Nervous System Overload: Why You Don’t Feel Safe in Your Body (And How to Heal)

Nervous System Overload: Why You Don’t Feel Safe in Your Body (And How to Heal)

Here is something I see in my office almost every week, and I do not hear it talked about anywhere else. A woman comes in and her life looks good on paper. The illness has a diagnosis. The divorce is final. The baby is sleeping through the night. The caregiving year is behind her. The labs are clear. And she sits across from me and says some version of: “I should feel better than this. Why don’t I feel like myself yet?”

That is nervous system overload, and it does not turn off when the hard chapter ends. It is the experience of your body still living inside the chapter you just survived, even though everyone around you (including, sometimes, you) thinks you should be over it. The labs do not measure it. Your friends do not see it. And almost nothing in the wellness conversation has language for it. Until now.

Most of the women who come to our team for personal growth coaching are not in crisis. They are functional. They are smart. They have read the books. They know what they are supposed to do. The problem is that their nervous system has been running on high alert for so long that information alone is not what changes it. Reading an article like this one will give you language for what is happening, and that matters. But the actual work — the part where you live it differently next Tuesday at nine o’clock at night with the people you actually love — that is the work the coaches and therapists on our team do with women like you every day. This article is in service of that. Not instead of it.

On this week’s episode of the Love, Happiness and Success podcast, I sat down with Amy Kurtz. Amy is a Hachette author, a certified holistic health coach, and a patient advocate who spent close to two decades trying to figure out why her body kept shutting down on her. She coined a phrase for exactly the experience I just described. She calls it Medical Trauma Brain. Her work is the doorway into a much wider conversation about personal growth coaching after a hard chapter, and how women rebuild trust in themselves after life knocks them sideways.

What is medical trauma brain?

Medical Trauma Brain is the lingering imprint of a long, hard chapter that stays in your nervous system after the chapter is technically over. It is the gap between the version of you that the labs say is fine and the version of you that still cannot relax in your own body. Amy Kurtz coined the phrase after living it for over a decade.

Amy’s story is specific and worth knowing. Back pain at fourteen. A perfect storm at twenty-five during a trip to Israel — celiac, thyroid disorder, a parasite, severe gastric motility issues. She gained thirty pounds in thirty days. She landed in the hospital and could not keep food down. From there, she spent a decade cycling through doctors. Thirty-six of them. The thirty-sixth finally gave her the diagnosis: late-stage neurological Lyme disease and co-infections. She did the hard treatment. Her body recovered.

And then she did not feel better.

She felt hypervigilant. She braced for the next collapse. She would be in the middle of a perfectly normal Tuesday and notice that her body was convinced something was about to go wrong. Nothing was wrong. The hard thing was over. Her labs were clean. Her doctors signed off. And her body kept living inside the chapter she had just survived. It was her husband who finally named it. He told her one day, in their kitchen, that what she had been through was a trauma. She had not had a word for it. Once she did, she could not unsee it. That sentence in her kitchen was the beginning of the book.

This is the work the coaches on our team do with women constantly, and almost none of them walk in calling it Medical Trauma Brain. They walk in saying “something is wrong with me and I don’t know what.” Putting language to what is happening is the first thing that changes — not because language alone heals you, but because the right language is what makes the work doable in the first place.

Why does my body still feel anxious after I’ve recovered?

Because your body and your nervous system run on completely different timelines, and almost nothing in modern medicine tracks the second one. Physical recovery is measured in lab values, scan results, and the absence of symptoms. Nervous-system recovery is measured in your felt sense of safety in your own body. The first can be done while the second is still profoundly unfinished.

The peer-reviewed research backs this up. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis published in General Hospital Psychiatry, drawing on 292 studies, found that medical events themselves are a significant predictor of post-traumatic stress symptoms, with prevalence rates running as high as 18.5% in the highest-risk medical contexts (Cyr et al., 2021). This is not fringe science. This is established. The medical-trauma framing has been peer-reviewed and acknowledged. What has not happened is that the framing has reached the women who need it.

