I Thought Anxiety Was Just My Personality Until I Learned What Nervous System Dysregulation Means
For most of my life, I thought I was just a nervous person. Jumpy. Easily overwhelmed. The kind of person who needs time to decompress after social events and can’t handle too much stimulation without getting irritable and exhausted. I assumed it was my personality—something fixed about who I am.
Turns out, it might have been my nervous system running a program that was never supposed to be permanent. And understanding that changed how I relate to myself, to my so-called anxiety, and to recovery.
Nervous system dysregulation isn’t a diagnosis you’ll find in most medical charts, but it’s a framework that’s reshaped how therapists, researchers, and trauma specialists understand chronic stress, anxiety, and that feeling of being constantly on edge. Here’s what I wish I’d known years ago.
What nervous system dysregulation actually means
Your autonomic nervous system—the part that controls things like heart rate, digestion, and stress response—isn’t supposed to be stuck in one mode. It’s designed to shift fluidly between states: calm and connected when you’re safe, alert and ready when there’s a threat, collapsed and shut down when the threat is overwhelming.
Dysregulation happens when the system gets stuck. For me, it was stuck in a low-grade threat response—always scanning for danger, never fully settling into safety. I wasn’t having panic attacks constantly, but I was never truly relaxed either. My baseline was vigilance, and I didn’t know there was any other way to be.
Research on the autonomic nervous system shows that this kind of chronic activation has cascading effects: sleep problems, digestive issues, difficulty with focus, emotional reactivity. I had all of those. I just thought they were separate issues, not symptoms of one underlying pattern.
How it gets stuck in the first place
For some people, it’s a single traumatic event. For others, like me, it’s an accumulation—growing up in an environment where stress was constant, where emotional safety wasn’t reliable, where your nervous system learned that staying on alert was the appropriate response to daily life.
The body doesn’t differentiate between a one-time threat and an ongoing one. If the threat is chronic—an unstable home, a critical parent, an unsafe neighborhood—the nervous system adapts by staying in protection mode. The adaptation makes sense in context. The problem is that it doesn’t automatically turn off when the context changes.
So you grow up, move out, build a safer life—and your nervous system keeps running the old program. You’re objectively safe, but your body doesn’t know it yet.
Why this isn’t just “anxiety”
Calling it anxiety never quite fit for me. Anxiety implies fear of something specific, worry about particular outcomes. What I experienced was more diffuse—a state of being rather than a fear of something. I wasn’t anxious about the presentation or the deadline. I was anxious as a baseline condition.
The nervous system frame explains this better. It’s not that I was worried about things. It’s that my entire system was calibrated for a threatening world that no longer matched my reality. The anxiety was a symptom of dysregulation, not the root cause.
This distinction matters because the solutions are different. Cognitive approaches that address anxious thoughts help, but they don’t fully resolve a pattern that lives below conscious thought. Somatic and body-based approaches that work directly with the nervous system often reach what talk therapy can’t.
Signs your nervous system might be dysregulated
I didn’t recognize most of these in myself until someone pointed them out. A racing heart not connected to exercise. Difficulty winding down even when you’re exhausted. Startle responses that feel exaggerated. Digestion that’s unpredictable. Sleep that’s light and easily disturbed. Feeling overstimulated in environments others find normal.
Also: chronic muscle tension, especially in the shoulders, jaw, or back. Difficulty taking a full, deep breath. Irritability that seems to come from nowhere. A sense of being “on” all the time, even when you desperately want to be off.
These aren’t character traits. They’re signals from a system that’s been running a threat response longer than it should have.
What actually helps
The goal isn’t to eliminate stress responses—you need those. The goal is to restore flexibility: the ability to activate when appropriate and settle when safe. For a dysregulated system, settling is the hard part. It has to be taught, slowly, through experience.
What helped me: somatic experiencing therapy, which works with the body’s stored stress responses rather than just talking about them. Breathwork that specifically targets the vagus nerve. Learning to notice when I’m activated and practicing interrupting the pattern before it escalates.
Also: being around regulated people. Nervous systems co-regulate with other nervous systems. If you’re around calm, you’ll trend toward calm. If you’re around chaos, your system will mirror it. I started paying attention to how I felt around different people and protecting my exposure.
Why this reframe matters
For years I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. I was the anxious one, the sensitive one, the one who couldn’t handle what others handled easily. That belief became part of my identity, and it carried a lot of shame.
Understanding dysregulation reframed everything. This wasn’t a personality flaw. It was an adaptation—my nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do in response to conditions that required vigilance. The problem wasn’t me. The problem was a system still responding to a situation that no longer existed.
That reframe doesn’t fix anything by itself. But it changes the relationship. You can work with something that got stuck. You can’t work with something you believe is fundamentally broken about who you are.
I still have anxious moments. I still get overwhelmed. The nervous system doesn’t reset overnight, and I may always be more sensitive than average. But I’m not stuck in the same way anymore. The system is learning—slowly—that safety is possible, that settling isn’t dangerous, that the old emergency is over.
If you’ve spent your life thinking anxiety was just your personality, it might be worth considering that something else is going on. Not something wrong with you. Something happening in your body that can, with patience and the right approaches, change.
You’re not broken. You’re adapted. And what adapted can learn to adapt again.
