How Somatic Hypervigilance Can Get in the Way of Healthy Relationships

Winter is a season I find that celebrates warmth, connection, and rest. Many long for less time working, earlier, cozier nights surrounded by comforting meals, integrating what happened in the busier seasons, and the warmth of a fire. Yet for many people, even in the most ideal circumstances, peace can feel out of reach. The body stays tense, the mind alert. If this sounds like you, I'm sure you've heard “you never just sit and relax with me” or “why does it feel like there's always something wrong?” but don't worry, you are not alone.

If you’ve ever found yourself waiting for something to go wrong in a relationship — even when everything seems fine — or needing constant reassurance to feel safe, you might be experiencing something called somatic hypervigilance. Scanning for what you or your partner is doing wrong, looking for signs of disloyalty, infidelity, or your partner’s lack of prioritizing the relationship, especially if there are unhealed wounds, can wreak havoc on our emotional and physical health.

It’s not a character flaw or a sign of failure in love. It’s your body doing what it was once trained to do: keep you safe.

What Is Somatic Hypervigilance?

The word somatic means “of the body,” and hypervigilance refers to being on high alert — scanning for danger or threat. 

• Vigilance is needed and appropriate when sensory information calls for us to be alert, like a growl in the woods when you are on a nature walk, or the sound of feet behind you walking to your car in the dark, or while watching your kids climb on the counter-top for their favorite cereal.

• Hyper-vigilance may occur from stuck internal alarms going on, despite external sensory cues of safety. 

Put together, somatic hypervigilance describes the state in which the body is constantly bracing for something bad to happen, even when life is calm. It’s a state of nervous system overactivation where your body is always watching, waiting, and preparing — just in case.

This pattern often develops from past experiences of stress, a history of abuse, PTSD in Veterans, or an inconsistent parent. Maybe your nervous system learned long ago that connection wasn’t always safe, that circumstances could change without warning, or that being too relaxed left you vulnerable. Over time, the body begins to expect disruption or brace for pain, even when the present is peaceful.

How It Feels in the Body

Hypervigilance doesn’t only live in the mind — it lives in the muscles, fascia, breath, and heart rate. Your mind is your body. Anxiety or Hypervigilance in the mind can often lead to hypervigilance in the body and it is a two-way street. 

“Thoughts can create nervous system activation, and nervous system activation can cause corresponding thoughts.” Natalie Cooney, Compass Healing Project

You might notice:

• Tight shoulders or a clenched jaw, tension in muscles/fascia

• A fluttering or heavy feeling in your chest or stomach when someone withdraws, or approaches, even slightly

• Trouble relaxing in peaceful moments

• Restlessness or a constant need to “do” something

• Scanning in the body for signs of sickness, pain, tension, anxiety and/or scanning outside for danger cues and sensory information that confirms the threat bias running in the background

• Flinching at sudden movements or loud noises

It’s as if the body doesn’t believe it’s allowed to rest. 

“For people suffering from hypervigilance, rest IS dangerous. It means we are left unguarded, unprepared, vulnerable, and exposed.”-Natalie Cooney

And while this state may once have helped you survive instability, over time, it can make closeness and healthy relationships feel like an uphill climb. It makes people unconscious of the present, making them forget moments of kindness, care, and pleasure. Hypervigilance leads to difficulty forming positive cycles due to the inability to be present. 

How Somatic Hypervigilance Impacts Relationships

When your body lives in a state of alertness, it can change how you connect, how you listen, and how you interpret others’ behavior. In relationships — romantic, familial, or platonic — this often shows up in subtle but powerful ways.

1. Difficulty Feeling Safe in Love

When your body is used to scanning for threat, even comfort can feel unsafe. A quiet moment with your partner might trigger anxiety rather than peace. The nervous system might wonder: What’s coming next? What are they not saying?