Stephen Porges’s work on Polyvagal Theory, published in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience (Porges, 2022), gives us a framework for the physiology of this. The autonomic nervous system is constantly running a below-conscious scan of your environment for cues of safety or threat. Porges calls this scanning “neuroception.” When that system has spent months or years in fight, flight, or freeze, it does not flip back to ventral-vagal calm just because the threat has technically passed. It needs evidence. Repeated, embodied evidence that the world is safe enough now.

Reading this article is not that evidence. Your nervous system does not believe articles. It believes experience.

Is medical trauma brain only for people who have been physically sick?

No. And this is the part of the conversation I most wanted to have with Amy. The exact pattern she describes — labs are clear, body is fine, but the nervous system has not gotten the memo — shows up after every kind of long, hard chapter. I see it in my office in women who have never had a diagnosable illness in their life.

It shows up after divorce. A woman finally leaves a marriage that took years to leave. The paperwork is final. She is safer than she has been in a decade. And her body is still scanning for the version of him that used to walk through the door at six o’clock. It shows up postpartum. The baby is healthy. She is healed on paper. And six months in she still cannot put a word to why she does not feel like herself. It shows up after caregiving — the woman who cared for an ill parent for years, who handled the funeral with grace, who returned to her own life, and who cannot understand why her body is still in crisis mode now that the crisis is technically over. It shows up after burnout. After fertility journeys. After leaving a job that nearly broke her. After the year that nobody saw the full weight of.

The common denominator is not illness. The common denominator is a sustained period of having to override your body to get through what was happening. Your body keeps a record of that override. And when you finally have room to feel what you set aside, it does not feel like relief. It feels, at first, like everything you did not let yourself feel at the time.

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself in a scenario that has nothing to do with chronic illness, you are not stretching the concept. You are the concept. This is what our team works with. Not the diagnosis. The aftermath of the chapter, whatever the chapter was.

Why don’t I feel safe in my own body?

Because at some point your body became the thing you could not trust to be okay, and that wiring does not undo itself just because the danger passed. If you were sick, your body was the source of the threat. If you went through a chronically stressful relationship, your body was the thing that kept reacting to a person you could not predict. If you were burned out, your body was the thing you ignored until it stopped you. Whatever the chapter was, your body lived inside it with you. And the body remembers.

Amy describes this with a specific phrase that landed for me. She calls the in-between the “shadowlands.” She would be out to dinner with friends, laughing, present-seeming. And her mind would be locked somewhere far away that felt like a sandstorm desert. The body was in one place and the nervous system was in another. That is the felt experience of nervous system overload after a long hard chapter, and it is one of the loneliest experiences I see women carry, because almost nobody asks about it.

The gender piece matters here, and the research is unambiguous. A 2024 article in eClinicalMedicine (The Lancet) reviewed the evidence on what the authors called “the gender pain gap” (Mills et al., 2024). Women experience longer diagnostic delays, are more likely to have their pain dismissed as emotional or psychosomatic, and are more likely to be undertreated across a range of chronic conditions including migraine, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, and endometriosis. These delays are not just clinical inconveniences. They are cumulative traumas that compound the original illness. By the time a woman finally gets the right diagnosis, she has not only the disease to recover from but the years of not being believed.

Amy lived that exact pattern. So have most of the women I sit with. The original problem and the medical experience of trying to get the original problem taken seriously become a layered trauma that takes longer to recover from than either piece alone.

If you have been told you should be fine by now and you are not, the very first thing I want you to know is that you are not making this up and you are not behind. The work of teaching your body that it is safe to stop bracing is real work, and it is exactly what coaching is for. The right coach will not be impatient with the timeline. The right coach will know exactly what timeline this is.

What’s the difference between physical recovery and emotional recovery?

