As children, our nervous systems are shaped in the presence, or absence, of attuned care. We learn early what earns us safety, affection, and belonging. For some of us, this learning happens not through rest and connection, but through doing; helping, performing, getting things 'right', anticipating, achieving.
In attachment theory, these are adaptive strategies the psyche and nervous system form to maintain connection and safety(Bowlby, 1969; Schore, 2001). When a caregiver is preoccupied, unpredictable, or emotionally unavailable, the child’s developing brain learns to work for love. To read subtle cues, fix problems, please others, or stay invisible to avoid rejection or conflict.
It’s an embodied and subconscious wisdom, because the growing personality and nervous system is learning that doing more might mean we are safer, more acceptable, less alone. But this “safety” is conditional. It is performance in place of connection.
The body stays busy because stillness feels dangerous due to this early absence of real secure safety and connection. Stillness is filled with a sense of not being good enough, of visceral unsafety to be who and how we are, of loneliness, or shame. If our present moment experience was not held and nurtured, we will mobilise out of it and become human doings, or fully dissociate from our authentic selves and bodies in order to survive.
When we experience this early in life, it creates a blueprint that can last a lifetime until illness, burnout, or a tough relationship comes knocking to start our growth home to ourselves.
Our physiology holds two equally vital drives: the drive to survive, and the drive to connect. When safety in connection is uncertain, survival takes over.
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) describes this through the polyvagal theory. He teaches about how our autonomic nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety or danger. If relationships feel unpredictable, the system may shift into chronic sympathetic activation (“do more”) or dorsal shutdown or freeze (“do nothing until it is safe again”), depending on what once worked for us to help us cope or survive.
For the overfunctioner, hyperactivation; being helpful, productive, high-achieving, busy, on; is a form of self-regulation. It quiets the fear of disconnection. But it also keeps the nervous system in a prolonged state of vigilance and depletion and more deeply kept us away from the connection with ourselves we so need; to be good enough as we are, to BE.
Our individual adaptations don’t develop in isolation. They are mirrored, and rewarded by the systems of dominance we live within. We internalize the logic of capitalism early: that our worth is tied to output. Productivity becomes morality. Busyness becomes identity. The nervous system’s childhood learning; “I must do to be safe”, meets a cultural echo of reinforcement: “You must do to be worthy.”
Think about typical first questions we meet someone; 'What do you DO?'. Moving to the US I was shocked at just how pervasive that is here, and I take a lot of delight in asking questions like 'what is your favourite animal and why?' and 'what would success be for you looking back on your life on your last day on earth?'. I enjoy people pausing and needing to engage in their own inner world in order to answer me. I get to see snippets of people's true selves and it delights me.
We are missing this human connectivity in this doing led culture where burnout is worn almost as a badge (when really often it is a shield for an inner child underneath who feels shame, less than, not enough as they are)
The result is our current society of overextended bodies, anxious minds, and hearts yearning for connection. An inability to focus for more than 10 seconds, constantly scanning for another reel of something else to 'DO' to regulate yourself. Burnout, chronic pain, autoimmune illness, and anxiety disorders have risen exponentially over the past two decades (World Health Organization, 2022; Clauw, 2014), and are all signs of this communal malady that ails us.
We are losing our ability to rest, to receive care, to exist without performing. The wisdom of our bodies; the subtle signals that guide regulation, rest, digestion, and repair; get drowned out by internalized pressure to earn love, success, or even the pressure of healing itself. We colonise and dominate the body and call it healing. But the body, heart, and mind only heal in a field of nonviolence.
So many people land in Befriend with us these days, thinking they need to 'regulate their nervous system' like they are a machine in need of fixing or a piece of Ikea furniture needing to be assembled the 'right' way with instructions from me. Many are shocked that we do not have many practices, and instead we do a lot of listening into our daily lives, getting to know ourselves and learning new ways to respond to our mind and body with kindness, curiosity, and safety; so that your own inner knowledge of what you need and what feels right to you, can come online to guide unique you.
