The Soul of Anxiety: From Protocols to a Return to Poetry
How science helps us understand anxiety, but poetry teaches us how to live with it.
Original photo by B. Littleton
I’ve come to believe that most of what we call anxiety is not a personal flaw; it’s a collective cry for help. We live in a world that rewards speed and punishes pause. Every day we’re asked to perform a kind of emotional gymnastics: stay productive, stay positive, stay connected. But the body can only take so much before it starts to whisper, slow down.When we ignore that whisper long enough, it stops whispering and starts shouting. That’s what I think anxiety really is: the body’s protest against a culture that has forgotten how to rest.
Dr. Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes how our nervous system is wired for connection, safety, and co-regulation. But when we’re constantly flooded with stimulation—news, deadlines, screens, expectations—our system shifts into survival mode. We don’t just feel stressed; our biology starts to believe we’re under threat. That’s when we freeze, procrastinate, or shut down, not because we’re lazy or broken, but because our body is trying to protect us.
Jung once wrote that “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” I think about that often. The suffering we refuse to feel—the grief, the fatigue, the loneliness of modern life—doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and shows up as anxiety, overthinking, or paralysis. It’s the psyche’s way of saying, You can’t keep living this fast and this far away from yourself.
We call it executive dysfunction or task paralysis, but I often see something deeper in my clients, and in myself. The person who can’t start the project, who stares at the blank page for hours, isn’t defiant or lazy. They’re often overwhelmed by a world that doesn’t honor the slow unfolding of creativity. The nervous system shuts down when the soul can’t keep up with the schedule.
Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “The attempt to escape from pain creates more pain.” His work reminds us that anxiety isn’t random; it’s relational. It’s the body’s way of saying, Something here isn’t right. We’re meant to move at the pace of breath, not bandwidth.
When I started paying attention to my own moments of freeze, those times when I’d circle the same task without making progress, I noticed a pattern. My paralysis wasn’t about time management. It was about meaning. The more I chased achievement, the more my body resisted. It was as if my nervous system was drawing a boundary my mind refused to set.
In that way, anxiety has become one of my most honest teachers. It interrupts me when I’m living in ways that are unsustainable or disconnected. It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s also profoundly wise. When I can pause long enough to listen, I often hear a truth I’ve been avoiding: You’ve gone too fast, too long. It’s time to return to your body.
We talk a lot about mental health as individual responsibility—self-care, mindfulness, therapy—and all of that matters. But there’s also a collective dimension to this. We’re living in what trauma expert Resmaa Menakem calls “a culture built on bodies in survival.” Many of us are trying to heal in environments that keep reactivating our stress responses. So when someone says they feel anxious or paralyzed, it might not just be their problem to fix; it might be a symptom of the world we’ve built.
The first step toward healing isn’t always doing more. Sometimes it’s daring to do less. To pause. To notice the body. To let anxiety become what it was always meant to be—a signal, not a sentence.
When I work with clients now, I often ask them, “What if your anxiety isn’t the enemy? What if it’s the most loyal part of you—refusing to move any faster than your soul can follow?” Most of the time, they just nod, quietly relieved. And honestly, so do I.
When I first started learning how to listen to my body, I was terrible at it. I’d sit still for maybe thirty seconds before my mind jumped up to find something “productive” to do. Rest felt irresponsible. Silence felt wasteful. That’s how deep the conditioning goes. We’ve been taught to equate worth with output, and stillness with weakness.
But healing, I’ve learned, begins when we stop treating the body as an inconvenience and start seeing it as a conversation partner. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes that trauma isn’t just something that happened to us; it’s something that lives in us. The same is true for chronic anxiety. It lives in our muscles, our breath, our posture, our sleep. The body holds the stories that the mind tries to forget. So when we come back to the body, we’re not escaping life; we’re coming home to it.
One of the simplest practices I teach clients, and the one I use myself, is what I call a body check-in. It takes less than a minute. I pause, feel my feet on the ground, and ask, “Where am I holding tension?” Then I ask, “What might this part of me be trying to say?” Sometimes it’s “I’m tired.” Sometimes it’s “I don’t feel safe.” Sometimes it’s “I just need a break.”
