12/12/2025
So many people feel like this. Whether it is a prevalence of post viral illness about which we still know so little, or a symptom of an over-stressed culture, or due to your unique experience, one way of viewing it is from a holistic understanding of Defense Mechanisms. In the traditional Freudian sense these are unconscious behaviours we employ to make ourselves feel safe in the context in which we developed. These are psychological defences like humour, repression, denial, intellectualisation etc.
If we think about how those psychological defences influence our behaviour they might make us avoidant, people pleasing or appeasing. If we think about what’s happening in our nervous system as we repress our fear in the face of the world (whether it’s the workplace, social, in a noisy city) we start to get disregulation, a nervous system level reaction and preparation to defend either with fight or flight up regulation or freeze/collapse down regulation. This is all happening unconsciously both at a psychological and autonomic nervous system level. The problem is these psychological, emotional and nervous system feedback loops are sending messages back to our brain influencing a response from both the limbic and endocrine systems which can lead to immune suppression and behavioural modulation, such as reduced activity and sleep disturbance (too much and too little).
All of these systems are about defending you. Defending you from threat of every kind. From the metaphorical tiger to the tiniest virus. Our entire evolution of physical and mental form is about staying alive, defending from threat - somatic, emotional, psychological.
It’s a complex puzzle! But it’s not impossible, because it all starts with finding your way back to safety. It’s easier to start with making the body feel safe. When your brain is receiving internal messages of safety we can start a slow and gentle re patterning that allows all systems to expand a little, to come out of contraction, bracing and Defense and take a look around and find it’s not quite so dangerous as we at some level believed.
From here the therapy, or the relearning can start to gain some traction