I don't have anyone else's intruction manual because I am not you. So why would I tell you what to do! I do however have enough training, qualifications, experience, and total trust in everyone's own system, to help people reconnect with their own inner manual that they will continue to write their whole life by learning through their own direct experience what is true, truer and truest for them.
We have been taught all our lives to trust 'authority' figures; home, school, religion, politicians. But mind-body healing is about learning to come home to feel safe enough in ourselves to know our own yes's, our no's, what is for us and not for us; to trust ourselves, live from our values, and validate our own path even if it makes no sense to others.
On a cellular level, the body mirrors the psyche. Every cell continuously senses whether the environment; both internal (thoughts, emotions, beliefs) and external (relationships, workload, toxins), feels safe or not.
When threat is detected, the cell shifts into what Dr. Robert Naviaux (2016) calls the Cell Danger Response (CDR): a metabolic and communication shutdown designed to protect and conserve. In acute stress, this is adaptive. But when the system never feels “safe enough,” the CDR stays switched on; keeping the body in inflammation, fatigue, and hypersensitivity. In other words, our biology reflects our story.
The same patterns that taught us to overfunction relationally keep our cells in defense metabolically. As within, so without. Chronic stress, perfectionism, and constant self-pressure signal danger at every level of our being. The body, in its wisdom, may eventually say “no”; through exhaustion, pain, illness, or collapse. Not as punishment, but as communication. As if to say: You’re not listening because no one listened to you. So I will slow you down for you to notice I need care, not performance.
In recovery spaces, this pattern can persist. We turn healing into another project; something to master, fix, or earn. “If I just do enough therapy, enough nervous system regulation, enough somatic tracking, then I’ll be worthy of healing.” But the body cannot be bullied into safety, or bypassed. Regulation doesn’t come through control; it comes through relationship; with ourselves, with others, with life.
Over functioning is, at its core, a disconnection from being. It’s what happens when we forget that our value is innate. That connection, not performance, is what truly restores safety in the nervous system. Healing asks us to stop striving for wholeness and to allow it. Having been through this myself, and having my ass handed to me on a platter of serious illness, I very much know how alarming is to go through. I also know there's no way I would have stopped without it, because I was living my 'normal' not knowing it was not kind, easeful or free.
When the body finally forces slowing down or stillness, through pain, fatigue, or burnout; it is not betraying us. It is inviting us back into being. It asks:
Our symptoms become mirrors, not enemies. They reveal the parts of us that learned to earn love through effort and invite us to learn something new: how to exist, safely, in enoughness. This is evolution, even though this feels like an emergency when illness hits. It is a nervous system learning that coming home to roost and rest is finally possible, and a psyche learning to belong to itself. My biggest task really with people that land with me is to get them to stop doing so much! This can lead to some really beautiful healing as we come to meet the tender and worthy parts of us waiting for safety and connection that sit under the constant 'doing'.
Healing is not a linear climb toward betterment; it’s a widening circle, an O, of remembering, returning, and re-rooting. We stop performing and begin inhabiting our lives a little moment at a time with more curiosity about 'what is here in this one moment?'. We begin to kick out out the internalized capitalism that tells us to earn rest, earn love, earn healing. We learn to let safety, care, and belonging be received, not achieved.
Our highly sensitive systems are not broken. They are attuned instruments, asking us to live more truthfully than this society's current norms. To realign our nervous system’s deepest drives; to feel safe to honour authentic connection, our values, and our gifts. The world really needs this right now, so do not resent your sensitivity! Each time you tune your own system towards rest and being as innately allowed, you are like a tuning fork for others to inhabit their own integrity. It is a kind of activism that I enthusiastically support in my community members, and with all of you reading this.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
Schore, A. N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1–2), 201–269.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
Naviaux, R. K. (2016). Metabolic features of the cell danger response. Mitochondrion, 30, 253–275.
Clauw, D. J. (2014). Fibromyalgia: A Clinical Review. JAMA, 311(15), 1547–1555.
World Health Organization. (2022). Global Report on the Epidemiology of Burnout and Stress-Related Disorders.
