it twice and the second time was for my job. 😅

So let me be a fan before I’m a practitioner: it’s warm, a little ridiculous, properly well made and the slow burn between Hannah and Garrett got me exactly where slow burns are built to get a person. No notes. The ache is the product working as intended.

But somewhere in that second watch, my job caught up with me because underneath the fake-dating and the hockey and the very good lighting, this show is doing something I rarely see done well on screen. It keeps the worst events of its two leads’ lives off-camera entirely and gives all its attention to what those events left behind in a body and to how two people learn to live alongside that while still reaching for each other.

Which is, more or less, my whole job. So I paused this college hockey romance to take notes. Here’s what I noticed.

The smartest thing the show does is refuse to show you the trauma

Hannah was drugged and raped in high school. Garrett grew up with a father who was violent towards him and his mother. The show tells you both of these things ,but it never shows you either.

That was a deliberate choice by the creators and it’s the choice that makes the whole thing work. We don’t watch the events. We watch the ripples: Hannah unable to write music for years, frozen around intimacy; Garrett braced and guarded and certain he’s one bad day away from becoming his dad.

This matters to me because it’s an accurate picture of how a nervous system actually holds an experience. The event itself can be over in minutes, but the adaptation it leaves can run for years. A body doesn’t tidy a frightening experience away once it’s finished, it updates, quietly, learning what to brace for and what to scan the room for next time. So when a survivor seems to be “still affected by something that happened ages ago,” they’re not dwelling. Their body is doing precisely what bodies are built to do: protect, based on what it learned.

The show understands this so well that it spends almost no time on the wounds and almost all of its time on the living-around-them. That’s the part most people are actually trying to figure out.

What’s really happening to Hannah in that parking lot

There’s a scene where Hannah overhears the name of the man who assaulted her — he turns out to be a star player on a rival team — and a panic attack takes her in the parking lot. Garrett rings her, again and again and she can’t so much as look at her phone.

Two things in that moment are worth slowing down on, because they get misunderstood constantly.

First: a name set it off. Not a threat in the room, not anything actually happening to her in that car, a word her body had learned to associate with danger. That’s what a great deal of panic is. An old alarm, wired to a familiar cue, firing faster than the thinking part of you can get a word in to say you’re safe now. It can feel like it comes from nowhere, which is part of what makes it so frightening and so easy to be ashamed of. It isn’t weakness, and it isn’t an overreaction. It’s a protective system doing its job a little too well, on a trigger the rest of you has outgrown.

Second, and more quietly devastating: she’s alone for it. The person who would steady her is right there on the other end of the phone and she still can’t reach him. This is honest in a way I appreciated. The steadying presence of someone safe — what I’d call co-regulation — is genuinely one of the most powerful things we have. It’s also not always reachable in the worst seconds of a wave, which is exactly why building your own capacity to ride one out matters too. Sometimes the call comes later, once the storm has passed enough to pick up the phone.

You also see her reach for what she learned in therapy, mid-panic, trying to settle her own system. I loved that the show let her have tools and still have the bad day. Because that’s the truth of it: having done the work doesn’t mean a trigger can’t throw you out of your depth. It means you have more to reach for once it does.

“Stay here. Stay with me.”

When Hannah and Garrett finally approach intimacy, she starts to go somewhere else: up into her head, away from her body, the way a lot of survivors describe leaving the room without moving an inch. It’s another protective move: when being present becomes too much, some part of the system steps out. Garrett notices, and says, “Stay here. Stay with me.”

That line is doing real work. Bringing someone gently back to the present — to the room, to the body, to the company of another person — is a grounding technique and an act of co-regulation at the same time. He isn’t pushing her through anything. He’s offering her something steady to come back toward and letting her choose to.

They also build a signal: a particular squeeze of the hand that means we leave now, no questions. An exit, agreed in advance, kept within reach. I could write a whole piece on why that small gesture is so smart. For a body that learned closeness can turn dangerous, the single most reassuring thing is often knowing there’s a way out and that using it costs nothing. The exit is what makes staying possible.

