Stress is something we all feel. And while it’s a universal feeling — it often doesn’t announce itself the same way each time we feel it.

Often times stress shows up as our never ending to do list, last minute meetings squeezed into an already full calendar, a presentation we’re nervous to give, entrepreneurial tasks we’re overwhelmed by, clients who need our support, kids and fur babes who need our love and attention, dishes piling up in the sink, bills that need paying, piles upon piles of laundry, and so on.

Sometimes it feels like anxiety or panic. Which can often manifest physically as racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach, or a sense of urgency you can’t explain.

Other times it looks like irritability, exhaustion, brain fog, uncomfortable sensations in the body, chronic symptoms, or feeling constantly “on edge” even when nothing is obviously wrong.

Not only do we feel our own stress — but we also feel the collective stress happening around us. We absorb world events through screens. We scroll past people’s fear, outrage, grief, urgency, pain, and uncertainty. We’re inundated with information (which is often polarizing in nature). We pick up on emotional and relational stress from those around us — our friends, family, loved ones, even strangers.

For many women, stress doesn’t feel like a single event. It feels more like a background hum in the nervous system. A state of bracing, along with the feeling of always needing to be prepared for something.

We live in a world where stress has become so normalized.

So many of us simply continue on with our day as if stress isn’t moving through our system. We make breakfast and drink our coffee. Answer emails. Do our work. Care for our families. Go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat. So many of us are carrying so much without ever giving our bodies a chance to reduce the load. Which is why we often don’t even recognize these feelings and sensations as stress anymore — instead, it just feels like how we are. So we adapt to live amidst the stress. We push ourselves to function through it. We learn to manage it instead of feel, process, and integrate it. What’s rarely talked about (even in the wellness and nervous system space) is how stress actually moves through the body — and what happens when it doesn’t. Because here’s the thing – stress isn’t just a thought, emotion, or feeling. It’s a physiological experience. A surge of energy. A mobilization of the nervous system designed to protect you. And when that energy doesn’t have a place to go, it doesn’t just disappear. It stays. This is where so many people get stuck.

The issue isn’t that your nervous system is broken or dysregulated. And the answer isn’t that you need to “calm down.” The issue is that you haven’t given your body the opportunity to complete the stress cycle.

Inside this piece, we’re going to explore:

• Why your nervous system is designed for stress — but not for constant stress
• How modern life keeps your body stuck in survival mode
• The role emotional suppression plays in anxiety, chronic symptoms, and autoimmune patterns
• Why “calming down” isn’t what your system is asking for when it’s activated
• How stress hormones and emotional energy need movement, expression, and validation
• My 7 step method for completing the stress cycle — use this method when you experience fear, overwhelm, anxiety, panic, or chronic symptoms

Your nervous system was built for survival, not for modern life

Your nervous system is incredibly intelligent. We honestly do not give our nervous systems enough credit. It evolved to protect you from immediate, short-term threats. In the old world (many past lives ago), your stress cycle looked like this: A danger appears, your system mobilized, energy and stress hormones flooded your body, you responded, and once the threat had passed, your body discharged that energy and returned to safety.

Similar to a good storyline or movie — stress has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But that’s not how stress works anymore in our modern world. Today, stress is constant and abstract. It looks like world events unfolding in real time. The emotional charge and inundation of conflicting information across social media. The pressure of work, family, health, finances. Fear about symptoms. Fear about the future. Fear layered on top of fear.

The problem is that your body still responds to stress as it did in the old world. And truth be told, you need this survival response. We don’t want to completely shut it off. You need your body to mobilize in the face of imminent danger. But our modern world stressors are often not life-or-death (like a tiger charging towards you). They may feel that way, but in reality, they’re often not truly a state of emergency. Yet your body still responds to every stressor (like being late to pick up your kids from school, spilling coffee in your car, missing a deadline at work, getting into a disagreement with your partner, or being cut off in traffic) as imminent danger. Not only does your body still respond as if it needs to protect you from imminent danger — but there is also no resolution. So, the energy stays trapped.

This is how stress becomes chronic.

Why so many of us learned to suppress instead of process

For many of us, suppression wasn’t a conscious choice. It was learned.

We grew up in environments where big emotions weren’t safe, welcome, or understood. Where crying was inconvenient and “not allowed.” Where anger was shamed and punished. Where fear was dismissed. Where we learned that being “too much” risked connection, love, and safety — the three fundamental needs of the nervous system.

