When anxiety has you caught in the loop—scrolling through worst-case scenarios, replaying conversations, your chest tight, your mind racing—the urge to think your way out is overwhelming. Find the right perspective, you tell yourself. Use logic. Talk yourself down. But somatic guide Mar Healy suggests something more fundamental: the problem isn't your thinking. It's that your nervous system doesn't feel safe. And that can't be thought away.
"Our protective parts are simply acting in service of survival," Healy explains in a 15-minute guided session designed to soothe anxiety. These aren't bugs in your system—they're features shaped by evolution and, often, by your own experience. Your mind loops, your body tenses, your attention fractures into future-worry because some part of you is trying to keep you alive. Your system learned this response for a reason. It's loyal work, even when it hurts.
But here's what most anxiety management frameworks miss: "They can't simply be told they are safe. They need to feel safe."
Why Thinking Your Way Out Doesn't Work
This distinction cuts to the heart of why cognitive approaches, while valuable, often leave anxious people still struggling. Cognitive behavioral therapy asks you to examine the thought and find its logical flaw. If your mind says, "Everyone at the party will judge me," it teaches you to test that belief: "What's the evidence? Is that actually true?" That's useful work. But for many—especially those with a nervous system shaped by trauma, chronic stress, or simply a sensitive temperament—the body is still screaming danger, no matter how sound the rational rebuttal. Your prefrontal cortex can know you're safe while your amygdala insists otherwise. The nervous system doesn't argue. It feels.
Healy's approach works differently. It doesn't argue with anxiety. It works directly with the nervous system, using the body itself as the instrument of change. This is the terrain of somatic therapy—an approach rooted in the understanding that trauma and emotion live in the body, not just the mind, and that the path to healing often runs through physical sensation, not verbal insight alone.
How Does the Practice Begin?
The session unfolds in layers, each one pulling your attention from the mental storm back into the physical present. Healy begins with an invitation: find a position in which your body feels safe. Sitting, standing, curled up in a ball—there's no prescribed posture. You might use a blanket, a pillow, anything that brings a sense of comfort and protection. "There is no right or wrong," she emphasizes. This opening move is crucial. You're not being asked to achieve anything or perform wellness. You're being invited to recognize what safety feels like, in your body, right now. That baseline matters more than you might think. Many people with chronic anxiety have lost touch with what safety even feels like. The practice begins by helping you remember.
Then comes the grounding work through sensory orientation. Without trying to change anything, without an agenda, you look slowly around the room, noticing shapes, colors, shadows, light. Healy is careful to note: "This is not an active experience. We're just allowing our focus to go where it likes." The distinction matters. You're not trying to achieve mindfulness or demonstrate presence to yourself. You're just noticing. Looking at your space as though for the first time, through fresh eyes.
A core principle in somatic work is that anxiety often pins your nervous system in two temporal locations at once. Part of you is stuck in past trauma—a moment when you were unsafe, and your system learned that threat could come from anywhere. Another part is projected into future catastrophe—all the ways things could go wrong. Your attention is fragmented across time, and your body is correspondingly fragmented, tensed for an attack that isn't happening.
But the physical present moment is usually safe. The room you're sitting in right now is not dangerous, even if your mind is rehearsing danger. By calling your awareness into the sensory reality of now—the texture of a cushion, the light from a window, the specific space around you—you're giving your nervous system permission to downshift from high alert. You're offering it evidence, moment by moment: you are here. This is where you are. And it is okay.
What is the Extended Exhale Technique?
Breath comes next, but not as an exercise in willpower. Healy teaches a specific ratio: breathing in for a count of four, pausing, then exhaling for a count of six. This extended exhale is the key. "These long slow controlled exhalations signal to the nervous system that we are safe. That it's okay to rest."
There's neurology beneath this. In the framework of polyvagal theory—developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges—your vagus nerve is essentially the communication highway between your brain and your body. When you're anxious, your nervous system is in a sympathetic state: fight-or-flight, muscles tense, breath shallow and fast. To shift toward what's called the parasympathetic state—rest and digest, relaxation, safety—you need to activate what Porges calls the "vagal brake." And one of the most direct ways to do that is through a longer exhale.
When you breathe out longer than you breathe in, you're not forcing calm. You're literally signaling to your nervous system: it's okay to rest now. It's okay to stop preparing for attack. Your body registers that signal and begins to downshift. Heart rate slows. Blood pressure drops. The muscles that have been braced for impact can finally relax. It's not meditation or magic. It's neurology. Your body is listening to what your breath is telling it.
How Does Physical Touch Ground You?
