What Happens When Your Nervous System Gets Stuck

Last year, I went through something I didn’t fully understand at the time—but it changed how I see the body, stress, and health completely. I had lost a lot of weight quite quickly and found myself in and out of hospital with arrhythmia. It didn’t make sense. I was having repeated tests, being told things were “concerning,” but no one could give me a clear answer as to what was actually going on. I just knew something wasn’t right in my body.

At the same time, I was getting ill very easily. My energy was low, I found it hard to sleep, I felt constantly on edge, and was completely exhausted. Looking back now, I can see I had been under a huge amount of stress for a long time. I was in a toxic relationship, but I kept making excuses for it. I downplayed it, told myself I was fine, carried on as normal. The people around me were concerned, even when I wasn’t ready to admit how much it was affecting me. As I started to research and look in to what was happening to my body I began to realise I may have been stuck in fight or flight.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. But looking back now, it made complete sense. I had been living in that state for a very long time—running on stress, adrenaline, and cortisol constantly, without ever really coming back down. And over time, that started to impact my health,especially my heart. Thats when I started to look in to nervous system work and incorporate practices in to my daily life.

Your nervous system is your body’s control centre. It’s always working in the background, scanning your environment and deciding if you’re safe or not. Based on that, it adjusts everything—your heart rate, your breathing, your energy, your digestion, and even how you feel emotionally. There are two main states your body moves between. One is fight or flight, your stress response. When something feels overwhelming or unsafe, your body releases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart rate increases, your body tenses, and you become more alert. The other state is rest and digest, where your body slows down, repairs, and restores. Your breathing deepens, your heart rate settles, your digestion works properly, and you feel calmer. In a healthy system, you move between these two.

The problem is when you don’t come back down. For me, what felt like normal life—being busy, pushing through, holding everything together—was actually my body being in a constant state of alert. I had been living in stress for so long that it became my baseline. When your nervous system stays in fight or flight, your body keeps producing stress hormones, and over time that starts to wear your system down. It can affect your sleep, your digestion, your energy, your hormones, and your heart.

For some people, it doesn’t show up as feeling wired. It shows up as shutting down. This is the freeze response. It can feel like low energy, numbness, disconnection, or feeling stuck. It’s not laziness—it’s your body trying to protect you in a different way. Both of these are signs that the nervous system is stuck. And when I say stuck, I don’t mean broken. I mean your body has adapted to what you’ve been living through and doesn’t know how to switch out of that pattern.

That was the biggest shift for me—understanding that my body wasn’t working against me. It had been trying to protect me the whole time. But staying in that state for too long comes at a cost. Your body can only run on stress for so long before it forces you to slow down. For me, that looked like getting ill, losing weight, and ending up in hospital without clear answers.

When the relationship finally ended that’s where things started to change and i stared to recalibrate —not by pushing harder or ignoring it, but by learning how to feel safe in my body again. Now, I want to share my story with the world. Because a lot of women are living in this state without even realising it—pushing through, holding everything together, thinking it’s normal—until their body says otherwise. It’s not about fixing yourself. It’s about understanding what your body has been trying to tell you all along and learning how to support it in a different way.

If any of this feels familiar—if you feel constantly on edge, exhausted, disconnected, or like your body is trying to tell you something you don’t fully understand yet—then this space is for you. You’re not alone in it, and more importantly, your body isn’t broken. It just needs a different kind of support.