So we adapted. We learned to hold it all together. To push through. To handle things on our own. Those patterns don’t disappear in adulthood. Instead, they are internalized. And they become the very framework for how we experience life and move through the world. Now, when we feel big feelings or intense sensations arise, we default to what we know from our childhood. We suppress. We override. We distract. We try to calm ourselves down or escape the discomfort as quickly as possible. And because the stress cycle never completes, our nervous system stays activated. Multiply that times the thousands upon thousands of times we feel stress within our lifetime. And you have yourself one chronically overactivated nervous system.

Based on recent research, humans experience stress on average of 5.39 times per day. Over a typical 80-year lifespan, this equates to roughly 157,000 to 160,000 individual moments of stress[1]

This is how hypervigilance becomes a way of life.

Over time, this constant internal stress load takes a real toll on the body. This is one of the reasons there is such a strong connection between suppressed emotions, unresolved trauma, chronic stress, and physical illness — especially autoimmune conditions and chronic symptoms in women.

Take it from me, someone who’s navigated a lifetime of trauma, unresolved emotions, and chronic stress – Your body isn’t betraying you. It’s responding to years of unfinished stress.

Why “calming down” isn’t the answer

This is where I want to challenge a common belief (yes, even in the nervous system space).

We’re often taught that healing means calming the nervous system down. Regulating it. Soothing it. Relaxing it. EFT tapping to soothe anxiety. Breathwork to calm our nerves. Meditation to slow our energy down. While these are beautiful practices and there are a time and place for them – you cannot relax energy that needs to move. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are meant to mobilize you.

Remember earlier when we talked about what stress looked like in our old world? Stress hormones were designed to surge at the sight of a tiger — so that your body could mount enough energy to run from said tiger. In our modern world, stress hormones respond the same way. When they are released into your system, they create intensity, heat, shaking, urgency. When we try to calm an activated system without first allowing that energy to be discharged, we often suppress it even further.

This is how anxiety becomes anxiety about anxiety. This is how symptoms become something we fear instead of something we feel. Healing doesn’t come from controlling or bypassing our bodies' natural, God given responses. It comes from expression and feeling into the shadow sides of ourselves.

My 7 step method for completing the stress cycle

This is the framework I use for myself when stress, fear, anxiety, panic, or uncomfortable symptoms arise.

These steps aren’t rigid — they’re not meant to be followed like a rule book or a checklist. They’re meant for you to move through them intuitively, in the flow your body needs.

Step 1: Listen to the Language of Your Body

The first step is to slow down enough to listen. So many of us respond to stress by leaving our bodies — dissociating, distracting, scrolling, working, doing anything to avoid being present with sensation and discomfort.

Instead, pause. Be with what’s moving through you. Place a hand over your heart or belly. Take a deep breath. And gently ask your body what she is communicating to you. This isn’t woo — it’s innate intelligence. Your body is always speaking. Most of us have just learned not to listen.

Listening is how you begin to interrupt old patterns.

Step 2: Resourcing Safety Within Yourself

Your body needs to feel safe in order to go deeper. I’m not talking about safety that numbs or suppresses — but safety that expands your capacity to feel.

In the nervous system and somatic (body-based) world, resourcing simply means giving your body layers of support to help you feel safe, grounded, and resourced. You can think of resourcing as an anchor — a way to ground you into the present moment and provide you with more capacity to feel emotions and experience stressors. This might look like curling up somewhere comfortable, wrapping yourself in a cozy blanket, turning on some soothing music, lighting a candle or rolling on an essential oil, holding a grounding object, or placing a hand over your heart.

With this step, you’re creating an environment that tells your system: it’s safe to feel this.

Step 3: Show Yourself Compassion

So many women meet their stress with judgement and carry deep beliefs that they are wrong, broken, or too much.

Why am I like this? Why can’t I just calm down? What’s wrong with me?

Those thoughts don’t come from nowhere. They come from years of being taught that our emotional responses were inconvenient, excessive, or unacceptable. Over time, that messaging becomes internalized, and we start relating to our own nervous systems with pressure instead of care.

Compassion interrupts this cycle.

This is where you soften your inner critic. Where you remind yourself that your responses make sense in the context of your life and your experience. That your nervous system learned these patterns at a time when they were protective. That nothing about this means you’re weak, broken, or failing.

You might place a hand over your body and say to yourself: of course I feel this way. This makes sense. I’m not wrong for responding like this.

