Why Everything You’ve Tried Hasn’t Really Changed You
- Aleksandra
- Apr 26
- 4 min read
Why restoring the sense of safety in the body should be your priority
Most of us don’t realise we’ve never actually felt safe. And often we’re too busy surviving to even notice.
Here’s what that means and here’s the most important thing you need on your healing and transformation journey.
Many of us live in a state of chronic survival. When there is a threat, something new, something uncertain, something that feels dangerous, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. What’s called the defense cascade is activated. Your fight or flight response.
Adrenaline floods the system. The body asks: do I fight, or do I run? It happens below conscious thought. And if the threat can’t be resolved, if you can’t fight it or flee it your body will go into freeze and then collapse. A kind of shutdown where there’s nothing to be done, no motivation, and no way forward.
The problem is that modern life keeps us almost constantly in that state. The demands of work. Financial pressure. Social pressure. Always chasing, always delivering more. Fear of losing your job. The recession. People around us who feel like threats.
Many of us are stuck in permanent survival. And we don’t even know it.
This matters more than most people realise.
Fear shrinks our lives. In survival mode, the frontal cortex goes offline. That’s the part of the brain responsible for clear thinking, decision-making, and relating to other people. Which is why, under stress, everything can feel foggy, overwhelming and impossible to think through.
That same part of the brain handles our relationships. When it goes offline, we can’t connect meaningfully. We isolate. We can’t think clearly enough to find our way out.
Survival hits the body too. Digestion shuts down when all energy is diverted to fighting or fleeing, there’s nothing left for anything else. Which is why so many people with chronic gut issues try every pill, every diet, every protocol, and get temporary relief at best. Nothing holds long term.
And there’s something even more invisible happening, something we rarely talk about.
When I was researching for my PhD, I asked people to describe what optimal mental well-being looked like to them. The answers were all the same: not having anxiety, not overthinking, not being reactive, not having stress.
But almost nobody could describe what they actually wanted. Just the absence of what they didn’t want.
But well-being isn’t just the absence of symptoms. It’s fulfilment, connection, joy, pleasure. All the things that make life worth living. When we’re in survival, we’re cut off from even imagining those things. We can only see as far as managing what’s wrong, never reaching for what’s possible.
This is where most approaches fall short.
Maybe you’ve done mindset work, journaling, working on your patterns and habits. All of it useful but none of it enough on its own.
Because more fixing doesn’t solve survival.
No matter how many pills, how many diets, how many frameworks you do, if survival is still running in your nervous system, the body won’t respond and the work won’t stick.
The problem isn’t that people aren’t trying hard enough. The problem is that they’re trying to think their way out of something that lives deeper than thought.
I remember the first time I connected to a feeling of safety in my own body.
I was stunned. Because I realised, I had never felt safe in my whole life.
And when I was finally able to hold that safety, really anchor it in my body, I started to release the fear. And I saw, for the first time, how completely that fear had been running my life.
The foundational work is restoring a sense of safety in the body.
So many of us don’t realise this is missing. We don’t know what we’ve never had. Instead of managing symptoms or reframing thoughts, the most important piece of work you can do is to restore the sense of safety in the body.
The work starts here: mapping the nervous system, finding where survival gets triggered, practicing grounding, anchoring safety as a felt experience. And then, from that place, asking a different questions. Not how do I fix what’s wrong? But who am I beyond survival? What does my life look like from here?
This is the most foundational work there is. If you want meaningful change, lasting change — this is where it begins.
Look at safety first.
If you like to experience how it is to experience safety in your body you can follow my free practice on Youtube: The garden of safety. The garden of safety can be used as a somatic anchor, where you can come back anytime to remember that you are safe.In this guided practice, we’ll first visualise a beautiful walled garden, where we feel sheltered and protected and then tune in to the feelings of safety within out body.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
With courage,
Aleksandra x
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