Your Body Knows Before Your Brain Does
If you’ve ever felt your chest tighten before you could name why, or found yourself shutting down mid-conversation with no clear explanation, that’s not weakness. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And it’s exactly what the therapy room needs to work with.
The science behind the reaction
Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges, explains how your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is constantly scanning for safety in your environment, in other people, and in your own body. It does this without your conscious input. Before a single thought is formed, your body has already decided whether you’re safe.
This happens across three states. Ventral vagal: connected, regulated, present. Sympathetic: fight or flight. Dorsal vagal: freeze or shutdown. Most of us cycle through all three daily. But when the nervous system has been shaped by stress or trauma, it can get stuck in the lower two, even when the threat is long gone.
Understanding this changes everything about how we approach healing.
Why talk alone isn’t always enough
Traditional therapy is largely top-down — we think, analyse, and make meaning. That’s valuable. But when the body is holding the experience, you can’t always think your way out of it.
This is where creative therapies come in: art, movement, dance, play, yoga, sensory work. These approaches are bottom-up, they work directly with the body and nervous system, bypassing the analytical mind to access what’s stored below the surface.
Research shows that clients whose nervous system defaults to fight or flight respond particularly well to expressive movement. Those stuck in freeze respond well to rhythm, grounding, and embodied creative practices. The modality meets the state.
What this looks like in practice
A few concrete examples:
Art — mapping your autonomic ladder. Drawing what freeze, fight/flight, and connection look and feel like for you, creating a personal reference point to track your own states and build flexibility between them.
Yoga and breathwork — activating the body’s natural anti-stress response, shifting the ANS from threat to safety. Not as a wellness add-on, but as a clinical intervention.
Dance and movement — working directly with the body to shift physiological state. As one researcher puts it: safety is rooted in the body, so that’s where the work has to happen.
Play — not frivolous. Play is a neural exercise. It trains the nervous system to move from activated to calm, and back again, a skill that underpins every other regulation strategy.
Sensory and relational work — your nervous system reads safety through faces, voices, eye contact, and gesture. Developing awareness of how you respond to these cues builds your capacity for connection and co-regulation.
The bottom line
Healing isn’t just a cognitive process. It’s a whole-body one.
At Inner Workings, sessions draw on both the depth of neuroscience and the power of embodied practice, not because it’s trendy, but because that’s where lasting change actually happens.
If your mind has done the analysis but something still isn’t shifting, it might be time to let the body lead.
This blog article is written from research and assignments completed by Jodi during her Masters in Psychotherapy and Counselling.
Jodi Frizzel is a psychotherapist and coach who works with high-functioning individuals ready to make real shifts in how they live, learn and relate. With a Master of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Level 2 Resource Therapy training, and over twenty years across mental health, education and business leadership, Jodi brings both the depth of therapy and the direction of coaching into one integrated approach. Her clients don’t just gain insight, they learn to use it. Jodi works with individuals online across Australia and face to face in Nelson Bay, NSW.