Showing yourself compassion isn’t about positive thinking. It’s about removing the internal threat. When your nervous system feels less judged, it becomes more willing to reveal what’s underneath the surface.

Step 4: Allow Emotions to Surface

As compassion settles in, you may notice something shift. The body often softens just enough for deeper layers to rise. Fear may shift into sadness. Anxiety may reveal grief. Irritation may uncover anger. This is not something you can force. It’s something that happens naturally, when your system senses safety and feels ready to express.

This step of the process is where many women feel fear arise. They worry that feeling more will make things worse, or that allowing emotion will spiral them into overwhelm. But what’s usually happening here is the opposite — the body is finally letting go of what it’s been holding alone. Emotions that were never fully felt don’t disappear. They wait. And when they surface, it’s not because something is wrong — it’s because your system trusts you enough to feel them now. Your body isn’t asking you to analyze these emotions, or understand them, or even trace them back to a story. Simply noticing and naming them is enough. I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel angry. I feel grief in my chest. I feel anxiety swirling in my stomach.

Naming is regulating. Witnessing is soothing. This is somatic work in motion. This is how energy completes its cycle instead of getting stuck.

Step 5: Holding Yourself Through What Comes Up

This is where the work becomes deeply relational. When intensity rises (emotionally, physically, or both) the nervous system looks for cues of safety. For most of us, that’s where we learned to abandon ourselves. To tighten. To brace. To try to make it stop.

This step invites a different response.

Holding yourself through what comes up might look like wrapping your arms around your body, rocking gently, or placing your hands where you feel the most sensation. It might look like speaking to yourself out loud, naming what’s happening, and letting your body know she’s not alone. You’re not trying to calm yourself down here. You’re staying with yourself. You might say things like: I see you. I know this is hard. You don’t have to go through this alone anymore.

This kind of attunement is deeply reparative, especially for nervous systems that learned early on that support (or the kind of support they needed) wasn’t available. Through this step, you are becoming the steady presence your body has been waiting for.

Step 6: Physically Discharge The Energy

Stress is not just emotional — it’s biochemical and physiological. When the body mobilizes for threat, energy floods the system. Muscles tense. Breath changes. Heart rate increases. This energy needs an outlet, or it remains stored. This is why movement is so essential. Discharging energy might look like shaking your arms and legs, jumping, dancing, stomping your feet, pushing against a wall, pounding your chest, crying, or making sound. It doesn’t need to look a certain way or last a certain amount of time — it just needs to feel honest and authentic to you. Even thirty seconds of intentional movement can help your nervous system release what words cannot express. As the energy moves, you may notice activation initially increase — heightened anxiety, big emotions, stronger physical sensations. But as the energy is discharged, you may notice a spontaneous sigh, a yawn, a wave of relief, or a sense of settling. These are signs that your body’s stress cycle is unwinding.

This is where many people realize that calming techniques never worked because their nervous system wasn’t asking to be soothed — it was asking to be met. Activation isn’t asking to be calmed. It’s asking to be completed.

Step 7: Close the Loop With Aftercare

Once the intensity begins to come down, the work isn’t over yet. The nervous system needs closure. So many people move through a big emotional release or stressor and then immediately jump back into their day — emails, tasks, responsibilities — without ever signaling to their body that the experience has passed. Aftercare is how you complete the loop. This might look like slow breathing, journaling, resting, spending time outside, nourishing your body with warming foods, hydrating with minerals, or simply moving more gently through the rest of your day. It might also include offering yourself reassurance — placing a hand over your heart and acknowledging what you just moved through. You might say: I’m so proud of you. We made it through. I’m here with you. We are safe.

This is how the body learns that stress can move through and resolve. That intensity doesn’t mean danger. That you can feel deeply and still be okay. That you can experience discomfort and still be safe. That you can feel activated and still come back into your body.

This is how trust is rebuilt — not through avoidance, but through completion.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to calm yourself down. Your body is asking for permission to finish what stress started. When stress is allowed to complete its cycle — through expression, movement, compassion, and safety — anxiety loosens its grip, symptoms soften, and the nervous system stops bracing for impact.

Not because life miraculously becomes calm but because your body knows how to move through what arises.

References

1. Neupane, Sameer, et al. How Many Times Do People Usually Experience Different Kinds of Stressors Each Day? arXiv, 3 Aug. 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.01553.

Image source: Ahmad Odeh

Note: The views expressed here do not exclusively represent the views of Materia+ and its governing entities.