My experience with an overactive nervous system

Most of us are familiar with the fight/flight/freeze response to danger. When faced with a threat to our lives, we will try to fight it off, flee for our lives, or freeze (either to give us time to plan our response to the threat or in the hopes the ‘predator’ won’t notice us). 

In order to accommodate these instinctive reactions, our body activates some systems in our bodies, while shutting down others.

For example, we may get a surge of adrenaline, but our digestion slows down so that energy is readily available for immediate survival. 

It turns out, for many of us and for a variety of reasons, the fight/flight/freeze state may get triggered by non-life-threatening situations, it may get triggered often, and at some point, our fight/flight/freeze states may not turn off. Our nervous systems see threats everywhere, both externally and internally, and they can react so quickly to those threats that we don’t even recognize what’s happening at a conscious level.

For me, and I’m guessing for most people in this situation, our nervous systems became overactive gradually, over years and decades. Like the frog in the boiling water, we never noticed that we were in trouble.

I want to quickly distinguish my overactive nervous system from stress. I don’t like the term stress, because it’s always talked about as if it’s something that we can easily address. If we’re feeling stressed out, then all we need are a couple massages, some deep breathing, and a yoga class. Or we’re told to “think positively” so that stressors don’t get to us, and if we’re still stressed out, it’s because we don’t have the right mindset.

Maybe if someone’s nervous system is functioning normally, this is true. But my nervous system wasn’t functioning properly. All of the techniques that were supposed to calm me down actually contributed to making me worse because I wasn’t addressing the core issues, and they added fuel to fire by making me believe that there was something wrong with me.

For me, there were a few core issues triggering my nervous system:

• I wasn’t allowing myself to acknowledge, let alone feel my emotions and negative thoughts.
• I was fearful of emotions and negative thoughts.
• I was fearful of my physical symptoms.
• My body and nervous system had developed automatic, subconscious responses to my repressed thoughts and emotions. In fact, one of the automatic responses was to repress the thoughts and emotions before I was aware of them.

I’m specifying my own issues here, but from what I’ve read and as I’ll explain below, these are all quite common in people who have chronic conditions. Basically, something triggers a fear response, our nervous system is over-activated and can’t shut down, and our bodies take steps to keep us safe so that the nervous system can finally relax.

For me, the cycle went something like this:

For a multitude of reasons, over the course of my childhood, I had learned that expressing emotions in public was wrong. When I was younger, I would consciously fight to keep myself from expressing those emotions publicly. But my nervous system is effective, and I got to the point that it would automatically repress the emotions for me. Unfortunately, my nervous system lacked discernment.

As I got older, if something triggered an unacceptable emotional response, my nervous system would repress it so quickly that I didn’t even realize I had those feelings. I didn’t realize when someone was pissing me off. I didn’t realize I was sad or grieving the loss of a friend when I moved. Not only was I unable to acknowledge those feeling publicly, I was also no longer able to access them when I was alone and it was “safe” to feel the emotions.

But here’s the thing about repressed emotions: They don’t go anywhere. They stay in the body until they’re finally released. Unfortunately, my body could only handle so many emotions trapped within me. When the overflow of repressed issues started to get problematic (and it started to get problematic in my early teens), my body would try to come up with ways to let me know something was wrong.

The cry for help and attention started as severe shoulder pain on a school trip, and then graduated to headaches, eczema, and endometriosis. It later became severe anxiety, more intense pain from endometriosis, and migraines. Then it became food intolerances, GI issues, chronic sinus conditions, and more severe migraines. It finally became long covid and a headache so bad it landed me in the ER. There were dozens of other minor symptoms over the years that would crop up and disappear if they didn’t serve my body’s goal of removing me from what was triggering the emotional stress.