your nervous system knows before you do

when people take more than they give

Sometimes you feel something is off long before you can explain why. Anxiety, gut feelings, that tightness in your chest before bad news - your body senses danger or discomfort first. It whispers long before your mind is ready to listen.

“The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin …” — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Most days you keep your head up and your heart down, trying to move through life without letting your feelings spill everywhere.

But what happens when you finally need your heart to speak… and it’s quiet? When you realize you’ve been drained by every interaction, every situation, every person who wasn’t right for you?

"If you want to calm your nervous system,stop moving through life as if your house is on fire."

You go through the day on autopilot, and even when your body finally rests, your mind keeps working - planning, overthinking, preparing.

“When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body … we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Healing means learning to listen to those signs instead of silencing them. Taking care of your mind and body shouldn’t be something you start only when you’re older.

Most of the things that shape us begin in childhood, and they follow us into adulthood. Every generation has carried anxiety - it just wasn’t understood or acknowledged. It only becomes obvious when we’re at our lowest.

And today, connection comes with a new kind of weight. Any relationship means involvement - you in their world and them in yours. That alone can drain you when they aren’t the right person.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Even your relationship with food can be affected: you might try to fill an inner emptiness with meals that feel comforting, or you might lose appetite completely because the idea of eating becomes just another task.

Then there’s social media - constant noise. We’re connected to everything except ourselves. We weren’t meant to absorb every opinion, every perspective, every negative comment from millions of people at once.

We were meant to explore our own world, slowly, individually. Now it feels like everything is already labeled, reviewed, criticized. There’s nothing left to discover without someone else’s voice in your head.

People keep telling you the basics: sleep, eat, drink water. But those are the last steps, not the first. Feeling safe isn’t just mental - it’s physiological. “Safety” feels like slow heartbeats, relaxed shoulders, deeper breaths.

You can’t think your way into calm; you have to feel your way there. Past stress or burnout can keep your nervous system stuck on high alert, even when nothing is wrong anymore.

That’s where small rituals matter - morning showers, cleaning your space, writing, journaling. They’re not chores; they’re regulation. They’re the bridge between your mind and your body. They bring you back into yourself.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Being connected to your body isn’t only about feeding it or giving it sleep. You’re not a machine. You’re a mind, a body, and a soul - all needing intention, care, and patience. Maybe you need deeper help: a psychologist, meditation, or someone who guides you back into your own center.

“It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn

But the first step is connection. You can’t build a plan for healing when you don’t even know yourself.

In my life, stress always showed up in my stomach, my head, sometimes even in the form of nausea or vomiting. My body reacted before my thoughts did - before I had any explanation. The vagus nerve fires, cortisol rises, and your body starts to speak long before you understand the message. Our thoughts come late to the body’s truths.

Your body senses what your mind isn’t ready to face. And healing begins the moment you start trusting those signals - gently, honestly, without running from them.

Maybe the real work is learning to hear your body the first time it whispers, not only when it finally screams. Because your nervous system always knows before you do - and it’s been trying to tell you the truth all along.