This makes vulnerability so hard. You may want to open up but find yourself shutting down, pulling away, or analyzing every small shift in tone. It’s not that you don’t trust your partner — it’s that your body doesn’t trust safety yet. The very sneaky part of living in a state of hypervigilance is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When overanalyzing the people around you for threats, you can come to conclusions that come from the past, not the present. This can be so deeply painful to want intimacy but fear vulnerability. If you aren't paying much attention, you can easily isolate yourself under the disguise of safety.

The brain does this to keep you safe; it is wired to do this after experiencing overwhelming experiences of betrayal, loss, shocking news, or rupture without repair. If these wounds are not healed, the nervous system is wired to protect you from it happening again. 

If this is you, I invite you to pause in your reading and soften your joints while slowly placing a hand on your heart or belly (bonus points for both!). This normal response to harmful moments needs to be seen through the eyes of honor, empathy, and compassion: “I see you, thank you for working hard to protect me”. 

2. Overanalyzing and Overfunctioning

Hypervigilance can make the brain work overtime in relationships. You might replay conversations, read into text messages, or anticipate your partner’s needs before they express them — just to keep things stable. You might experience a new potential partner with loads of suspicion, protective posturing, or looking for how they fail to meet your unspoken expectations.

While this comes from care, it can also lead to emotional exhaustion and resentment. Relationships become about managing rather than relating.

In a culture like California’s — where independence, productivity, and mindfulness are highly valued — it’s easy to mistake this pattern for emotional intelligence. But a true connection asks for trust, presence, and acceptance, not constant monitoring or mobilizing.

3. Misreading Neutral Cues as Rejection

When your nervous system is tuned to danger, neutral moments can feel charged. A partner’s quietness might register as anger, shutdown, or rejection; a delay in text response might feel like abandonment or disinterest.

This can create cycles of anxiety and reassurance-seeking — where you need your partner to constantly prove they’re not leaving. Over time, both people feel stuck in roles that don’t feel good: one hyper-attuned, the other feeling pressured to maintain calm.

4. Avoiding Conflict or Authentic Expression

If your body associates conflict with danger, you might learn to avoid it altogether. You may say “it’s fine” when it’s not, or swallow discomfort to keep the peace. You might inhibit what is real or true for you, not being clear about what you need or want. You may let your partner make all the decisions so as not to experience push-back or criticism. You may fear asking for your partner to touch or engage sexually in a preferred way because your history says that they won’t be responsive, they might spiral, and you may feel you need to soothe them. 

But unresolved tension builds. Eventually, it leaks out as resentment, withdrawal, or shutdown — the very disconnection you were trying to avoid.

In somatic therapy, it’s often said that “what the body resists will persist.” Avoided emotions don’t disappear; they wait to be felt. This is how the allostatic load creates larger, more systemic problems in different areas of your body and life.

I want to be clear, you might not be in control of this. Sensing danger in your nervous system will lead to a different state of being. Your thoughts become fuzzy, your heart rate increases, and your focus shifts to survival. This is so normal, and it is not a life sentence. You can shift this with the right tools, education, and support.

5. Losing Access to Joy and Playfulness

Hypervigilance doesn’t just guard against pain — it also guards against joy.

To the nervous system, both excitement and fear can feel activating. So when the body is overwhelmed, even with positive experiences — like intimacy, laughter, or spontaneity —  It can feel overstimulating.

This can leave relationships feeling serious, rigid, or emotionally muted. The spark dulls not because love fades, but because the body is too busy staying safe to relax into pleasure. I have to acknowledge how painful this can be. There is nothing wrong with you, and you do deserve love. 

The Nervous System and Love

Healthy relationships depend on the ability to co-regulate — to feel calm and safe with another person. When your nervous system feels balanced, you can listen deeply, empathize, and repair conflict with grace.

But if your body is stuck in survival mode, connection feels unpredictable. You might swing between closeness and withdrawal, craving intimacy one moment and fearing it the next.

In somatic terms, this is the dance between hyperarousal (sympathetic fight or flight) and collapse (internal shutdown states like freeze, fawn, inhibition). Both states make it almost impossible to stay grounded in the present.

Check out this blog by Jessi Eckert about Taming the Four Horsemen: A Holistic Approach to Healing Relationships and How to Stop the Apocalypse from Happening in Your Relationship. It's a good place to start if your relationship is feeling close to collapse.