When we bring curiosity instead of judgment, the body starts to trust us again. The moment we honor its signals, something inside begins to soften. Polyvagal researcher Deb Dana calls this “befriending your nervous system.” It’s an act of relational repair, between self and body, between psyche and soma.
I also believe embodiment has a collective dimension. We don’t live as isolated nervous systems; we co-regulate with one another. When we show up grounded, breathing, and present, we give others permission to do the same. It’s contagious, in the best way.
Dr. Resmaa Menakem writes about this in My Grandmother’s Hands: “Healing must happen in bodies, not just minds.” He reminds us that collective trauma, racism, fear, and disconnection live in our flesh as much as in our history. When we slow down enough to feel, we start to interrupt the inherited patterns that keep us reactive and disconnected.
Embodiment, then, isn’t self-indulgence. It’s cultural repair. Every time we breathe through a moment instead of bypassing it, every time we soften our shoulders instead of raising our voice, every time we pause before reacting, we contribute to a world that is a little less defended and a little more humane.
For me, this has become a daily practice. I start my mornings with a few slow breaths before I even touch my phone. I try to take one ten-minute walk a day with no earbuds, no agenda, just listening. When I feel that familiar pressure building, the one that says do more, fix faster, I ask, “What if slowing down is the most radical thing I can do right now?”
And maybe that’s the point. In a culture addicted to speed, slowing down is a form of resistance. It’s a way of saying, I refuse to abandon myself for productivity.
We talk about healing as if it’s a private act, something that happens behind closed doors or in therapy rooms. But the longer I do this work, the more I realize that when one person regulates their nervous system, the whole room changes. The air gets quieter. The pace shifts. People start breathing again.
That’s what embodiment really is. It’s not just personal regulation; it’s relational repair. When we return to our own bodies, we help the world remember its own.
Even with all the science we have, and I’m grateful for it, I sometimes feel we’ve made healing another project to complete. Neuroscience, trauma protocols, even the most compassionate nervous-system work can slip into the same mindset that created the problem: let’s fix this. I’ve done it myself. I’ve tracked my breathing, monitored my vagal tone, studied my patterns, and still felt like I was treating my humanity like a system to optimize.
There’s wisdom in these tools. Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, and Bessel van der Kolk have given us language to describe what our ancestors always knew: that the body remembers and that safety is relational. But sometimes I think healing asks for something older, something less clinical and more devotional. It asks for poetry.
When my nervous system feels like a storm, I go outside. Mary Oliver once wrote, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” That line has rescued me more times than any breathing app ever could. It reminds me that my body isn’t a problem to solve; it’s a creature longing for belonging. I take off my shoes and stand barefoot on the earth, not because it’s trendy, but because it helps me remember I’m part of something larger than my own striving.
Poet William Stafford wrote, “There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.” When I read that, I imagine that thread as the pulse of the earth, the same pulse running through my own body. Every time I pause and listen, to the wind in the trees or to the sound of my own breath, I find that thread again. It leads me back to sanity, to rhythm, to soul.
And then there’s Robinson Jeffers, the poet who stood on the cliffs of Big Sur and reminded us that “the beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself.” Jeffers believed that returning to the more-than-human world could heal the loneliness of the modern soul. He called it “inhumanism,” but I think he really meant humility, remembering that we are not the center, but a part.
When I sit by the ocean or watch light move through the desert sky, my nervous system reorganizes itself without a single technique. My breath lengthens, my shoulders drop, my mind stops trying to do healing and starts to be healed. The land becomes the therapist, the sky the witness. This is what I mean by embodiment as cultural repair, not just calming our own systems, but letting the world we inhabit calm us, too.
Maybe the next step in our collective healing isn’t more data but more devotion, to place, to poetry, to presence. The poets remind us what science sometimes forgets: that belonging is not just psychological; it’s ecological. Our bodies are made of the same minerals as the soil we walk on. When we tend to that connection, we begin to remember who we are.
So yes, the nervous system needs safety. The psyche needs understanding. But the soul? The soul needs sky. It needs the sound of a bird at dawn, the smell of rain, the words of a poet that remind us life is still sacred.
When I forget that, I open Mary Oliver again and I read:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
And I breathe, deeply. Not to fix anything, just to belong again.
written by Bren Littleton
Original photo by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press c. 2025
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