Physical recovery is the body returning to its previous function. Lab values normalize. Symptoms reduce. Movement returns. Your medical team can measure it, chart it, and sign off on it. Emotional recovery is the metabolizing of what the body went through — the grief of who you were before, the integration of who you became under stress, and the rebuilding of trust between you and your body. Almost nothing in the medical system measures it. Almost nothing in the wellness system has language for it that is not either reductive or expensive.

Amy makes a distinction in our conversation that I want to underline. Most trauma frameworks were built for capital-T traumas — a single horrific event, like an assault or a combat exposure. Complex PTSD frameworks were built for repeated traumas across time, like sustained childhood abuse. Medical Trauma Brain sits in a third category. It is the experience where the threat is your own body. Which means the trauma frameworks that ask you to feel safe in your body in order to heal are starting from a place you cannot start from yet. The recovery is the rebuild of that ground.

Practically, this means a few things. It means anti-inflammatory eating helps because reducing systemic inflammation reduces the body’s baseline threat signal. It means gentle, regular movement helps because it teaches the body that it can exert and recover safely. It means active movement, in particular, is unusually effective — Amy mentions in our conversation that research has shown active movement can be as effective as a benzodiazepine for some anxiety symptoms. It means sleep, breathwork, and slowness all matter, not as wellness theater but as nervous-system inputs.

And it means the relational piece is non-negotiable. Doing this work alone, with only your own internal voice as company, is not how most women come through it. The reason coaches and therapists exist for exactly this kind of healing is that you cannot fully see the gap in your own nervous system from inside it. The work of our team is to sit on the other side of you and witness it accurately, so that your nervous system finally has a steady second person in the room while it learns to recalibrate.

Why reading this article isn’t enough

I want to be honest with you about something. The frameworks I just walked you through are real and they work. People use them. Lives change because of them. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article thinking that reading it was the work.

Here is what almost always happens. You read a piece like this one. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful. You make a mental note to try things differently. Maybe you Google a breathwork technique. Maybe you book one yoga class. And then your nervous system, which has been doing the same thing for the past three years or thirteen years or thirty years, does what it has always done. The hypervigilance returns. The bracing returns. The Tuesday at nine o’clock arrives and you are right back where you started, wondering why nothing changed.

The reason is simple. You are trying to override a deeply patterned response, by yourself, in the middle of the moment that response is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do new behavior. It is almost impossible to do alone.

What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns. Someone who can sit with you the first time you try to do it differently and reflect back what they see. Someone you can text after a hard week and get a steady response. Someone whose job is to pay attention to your nervous system across time. That is what working with one of the coaches or therapists on the Growing Self team actually is. It is not a lecture. It is not a generic plan. It is an ongoing relationship with someone who is keeping track of you while you do the work.

If anything in this article landed somewhere specific, that’s the signal that it is worth saying out loud to a real person. You can schedule a free consultation with our team and have a real conversation about what is going on for you. No commitment. No pressure. Just a conversation with someone who has heard a lot of stories and is not going to flinch at yours.

How do you regulate your nervous system after trauma or illness?

Slowly, with the right kind of help, and with a real respect for the fact that the work takes longer than you want it to. Here is what Amy and I covered in our conversation, organized into the categories that actually move the needle.

Self-advocacy as a daily practice. Amy reframes self-advocacy from “how to talk to your doctor” to “how to listen to your own body on a Tuesday.” She uses the inner-child metaphor specifically. If a child told you she had to use the bathroom or that something hurt, you would listen. Most women have spent years overriding their own version of those signals. Re-learning to hear them is the first move, and the smallest, and the most underrated.

Working with a doctor who actually helps. Amy now uses five non-negotiables before she commits to a doctor: the doctor has worked with people like her before; the doctor has a curious, open mind; the doctor trusts her own opinion about her own body; the doctor validates her experience without making her perform calm; and the doctor is willing to send her to someone else if they do not have the answer. Any red flag in those five is a signal to keep looking. She wasted years on doctors who failed one or more of those tests, and she wants women to skip that part.