Healing Somatic Hypervigilance in Relationships

Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to relax or pretending to trust. Trust me, this won't work one bit. It means teaching your body — gently and consistently — that safety is possible.

Hypervigilance is a form of “time-traveling”. Your body is going to the past or future experiences. The key with hypervigilance is to honor how healthy it is for the body to do that for you, then start to unlink those past experiences by soaking up the *present. 

If there is abuse, war, civil unrest, racism, sexism, prejudice, and discrimination for your sex, gender, religion, body functioning, or belief system, it is ESSENTIAL that your system be hypervigilant. So look for and create pockets, or oases, of safety/calm/connection, while you simultaneously take steps to mobilize and advocate for larger *contexts of safety over time. 

**If in California, here are some resources that can partner with you to support creating more contexts, environments of safety to support lowering your hypervigilance: 

• San Diego Access and Crisis Line: 1-888-724-7240

• Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: 988 (call or text)

• The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386; or text ‘START’ to 678-678

For resources outside of an emergency, please consider this link first:

https://dontcallthepolice.com/san-diego/

How to Shift Out of Hypervigilance

Here are some ways to begin shifting out of hypervigilance. These are meant as practices that help over time. Patience is essential when re-wiring your nervous system:

1. Notice, Don’t Judge

Start by simply noticing when your body goes into alert mode. Do your muscles tense during conflict? Does your heart race when your partner is quiet?

Instead of judging, try to approach it from a neutral state: You can say to yourself, “I feel tense right now. I'm noticing my heart is racing.”

Awareness is the first step toward regulation. You don't need to fix or force anything. Try to step into observation. If this already feels like a lot to step into solo, don't hesitate to reach out to a somatic therapist in California to help guide you through this process of healing at a comfortable and safe pace.

2. Ground Through the Body (Self-Regulation)

When the mind spirals, the body can anchor you. Try grounding practices like:

• Feeling your feet being supported by the ground or trying slow movements to your joints to help your nervous system experience presence

• Make a warm cup of tea, and as you feel waves of sensation, blow air slowly on the cup of tea to cool it.

• Notice what you feel through smell, touch, and sound—for example, warm water, cool breeze, soft fabric.

• Think of a loved one or a pet and wish good things for them

• Hold or squeeze a heavy rock, crystal, or fidget and pay attention to the weight, temperature, and how it feels in your hand.

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These small actions signal to your nervous system: I’m safe right now.

In places like California, where access to nature is abundant, grounding can also mean stepping outside — feeling sand, soil, or ocean water beneath your feet. The body naturally settles when it reconnects with the earth. If you feel yourself searching for danger outdoors, try looking up. Notice the vastness and emptiness of the sky. 

3. Practice Co-Regulation

Healing hypervigilance doesn’t happen alone — it happens in safe relationships. Co-regulation means letting another person’s calmness help settle your own nervous system.

This can look like:

• Small moments of true vulnerability in times when you feel connected to yourself and your partner.

• Reading a chapter of your favorite book out loud with your partner. Feel that you are safe as they calmly listen and take in a piece of work you connect with.

• Reach out and put your hand on their shoulder, or sit very close to them, and let the small moment of connection assure you that everything is, in fact, okay.

• Ask to hold hands, for a hug, or to lie together on the couch.

• Practice listener-speaker conversations while looking into each other’s eyes; pick who is listening and who is speaking, and set a timer, then switch. Practice just empathizing and understanding as the listener. Practice speaking from “I statements” as the speaker. 

These small, consistent moments rebuild the ability to trust in your body.

4. Set and Communicate Boundaries

When the nervous system feels unsafe, boundaries become blurry — either too rigid (to keep danger out) or too porous (to keep connection in).

Boundaries are what YOU are going to do. Boundaries are not about changing or controlling someone else’s actions. 

• ”When you drink, I will not engage with you. I may leave to stay at a hotel/friends/spare bedroom for the night.”