But perhaps the most intimate part of the practice is the grounding through physical sensation. After the breath work, Healy guides you to notice where your body touches surfaces: feet on floor, back against chair, hands at rest. The instruction is specific: not thoughts about touch, but the direct sensation of being held by the world around you. This is another somatic principle: the more you live in the conceptual mind, the more disconnected you become from the felt sense of your body. Anxiety amplifies this disconnect. Your mind is running simulations, and your body is a kind of secondary information source. The practice reverses that priority, at least for a while. It asks: what does it feel like to be in contact with something solid right now? Not to think about it, but to feel it. What is the texture, the temperature, the sensation of support?
Then Healy suggests an even simpler gesture: one hand on your heart, one on your belly. "Everything is okay," she invites you to repeat. "Right now I am here in my body in this moment and everything is okay. I am safe. I am here."
This is self-soothing in the most literal sense—the way a parent comforts a child, but you are both the giver and receiver. Your own touch, your own voice, your own presence. There's no magic in it. There's just this: your nervous system registering that you are not alone, that you are held, that you can be your own source of safety. For someone whose anxiety often comes with a sense of isolation or abandonment, this can be profoundly reassuring.
What Makes This Approach Different?
What makes this approach distinctly contemporary is its refusal to pathologize the response. Healy doesn't position anxiety as a malfunction to defeat. She positions it as a signal—a loyal but confused protector. The practice doesn't tell you to stop being anxious. It teaches your nervous system a more nuanced reading of threat. It says: you're right to be cautious, to pay attention. Your vigilance has served you. But you can also arrive in this body, in this room, in this moment, and recognize that right now, you are not in danger.
This is different from dismissing anxiety or pretending it away. It's different from toxic positivity—the idea that you should just focus on good things and the bad feelings will disappear. Instead, it's a somatic acknowledgment: your nervous system has learned to protect you through hypervigilance. That response made sense once. It may still make sense sometimes. But right now, in this room, in this moment, you have the capacity to feel different. And that capacity lives in your body, not your beliefs.
The techniques Healy uses draw on a lineage of somatic and trauma-informed approaches that have gained significant credibility over the past two decades. The understanding that you cannot think your way out of a nervous system response—that you have to feel your way through it—has become central to modern trauma therapy and neuroscience-informed practice. The body holds wisdom that the mind sometimes can't access, and the path to healing often requires listening to that body-based knowledge.
Where to Go From Here
At the close of her practice, Healy offers a crucial reminder: "I have simply guided you here, but that the feelings, the sensations are within you. You alone are in control of your being." This is the inversion that makes the practice complete. She's not your rescuer. The relief isn't something she's given you. It's something you've accessed within yourself, using her voice as a map. The power stays with you. And that, in a nervous system shaped by anxiety, can be the most healing realization of all.
The real work begins after the session ends. The more you practice these techniques—returning to what safety feels like in your body, using the 4-6 breath ratio when you feel the loop beginning, placing your own hand on your heart and repeating the affirmations—the more your nervous system learns that it doesn't have to stay on high alert. You're not fighting anxiety. You're teaching your nervous system a new way to read the world. That education happens in the body, not the mind.
Mar Healy is a psychotherapist and meditation teacher who writes and records guided meditations and healing poetry, working with compassion, mindfulness and a trauma-informed, nerv…
Try the sensory grounding approach: notice five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste. Then focus on your feet on the ground or your back against a chair and breathe in for 4 counts, out for 6 counts. This pulls your nervous system from future-fear into present-moment safety.
Anxiety lives in your nervous system, not just your thoughts. While cognitive approaches can help, your body may still register danger even when your mind knows you're logically safe. Somatic practices work directly with that nervous system signal, teaching your body to feel safe rather than simply thinking your way to calm.
Breathing in for 4 counts and exhaling for 6 counts activates your parasympathetic nervous system—the rest-and-digest response. The extended exhale tells your body it's safe to relax, directly counteracting the shallow, rapid breathing of anxiety without requiring willpower or mental effort.
Yes. Somatic therapy works with the nervous system's own language—physical sensation and safety signals—rather than arguing anxiety away. By helping your body genuinely feel safe through grounding, breath, and touch, you're rewiring the protective response that drives anxiety.
A single 15-minute session can offer temporary relief, but lasting benefit comes from building familiarity with what safety feels like in your body. The more you practice, the more your nervous system learns that it can downshift, and the easier it becomes to access calm on your own.
Cognitive therapy focuses on examining and changing anxious thoughts, while somatic approaches work directly with nervous system sensations and body responses. Both are valuable; somatic methods are especially helpful when your nervous system is stuck in protection mode despite what your mind knows to be true.
Yes. The extended exhale breathing, feeling your feet on the ground, or placing your hand briefly on your heart are all subtle techniques you can use anywhere. Even a few rounds of 4-in-6-out breathing can shift your nervous system before a difficult meeting or social situation.