Working with a therapist or coach who knows this work. Amy is clear in our conversation that mental-health support is not optional during nervous-system recovery. She names the modalities that helped her — CBT for the cognitive overlay, EMDR for the trauma processing, somatic work drawn from Peter Levine for the embodiment piece. The right combination depends on the person. The wrong combination is no support at all. If you want a clearer read on which kind of support fits your situation, our Therapy Questions page is the place to start.

The daily practice list. Anti-inflammatory eating. Sleep. Regular gentle movement. Breathwork or meditation. Reducing exposure to environmental toxins where you reasonably can. None of these is revolutionary alone. All of them together change the baseline signal your nervous system is reading.

This is exactly the territory the coaches and therapists on our team specialize in. Not generic wellness advice. Specific support for the work of teaching a particular nervous system that it is safe to come back down. There is no one-size-fits-all answer here, and that is the point. The right approach is the one calibrated to your history, your body, and your life. If you are deciding between therapy and coaching for this work, our Life Coaching Questions page walks through how to know which is the right starting point.

What about the people I love?

This is the part of the conversation that surprised me most. Amy and I ended up talking about the social cost of living through a long hard chapter — the friends who quietly disappear, the partners who run out of language, the family members who try to be supportive and accidentally make it worse. If you are the woman carrying this, you already know exactly what I am describing.

Amy told a story that I keep thinking about. She was talking about her diagnosis with someone she loved. She mentioned how much time she felt she had lost. The woman she was talking to stopped what she was doing, walked across the room, hugged her, and said: “I’m so sorry that you’ve been through so much pain.” Amy says she wept. Not because the words were profound, but because nobody had ever said them. The people in her life had been trying to be supportive by saying things like “are you better yet” or “have you tried this thing my cousin’s friend tried.” Almost nobody had said the simple sentence that named what she had actually been through.

If you are someone who loves a woman in the middle of this, you do not have to know the answer to anything. You do not have to be a therapist. You only have to be willing to name what she has been through and ask what she needs from you. Three questions cover almost all of it: What do you need from me? How can I support you? Is there anything I can do to make this easier? She will tell you. And the willingness to ask, without making her perform okay-ness in return, is more valuable than any specific thing you could offer.

If you are the woman in the middle of this, the relational work is also coachable. Post-traumatic growth is the term researchers use for what happens when women come out the other side of something hard — not just back to baseline, but with more capacity for honesty, intimacy, and clarity than they had before. That outcome is more common than most women expect. It is also more accessible with support than without.

The relational version of this work is one of the most common reasons women reach out to our team. They are tired of pretending they are fine in the rooms where they used to be able to relax. They are ready to have real conversations with the people who matter, and they want help structuring those conversations so they can hold up. That is exactly what the coaches on our team do. Not just the inner work. The outer work too.

The one tool I’d give a woman tonight

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself for the first time, this is what I want you to do. Tonight.

Find one quiet moment. Sit down. Put one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe in for four counts. Breathe out for six counts. Repeat ten times. While you do it, say to yourself, in whatever exact words feel honest: I made it through. I am here. I do not have to be over it yet.

That is the smallest possible nervous-system input. It is not the cure. It is not even the start of the cure. It is a single, repeatable signal to your body that you are paying attention, that the override is over, and that you are willing to listen now. That signal, repeated, is part of what teaches your nervous system that the threat has passed.

Tomorrow morning, do it again.

And if something in this article landed somewhere specific — if you saw your life in any of these paragraphs — that recognition is worth saying out loud to a real person. Not a friend, not a partner, not yet. A coach or a therapist who has sat across from hundreds of women in exactly this place and knows the shape of this kind of healing. That is what the team at Growing Self exists for. Not to fix you. There is nothing wrong with you. To witness the work of you teaching your body that it is safe to be here again, and to help you get there with someone in the corner who is paying attention.

If you are ready to have that conversation, you can book a free consultation with one of the coaches or therapists on our team. It is a real conversation, with a real person, to see whether what we do here is the right fit for what you are carrying. No commitment, no pressure. Just the start of being seen accurately.

Xo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby