When Your Body Forgets How to Feel Safe
There’s an exhausting rhythm some of us know too well: swinging between too much and not enough, between anxiety that won’t settle and a kind of shutdown that feels like you’ve disappeared from your own life.
If you’ve lived with trauma or chronic stress, your nervous system may have adapted by staying on alert. Always scanning, always ready, never quite at rest. Over time, that state can become so familiar that you stop recognising it as dysregulation at all.
Instead, it starts to feel like who you are.
What gets lost in that process is a felt sense of safety. Not the idea of safety, but the bodily experience of it — the ability to settle, to soften, to feel at ease without bracing for what might come next.
This is where the idea of glimmers becomes useful.
When You Can’t Tell You’re Dysregulated Anymore
For years, I didn’t recognise dysregulation in myself. It had become my baseline. When I told myself I was being productive, I was often in fight-or-flight. When I called myself lazy, I was usually in shutdown. My body was stuck in survival mode and I had no idea how to find my way out.
Fight-or-flight feels like everything must happen now. You can’t sit still, can’t switch off, can’t stop preparing for the next thing. Restlessness masquerades as energy. Anxiety hums beneath everything, even when nothing obvious is threatening you. Shutdown feels like I just can’t. You move through fog. You keep yourself small. Exhausted, quiet. Sleep doesn’t help. Numbness fills the places where feeling should be. And freeze is that suspended state between the two — not quite anxious, not quite numb. You stare into space, forget what you were doing, feel detached from your own life. That too is protection.
These are not character flaws. They are your nervous system’s best attempt to keep you safe. But when survival becomes your default, you lose flexibility, the ability to move between states and come back to balance. The goal is not to eliminate activation entirely but to restore the capacity to move through it and return.
Reflection: Which of these states is most familiar to you? Do you tend toward the too-hot (restless, scanning, unable to switch off) or the too-cold (foggy, numb, moving through life at a distance)? Some people oscillate between both. Knowing which state you are in when you are in it is the first step toward being able to respond to it rather than simply living inside it.
If you'd like to explore this more deeply, you may find these helpful:
– How to Trust Yourself Again After Gaslighting
– When Your Partner Shuts Down — Understanding Withdrawal as Protection
Even tiny moments of light can help the nervous system move out of survival mode.
What Glimmers Are
Glimmers are the opposite of triggers. Triggers activate your survival responses — they signal danger to the nervous system, real or perceived. Glimmers invite your body back toward calm, connection, and safety. They are what polyvagal theorist Deb Dana describes as cues of safety: small, often subtle moments that the ventral vagal system, the social engagement branch of your nervous system, can register as safe.
They are easy to miss, because your nervous system has been trained to spot threat, not peace. The felt sense of safety is quiet. You have to learn to notice it. Glimmers are not grand moments of joy or profound peace. They are the warmth of sunlight on your face for a moment. The particular quality of light on the water. A dog being walked that makes brief eye contact. The smell of coffee. A fragment of music. A moment of genuine laughter. A comfortable silence with someone you trust. These tiny experiences do something in the body before the mind even registers them, a small softening, a micro-release, a brief settling. That is the glimmer.
There are two kinds. Self-regulating glimmers are things you do or experience alone: reading, journalling, stretching, breathing slowly, soaking in a warm bath, sitting in a patch of sun, savouring something without rushing. Co-regulating glimmers happen in connection: laughing with someone safe, resting with a pet in your lap, sitting beside a calm friend, sharing a conversation that does not demand performance. Both matter. Both remind your body that ease is possible. And that you can trust it when it arrives.
Start Where You Are
Healing does not begin by forcing calm. It starts with noticing where you actually are and choosing glimmers that meet you there.
When you are too hot, anxious, restless, unable to settle, you need glimmers that release energy and signal safety through movement. A brisk walk. Cold water on the face or wrists. Shaking out the hands. Gardening or physical work. Rhythmic bilateral movement. Something that lets the mobilised energy discharge rather than build further.
When you are too cold, shut down, numb, foggy or empty, you need glimmers that gently activate without overwhelming. Mild physical sensation: warmth, texture, something cool to hold. Gentle movement. Light and colour. A conversation that does not demand much but offers warmth. Anything that brings you slightly more into the body and slightly more into the present moment without pushing hard.
The practice is not complicated. But it requires consistency. And it requires a particular quality of attention: not forcing the glimmer to mean something, not turning it into a self-improvement project, but simply letting it register. Letting the warmth of the sun on your face actually arrive for the few seconds it is there. That allowing is the practice.
Reflection: Think of one or two things that tend to produce a small shift in your body, not a dramatic improvement, just a minor easing. A moment of warmth, a texture, a piece of music, a particular kind of light. These are your specific glimmers. They are not generic. Knowing what specifically works for your nervous system is more useful than any general list of calming activities. What are yours?
