The Body Keeps the Score: Understanding Anxiety, Fatigue, and Emotional Numbness
“You might think it’s just burnout. Or maybe anxiety. But what if what you’re feeling—this constant exhaustion, emotional fog, and disconnection—is your body’s way of holding what your mind had to push through?”
This is the essence of what trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk means when he says, “The body keeps the score.”
What the Body Carries When the Mind Pushes Through
There’s a pattern among high-achieving women that often goes unnoticed—at least on the surface. They perform well. They hold it together. They keep moving. But beneath the performance is a body carrying the weight of unprocessed anxiety, grief, and trauma.
The symptoms rarely show up dramatically. Instead, they arrive quietly: the tension that never eases, the fatigue that sleep can’t fix, the shallow breathing, the racing mind. These physical signals are often dismissed as stress or busyness. But for many women, they are the body’s way of expressing what the voice hasn’t been able to say. Symptoms like these are common in those experiencing high-functioning anxiety, unresolved trauma, and long-standing grief.
This Isn’t Just Stress—It’s Survival Mode
For women who were never taught to rest, who were rewarded for self-sacrifice, who survived by over-functioning, the body often becomes a container for everything unspoken. Emotional pain doesn’t disappear. It finds a home in the muscles, the breath, the digestion, the immune system. What looks like burnout or busyness is often the nervous system screaming for relief.
This isn’t just a mental health issue—it’s physiological. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma imprints itself on the body. It lingers not only in memories, but in the way a person sleeps, breathes, moves, and relates to the world. The body remembers what the mind pushed aside.
Readers of the book often say the same thing:
“I didn’t think I had trauma until I saw myself on every page.”
“It gave me words for what I’ve been feeling for years but couldn’t explain.”
This kind of resonance is common—especially among high-functioning women who’ve lived their entire adult lives in overdrive. They’re not falling apart. But they’re far from okay.
High-Functioning Doesn’t Mean Healing
She’s the one others count on. She doesn’t miss a deadline. She makes things look easy. But her calm exterior is often a well-managed freeze response. The ease is performance. The presence is pressure. And rest, when it comes, feels undeserved or even unsafe.
This isn’t about weakness. It’s about survival. About nervous systems that learned early on to anticipate needs, manage risk, and minimize vulnerability. The body responds accordingly. It tightens. It overthinks. It dissociates. It numbs. And for many, this becomes the only way to move through the world.
Grief Isn’t Just for Death—It’s for Everything You Lost to Survive
Grief doesn’t always come from a single event. Sometimes it comes from slowly abandoning yourself over time. From the years spent shaping around others’ expectations. From silencing your emotions to keep the peace. From holding it all together while quietly falling apart. These losses rarely get named. But the body holds them like any other grief. And eventually, it aches under the weight of what was never spoken.
The Symptoms Aren’t the Problem—They’re the Story
What’s labeled as overthinking, irritability, or chronic exhaustion is often a nervous system trying to protect. It’s not dysfunctional—it’s intelligent. But when protection becomes a permanent state, it disconnects you from who you are beneath the coping.
Therapy isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about gently unlearning what survival taught. It’s where the body gets to rest. Where the story gets to be heard. Where safety becomes something internal, not something performed.
You Don’t Have to Collapse to Begin Healing
At Mental Lift, virtual therapy is offered for women in North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, and Florida who are tired of holding everything alone. I specialize in working with high-achieving women navigating anxiety, trauma, and grief. The work is gentle, validating, and rooted in the belief that healing doesn’t require collapse—it just requires truth.
For those quietly unraveling under the weight of their own resilience, this is your place to exhale. To stop performing. To start feeling. To return to yourself.