I remember the first time I went to London for the weekend as a schoolgirl.
I was staying with a friend who lived in Kingston, and we spent the day wandering King’s Road, staring at boys, trying to look cool and badly smoking cigarettes.
By the end of the day, the plans changed. We found ourselves in a different part of London with new people, much further from where we were staying.
Everyone else was chatting, laughing and flirting.
I was panicking.
I didn’t know exactly where I was. I didn’t know how I was getting home. I felt trapped, and the more I tried to reason with myself, the worse it became.
Eventually, I started vomiting.
The strange thing was that I knew, logically, I wasn’t in danger. I was with friends. Nothing terrible was happening.
But my body had already decided I was unsafe.
No amount of thinking could change what my nervous system believed.
That pattern followed me throughout my teens and twenties.
My ex-husband used to say it was as though my system had hit the panic button. I could be going to a friend’s house for dinner, something I’d been looking forward to, and yet as the time approached, my body would start screaming:
What if you need to leave?
What if you can’t get out?
What if people judge you?
What if you can’t find your way home?
Eventually the nausea would begin, and more often than not I’d end up hiding in a bathroom, vomiting, before leaving early.
Looking back, I can see I was completely dysregulated.
I was also abandoning myself.
I treated my fear as something that needed to be ignored rather than understood.
It happened so often that I was eventually diagnosed with stomach migraines. But the episodes weren’t random. They almost always happened when I felt trapped, out of control or unable to leave.
My stomach wasn’t the problem.
It was where my anxiety expressed itself.
Everything started to change when I found yoga at university.
Yoga taught me something I’d never learned before: to notice what was happening inside me instead of immediately trying to escape it.
First comes awareness.
What is happening in me right now?
Then comes acceptance.
Can I let this feeling exist without fighting it?
Only then can regulation begin.
When your nervous system believes you’re in danger, logic isn’t running the show. Your body has already taken over.
Regulation happens through the body; through breathing, movement, grounding and staying connected to yourself while discomfort moves through you.
That changed everything.
This summer I did things I never could have imagined doing in my twenties.
I travelled alone to places I’d barely researched. I drove through France. I spent four days at a remote festival in Portugal with no phone reception, surrounded by people I’d never met.
The anxiety still showed up.
The knot in my stomach.
The tight chest.
The urge to cancel everything.
The difference was that I no longer assumed those feelings meant I was unsafe.
At the festival there were moments I felt overwhelmed. Everything was unfamiliar, unpredictable and outside my comfort zone.
But this time I didn’t abandon myself.
I slowed down.
I breathed.
I stepped away when I needed to.
I reminded myself that I had choices. I could rest, leave a conversation, ask for help or even go home if I truly needed to.
Because I knew I wasn’t going to trap myself, my nervous system slowly settled.
I stayed all four days.
And somewhere in that experience I realised something that has changed my life:
Discomfort and danger are not the same thing.
When we’ve lived with anxiety for a long time, unfamiliar experiences can feel unsafe.
A new place.
A change of plans.
People we don’t know.
Not knowing how the evening will unfold.
Our nervous system often interprets uncertainty as danger.
The sensations are real.
The tight chest is real.
The nausea is real.
The urge to escape is real.
But the danger isn’t always real.
Sometimes discomfort is telling us to leave.
Sometimes it’s simply telling us we’re doing something new.
Learning to tell the difference is one of the greatest gifts nervous system regulation has given me.
Not a life without anxiety.
But the ability to stay with myself while anxiety is present.
I no longer believe that saying yes means abandoning myself.
I know I’ll listen if something genuinely isn’t right.
And because I trust myself now, I can step into unfamiliar places without assuming they’re unsafe.
I can feel anxious and still take the next step.
I can be uncomfortable without believing I’m in danger.
And perhaps that’s what freedom really is.
Not never feeling afraid.
But knowing that wherever you go, you won’t leave yourself behind.
Want Personalised Support?
If you’d like help applying these ideas to your own life, one-to-one sessions offer a grounded space to explore your patterns, get clarity and create a life of ease.