• ”When your mom comes over, I will need to take breaks out in the garden or bathroom.”

• ”When I am hungry or tired, I will try to be kind to you while I look for food. 

• ”When you play video games and tell me “I don’t have time to talk about our problems”, I feel angry, unimportant, and uninterested in sex with you. When this happens, I will either tell you what I’m feeling and ask you to pause the video game so we can schedule a time to talk, or I will go to our room and not be interested in connecting with you until we have the conversations that are needed.” 

• "When you say you’ll do the dishes today and then don’t, I won’t do them. Are we still in agreement that we commit to having our dishes done by the end of the day, or do we need to update our agreements?"

• ”When you stay on your phone during our dates, I feel insignificant. When this happens, I will pause our dinner and share how I’m feeling. If you decide to re-engage, I will love that; if you don’t, I’ll take an Uber home.”

• ”When we are having sex, and it is centered on your pleasure, I am going to ask us to stop and re-group so we can make it mutually satisfying. I will try to ask for what I want."

Healthy boundaries teach your body that it can protect itself and stay open. Try naming what you need out loud: “I need a few minutes to take this in before we talk,” or “I want to connect, but I need a moment to myself first.”

Each time you express a need, and it’s respected, your body learns that safety and closeness can coexist. Tell your partner this! Agree on a phrase together to eliminate the possibility of this boundary being taken as a rejection. At a good time when you feel safe, bring up what happens in your body when you notice a conflict and explain how they can help. That way, when a conflict arises, you have pre-established boundaries.

5. Somatic Therapy and Nervous System Work

Somatic therapy helps bridge the gap between what the mind knows (“I’m safe”) and what the body feels (“I’m not safe”).

Through breathwork, grounding, movement, reworking and completing past memories, and nervous system mapping, you learn to identify your body’s cues and bring awareness to them in real time.

At Compass Healing Project, our somatic therapists in California work with individuals, specifically Individuals, couples, parent/child relationships, first responder individuals, first responder couples, military individuals, and military-impacted couples and couples to unwind these patterns — helping you build the capacity to stay grounded, open, and connected in love.

Healing hypervigilance is not about never feeling anxious again; it’s about learning to trust that you can meet those moments with compassion rather than control.

Living in a relationship in California: Finding Stillness in the Noise

California life moves quickly. The blend of ambition, creativity, and cultural pressure to “do more” can make it easy to stay in constant motion. But hypervigilance thrives on speed — it feeds on the idea that slowing down isn’t safe.

That’s why reconnecting with your body here can be a radical act. Whether it’s a quiet morning walk along the shore, breathing under the redwoods, or simply letting yourself pause at sunset, California offers countless reminders that presence is still possible.

When you slow down enough to listen to your body — to the ache, the tension, the breath — you create room for something softer: trust, connection, and joy.

Final Thoughts

Somatic hypervigilance can make love and relationships feel complicated, even when it doesn't have to be. But with awareness, compassion, and support, your body can learn that safety and intimacy can coexist.

You don’t have to keep waiting for something to go wrong. Healing begins the moment you choose to stop fighting the sensations in your body — and start listening to them instead.

When the body softens, love has space to grow.

Start Working With a Somatic Therapist in San Diego, CA

Our in-person and online couples therapist who specializes in working with first-responders, military, and veterans in relationships and their families has openings for in-person (San Diego) and online in all of California. Jessi Eckert would love to support you to find ease and connection. You can start your therapy journey with Compass Healing Project by following these simple steps:

1. Reach out today for a free discovery 20-minute consultation!

2. Meet with a caring therapist

3. Start connecting with your partner on a deeper level!

Other Services Offered with Compass Healing Project

At Compass Healing Project, we use a range of modalities to support various mental health needs. In addition to somatic therapy, we also offer ketamine assisted therapy, EMDR, Clinical Sexology, hypnotherapy, and embodiment practices. Each is tailored to help with anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief, sexuality concerns, and relationship issues.  We also offer intensive couples therapy and teen therapy. To learn more about our services, visit our blog or connect with our therapists in California and Colorado.