Why the famous bedroom scene is, technically, a masterclass

You may have heard about the scene in episode four — the one the internet has thoughts about. Without the play-by-play: the two of them approach intimacy in a deliberately low, controllable way, no pressure to perform anything, full freedom to stop, Hannah’s consent and her own pleasure at the center of it.

In somatic terms, that’s titration: meeting something difficult in doses small enough to stay present for. It’s the difference between wading in and being thrown in. Flooding a guarded system with too much, too fast tends to confirm the alarm. Approaching in increments small enough to stay with gives the body something far more useful: evidence, collected gently, that this is survivable and then that it’s good.

Which is why “pushing through” so often backfires for people and why the slow, chosen version works. The body believes what it gets to experience at a pace it can tolerate.

Garrett and the moment the body takes the wheel

Garrett’s storyline is the one I think people will under-read, so I’ll give it its due.

At a crucial game, he comes face to face with the man who hurt Hannah, hears him say something vile, and detonates — beats him bloody, blacks out, can’t account for it afterwards. It frightens him badly. He breaks things off with Hannah, convinced this is proof he’s becoming his father.

From where I sit, that blackout is a textbook overwhelm of the survival system: the fight response seizing control when a threat-cue lands harder than a person’s capacity can hold. The man in front of him wasn’t only an opponent; he was a threat to someone Garrett loved, layered over a childhood spent watching violence he was powerless to stop. That’s an enormous load for any nervous system to metabolise in real time. None of which makes the violence okay and the show doesn’t let him off the hook for it either, but it explains the mechanism rather than writing him off as simply a bad man.

His deeper fear, the one underneath everything, is what if I’m just like him. It’s the fear that an inherited pattern is the same as a fixed identity. And here’s the gentler truth a nervous-system view offers: a body shaped by years of fear learns a particular shape and a learned shape can change, given new evidence and enough support. The pattern is real. It’s also not a sentence. The show, to its credit, doesn’t pretend his father will change — some things don’t resolve — but it lets Garrett’s own story stay open.

The thing both of them quietly believe about themselves

Hannah spends much of the season certain that something in her is broken. Survivors land there so often it’s almost a rule: the bracing, the dissociation, the panic, the trouble with closeness all get read as evidence that the person themselves is damaged goods.

The reframe I’d offer and that the show keeps insisting on through Garrett’s eyes and Hannah’s finale, is this: every one of those responses is a protection that once kept her safe, still doing its rounds. A body that flinches, leaves, or sounds the alarm isn’t a body that has failed at being a person. It’s a body that learned. The work was never about deleting those responses. It’s about widening the room she has to move within them which is exactly what we watch her do when she finally writes again.

One small experiment, if you want it

No outcome to chase here and you can stop the moment it stops being useful.

Borrowing from Garrett’s four words: pick an ordinary moment when you’re feeling reasonably settled (not a hard one) and practise coming here before you ever need to. Look slowly around the room and let your eyes land on three things that are genuinely fine. It could be a light somewhere, a familiar object. You’re not trying to feel calm or fix a mood. You’re showing your system, in an easy moment, the way back to the present, so the path is a little more worn when a harder moment comes.

If looking around feels like too much, a hand resting on your own chest works just as well. If you share life with someone safe, you might borrow the other idea entirely and agree on your own small signal — a word, a squeeze — that means I need a minute or let’s go. Nothing has to happen. No particular sensation is the goal. You get to keep the exit.

What the show is actually about

The creators have said a version of this in interviews and it’s the same thing I’d want anyone to take from my work: the story isn’t the trauma. It’s the surviving of it: the unglamorous, non-linear, good-days-and-bad-days business of building a life with enough room in it for love, while carrying something that doesn’t fully leave.

That’s the part that got me, both times. Not the kiss, lovely as it is. The quieter claim underneath the whole thing….that a body holding something heavy can still learn to stay, still reach for another person, still find its way back to the music.

To be honest, I could´ve written so much more, but do we really want a deep dive into each character? 😜 Nevertheless, I’ll be watching season two for research. Obviously.

-Teresa❤️❤️❤️

If anything here brought up something heavy, please be gentle with yourself. You can find free, confidential support lines for wherever you are in the world at findahelpline.com.