Five Signs You Are Living in a High-Alert State (and May Not Realize It)

One of the things that I love most about what I do is helping people reconnect with the home of themselves. And part of this reconnection is supporting them in feeling more embodied, present, awake and alive in their lives. 

And on the flip side, when we feel anxious it's like we are unable to fully experience this present moment. It robs us of our aliveness. 

Author Glennon Doyle says, “Anxiety is like a body snatcher so that I appear there but I’m really gone. Other people can still see me, but no one can feel me anymore, including myself. Anxiety makes me miss my own life.”

I have a special interest in anxiety not only because global rates of anxiety since the pandemic have increased by 25% (or more) but also because I know anxiety personally. Both sides of my family lines are/were anxious folks. My father’s nickname for me as a child was worrywort. Thanks dad, that didn’t imprint anywhere. 

I had serious mental health challenges as a teenager and by the time I was eighteen I started to get really curious about meditation, yoga and other ways of working with both my mind and body. 

Because what I realized is that I couldn’t think my way out of anxiety. 

I needed to invite my body into the experience and conversation. 

For the last few years I have been deep in study of the somatic arts, specifically somatics and anxiety. "Somatics" comes from the Greek word soma meaning “the living body known from within.” With this, we can understand that somatic work is an experiential approach towards mind/body integration, or a remembrance of the connection between these two that have in fact always been there. Somatic psychology is known as a “bottom up” approach as opposed to a “top-down” model, which means that we literally use the body as a guide in our experience of healing. Both approaches have their place, it’s just that in our culture we have tended to only legitimize the more traditional “top down” talk therapy approach.

Anxiety can be pretty sneaky. You don’t have to have experienced major catastrophic life events to be anxious. You don’t have to be having full blown panic attacks to be having anxiety interfering with living fully. 

Here are five signs you are living in a high-alert state (and might not realize it)... 

1. You experience chronic areas of tension or pain somewhere in your body. When anxiety is a habitual pattern in the body, so too is the matching contraction in your muscles. And whether those muscles are in an isometric contraction of ten percent or thirty percent or fifty percent, on some level those chronically tight muscles are telling your brain that you are not safe. 

    

2.  You get stuck in repetitive thoughts (especially worst case scenarios or constant obsessing about the future). This is a state of hypervigilance where unconsciously you are always preparing for that next shoe to drop. You will be ready, no matter what comes, dammit. And also, this can be an exhausting way to live. 

    

3. Your sleep stinks. You have frequent wakings, you toss and turn, and you wake up feeling spent instead of refreshed. This is because your body is so wired during the day that it is very hard for it to transition to the ultimate letting go of deep, quiet sleep.  

    

4. You struggle to relax even on your “days off.” When your nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance even when you are at rest and experiencing safety, it feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Your system just can’t down regulate. Being in survival mode all day may look like productivity on the surface but underneath it is masking a deep disconnection and self-avoidance.

    

5. You have trouble concentrating, you easily lose things, you forget what you were doing 5 seconds into a task, you can’t even sit through a movie anymore, and your brain space has been reduced to text sized sentences and emojis. This is because being in a high alert state makes your brain and memory frazzled. We are too busy living in survival mode to fully focus or have clear mental acuity.

Did you resonate with any of these? I recently presented this topic to a group in my community and multiple people came up to me afterwards telling me that they could relate to three or more of these examples. They seemed a little embarrassed but also relieved to better understand themselves. 

There is absolutely no shame in living through high alert; this is/was an intelligent adaptation your body created in response to you being in an unsafe situation, often over the course of years. Knowing that, you can develop a more robust capacity to expand and contract, ebb and flow, react and then settle. You can learn to build a wider window of tolerance for all kinds of your human experience. When you are no longer living through survival mode, true healing finally has a chance to come forward.