Why anxiety got louder when life got better…This is something I’ve been sitting with for months…
The breath gets shallower, and shallower. You can’t find a comfortable position, not in your chair, not in your body, not anywhere. There is a pulling feeling in your chest, as if the capacity is shrinking, as if something is closing. It feels like drowning. Except you’re not in water. You’re just sitting somewhere, in a normal place, living a normal moment.
You know you need to breathe. You know this. But knowing and doing are two completely different things when your body has decided something is wrong.
So you excuse yourself. You go to the bathroom. You stand there in a quiet cubicle away from everything, and you take one slow breath. And then another. And something loosens, slightly. Enough. You’re safe. Everything is fine. You can go back.
And you do. Because you are safe. Everything is fine.
Your body just hasn’t gotten the message yet.
When anxiety shows up where it should feel safe
I was sitting across from my best friend in a restaurant I had been looking forward to for weeks.
It was dinner at our favourite restaurant. The kind of dinner we always do, sharing dishes, trying everything, the table full of small plates and conversation that picks up exactly where it left off. She is one of the people with whom I feel the easiest in the world. She has seen my bad anxiety days before, years ago. She knows.
So why now? Why here, of all places? Why in the middle of something that should feel like a breath of fresh air?
The restaurant was full. The noise was everywhere, conversations layering on top of each other, the clatter of plates, the warmth of too many people in one room. And my body, instead of settling into the evening the way I wanted it to, was treating all of it like a threat.
I excused myself. Bathroom. Breathe. Come back.
And then I did the thing that always helps, even when it feels the hardest to do. I told her. Just said it out loud across the table: I’m having bad anxiety tonight. And something shifted the moment the words left my mouth. Like naming it shrinks it slightly. Like it stops being this invisible thing pressing on your chest and becomes just a thing, a real thing, something that can be talked about over shared plates of food with someone who loves you.
By the middle of dinner my body was slowly, quietly letting go. The noise was still there. The people were still there. But I was there too, finally. Present enough to enjoy it.
Why anxiety got louder when life got better: the science behind it
Here is what made no sense to me.
Six months ago my life was genuinely hard. Work stress, the renovation that never seemed to end, personal things I was carrying that I hadn’t fully put down yet. I wrote about some of that season here, and at the end of that letter I asked myself a question I couldn’t yet answer. Stress coming from so many directions at once. And somehow I managed. I kept going. I held it all together.
And then things got better. Work became something I actually loved again. The renovation reached the finish line. The heavy personal things started to lift. Life was good.
So why was I sitting in a restaurant with my best friend feeling like I was drowning?
By nature I am a curious person. I have always believed that when something is going on with your body or your mind, there is a reason, a root, something worth finding if you’re willing to look. So I did what I always do when something doesn’t make sense to me. I took my laptop, my notebook, and a pencil, and I went down the rabbit hole.
Here is what I found.
Our nervous system doesn’t work the way I always assumed it did. I thought stress and anxiety arrived together, that you felt anxious when things were hard and better when things eased up. Simple. Logical. Except the body doesn’t work like that.
When we go through a long period of stress, our body shifts into survival mode. It starts running on cortisol and adrenaline, the hormones that keep you sharp, keep you moving, keep you functioning under pressure. And here’s the part that changed everything for me: during the most stressful season, you can actually feel okay. Because your body is protecting you. It’s doing its job. It’s keeping you upright and moving and capable because right now you need to be.
But then the stress lifts.
And your nervous system, which has been in high alert for months, doesn’t automatically know how to come down. It has gotten so used to running on that level of activation that it keeps looking for the threat. And when it can’t find one, it creates the feeling anyway. The chest tightening. The shallow breathing. The sense of danger in a room full of people eating dinner.
That’s why the restaurant felt unsafe when it wasn’t. That’s why the office felt overwhelming when I was finally happy there. My life had gotten better. My body just hadn’t caught up yet.
What I found at the bottom of the rabbit hole
So I kept digging.
I have done a lot of work on myself over the years. Talk therapy, self-help books, courses, mindfulness practices. And they have genuinely helped. I am a firm believer in meditation, in breathwork, in movement, in setting boundaries, in doing things that bring you real joy. These things matter. Joy matters more than we give it credit for.
But all of it has lived in my mind. I am, as I like to say, very good at the theory.
And what I was learning now was that anxiety isn’t just a mind problem. It lives in the body. It is stored there, in the nervous system, in the places that talk therapy doesn’t always reach. So if I wanted to get to the root of it, like really get there. I needed to stop working from the neck up and start working with the whole of myself.
That’s how I found somatic therapy.
Somatic therapy is body-centred, it works with the physical sensations, the stored stress, the trauma that lives not in your thoughts but in your tissues. It’s not about talking through what happened. It’s about helping your nervous system finally feel safe enough to come down.
I haven’t started yet. But I am about to. And I am more curious than I am scared, which feels like the right way to begin something new.
I don’t have the answers yet. I don’t have a tidy conclusion or a list of things that fixed it. What I have is a body I am finally learning to listen to instead of push through, and a curiosity that feels stronger than the anxiety itself, most days.
I’ll bring you with me on this one. Every step of it, what I try, what helps, what doesn’t, what surprises me. Because I think a lot of us are carrying more in our bodies than we realise. And I think it’s time we started there.
For now, if your chest gets tight in a restaurant, go to the bathroom. Take a breath. Tell someone you trust. And know that your body is not broken. It’s just still catching up.
It will get there.
So will you. 🤍
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