Your Symptoms Are Real.

 The brain doesn't just pay attention to physical threats. It also pays attention to emotional ones.

Past experiences, trauma, chronic stress, difficult relationships, perfectionism, uncertainty, frightening symptom experiences, invalidating healthcare experiences, endless Googling, symptom monitoring, and the constant need to fix or figure things out all become information that your brain uses to assess danger and upgrade your alarm system. It then uses that information to make associations and predictions of what is dangerous to your nervous system, your survival.

Over time, all your experiences, experiential context, beliefs shape the lens through which your nervous system interprets threat of both our internal—sensations, thoughts, emotions—and external worlds.

The nervous system doesn't neatly separate physical threats from emotional threats. To an overprotective brain, uncertainty, conflict, difficult emotions, physical sensations, or feared activities can all register as potential danger.

And here's the important part:

Your nervous system is not broken. Your fire alarm isn’t broken. Its working too well. Like anything else, too much of a good thing can become a barrier!

Every response, sensation, and protective pattern develops in service of one thing:

Safety.

Sometimes, especially during stressful, developmental, or threatening experiences, our brains and bodies make remarkably adaptive choices to help us become "safe enough" to get through difficult circumstances. These responses happen automatically and outside of our awareness. We don’t always know what the nervous system is responding too but subconsciously its storing data. 

The challenge is that sometimes our alarm system becomes a little too enthusiastic about its job.

I often explain this using a pain dial and smoke alarm analogy.

Pain is a protective output generated by the brain. It is the brain's best guess about how much danger exists as a threat to you, your body’s ecosystem.

Using your history, beliefs, personality, stressors, emotions, relationships, nervous system state, symptom experiences, and current circumstances, the brain predicts future danger and adjusts the pain dial accordingly.

Sometimes those predictions are accurate, sometimes they are over reactive in honor of safety. Becoming overprotective and predicting danger where there is little or none.

It's kind of like a smoke detector that starts blaring because you made toast. Remember top of the line smoke detector.

Annoying? Absolutely.

Broken? Not at all.

It's simply trying a little too hard to keep you safe.

The encouraging news is that the brain is not fixed. Through neuroplasticity, it is constantly updating its predictions with every new piece of information it receives.

What the nervous system needs are new experiences and new evidence—corrective experiences that demonstrate that not every sensation, emotion, thought, memory, activity, or situation is dangerous.

Over time, the smoke alarm quiets, the pain dial turns down, and your nervous system learns something incredibly important:

You are safer than it previously believed. You can handle more than you thought!

That is where meaningful healing and recovery become possible.