Why This Works
Glimmers work because the nervous system is not a fixed state machine — it is constantly updating its predictions based on accumulated experience. When you have lived in a threat-conditioned environment for a long time, your nervous system’s default prediction is: this is probably dangerous. Glimmers provide counter-evidence. Not dramatic counter-evidence, just small, consistent signals of safety that accumulate over time into a slightly different prediction. And slightly different, over enough time, becomes genuinely different.
This is also why the practice is better done when you are not in acute distress, not as a crisis tool but as a regular, daily practice of noticing safety when it is present. The nervous system learns most readily from repeated, low-stakes experiences rather than from dramatic interventions at moments of high activation. Building a relationship with your own glimmers outside of crisis means they are more available to you in the difficult moments, because the nervous system has already registered them as reliable.
For more on the nervous system states that underlie this work and how regulation actually happens, see: Why You Can’t Just Calm Down and Why You React Differently on Different Days: Your Window of Tolerance.
Need Support?
If you've been recognising these responses in yourself, it can help to know they aren't a flaw in you. They're patterns your nervous system learned in response to experiences that felt overwhelming, unsafe, or too much to carry alone.
These responses can feel deeply ingrained, but they aren't fixed. With understanding, awareness, and support, your system can begin to experience something different.
You don't have to force yourself out of survival mode before reaching out.
→ Read more about trauma, emotional regulation, and nervous system responses
→ See How Therapy Works
If you are living in survival mode and cannot find your way back to ease on your own, trauma-informed therapy that works with the nervous system directly, rather than only with thoughts and narratives, is often the most useful support.
📞 Call 0452 285 526
📧 Email kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
Frequently Asked Questions
Is noticing glimmers the same as positive thinking?
No, and the distinction is important. Positive thinking involves consciously generating optimistic thoughts or reframing difficult situations as more acceptable. It operates at the cognitive level and tends to fail when the nervous system is significantly activated, because the thinking brain is not fully online. Noticing glimmers is a body-level practice. It is not about telling yourself things are fine when they are not. It is about allowing the body to register the actual momentary experience of a cue of safety, which is real, even in the midst of difficulty. The nervous system receives it differently from a thought. The cumulative effect is different, too: positive thinking tends to require ongoing effort; accumulated glimmer practice gradually updates the nervous system’s baseline prediction.
I try to notice glimmers but they don’t seem to last. Is that normal?
Yes, and entirely expected. Glimmers are by definition brief, they are not sustained states of safety, they are momentary signals. The practice is not to hold the glimmer or extend it but to let it land while it is present. A nervous system that has been chronically threat-conditioned often dismisses these moments very quickly, the vigilance system overrides the signal before it can fully register. This is why the practice benefits from deliberate attention: consciously staying with the glimmer for the few seconds it is there, noticing it in the body rather than immediately moving on. Over time, the capacity to stay with it tends to extend naturally.
I feel guilty resting or doing things that feel good when my life is so difficult. How do I work with that?
This guilt is common and has a specific origin: it is often the nervous system’s warning that ease is not safe, that relaxing means missing the next threat, that taking care of yourself is somehow a betrayal of the difficulty you are in. This is not a moral assessment. It is a survival strategy that developed in an environment where vigilance was necessary. The guilt is not accurate information about whether rest is appropriate; it is information about how long the nervous system has been in survival mode. Approaching the guilt with curiosity rather than compliance tends to be more useful: what is the guilt afraid will happen if I rest? What does it think I need to stay alert for? The answers are often illuminating about the original environment, and they can eventually be gently updated.
What if I can’t find any glimmers? What if everything feels grey or threatening?
This is one of the signs that the nervous system may be in significant hypoarousal, a shutdown state in which access to positive sensation and genuine connection has become very limited. It is not a permanent state, but it may require more support than a self-directed glimmer practice can provide. If you are finding that you genuinely cannot access any moments of ease or positive sensation, and that this has been the case for an extended period, therapeutic support specifically oriented toward nervous system regulation is appropriate. The absence of glimmers is not evidence that healing is impossible; it is a sign of how thoroughly the system has gone into protection mode, and that level of protection often needs the consistent co-regulation of a therapeutic relationship to begin to shift.
How long before I notice a difference from this practice?
This varies considerably depending on how long the nervous system has been in chronic threat mode, the intensity of the original experiences that shaped it, and how consistently you can practice. What most people find is not a dramatic shift but a gradual one: the glimmers become slightly easier to notice, slightly longer to stay in, slightly more available in difficult moments. The baseline tension begins to ease, not all at once but incrementally. Some people notice meaningful change within weeks of consistent practice; for others, it takes much longer, particularly when the chronic activation has been present for decades. The practice is cumulative and directional. Each glimmer contributes, even when progress is not visible in the moment.
