Why Anxiety Feels So Bad in Your Body and How Somatic Therapy Can Help
You know the feeling. Your stomach drops before a conversation you've been avoiding. Your shoulders creep up toward your ears during a busy week and stay there. You wake up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding, even though nothing is wrong.
Anxiety doesn't just live in your mind. It lives in your body. And for a lot of people, that's the part that's hardest to shake.
The body keeps score
When your nervous system perceives threat, real or imagined, it mobilizes. Heart rate increases. Muscles tense. Digestion slows. Breathing gets shallow. This is your body doing exactly what it's supposed to do: preparing you to fight or run.
The problem is that for many people, this response never fully turns off. You're not running from a predator. You're sitting in traffic, or lying in bed, or walking into a meeting. But your body is still bracing for impact.
Why understanding doesn't fix it
You might already know why you're anxious. You can trace it back to your childhood, your work, your relationships. You've read the books. You've done the therapy. You understand yourself quite well.
The racing heart doesn't care about your insight. The tight chest isn't interested in your analysis. This is the frustrating thing about anxiety that lives in the body: you can't think your way out of it, because the part of you that's activated isn't listening to your thoughts.
What somatic work offers
Somatic therapy works directly with the nervous system. Rather than talking about anxiety, you learn to notice it in real time: where it shows up, how it moves, what it's trying to protect you from.
This isn't about relaxation techniques or breathing exercises, though those can help. It's about helping your body complete the stress responses it started and never finished. It's about teaching your nervous system that the emergency is over.
Over time, anxiety becomes less like a hijacking and more like information, a signal you can read and respond to, rather than something that runs the show.
If this sounds familiar
I work with people who function well on the outside but feel like they're white-knuckling it underneath. Many of them have done years of therapy and still feel anxious. They're not looking for more insight. They're looking for something that actually shifts the feeling in their body.
If this sounds familiar, somatic therapy might be worth exploring.
Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.