Have you ever had a moment where your body reacted before you even knew what was going on?
Maybe your stomach turned when you saw a certain look on someone’s face. Or you felt shaky walking into a room you’d never been in before. Or you suddenly needed to get out of a situation, even though everything looked perfectly safe on the outside.
That’s emotional memory.
Not the kind you think about. The kind that lives in the body.
You might not remember the exact event. You might not have words or pictures for it. But your body does. It remembers how it felt. It remembers what it needed to do to keep you safe. And it reacts as if it’s happening again.
If you’ve read my post on What Is Emotional Memory, you’ll know that these responses don’t live in your thinking brain. They’re stored in the emotional and survival parts of your nervous system, which react before you have time to make sense of things.
Sometimes this happens with people who grew up in homes that were unpredictable. You might walk into a kitchen now and feel tension rise for no reason. But it’s not for no reason. Your nervous system remembers that kitchens were where arguments happened, or where you had to walk on eggshells. You might not consciously think that, but your body does.
I’ve worked with people who felt on edge every Sunday evening and had no idea why. Until we gently explored it together, and they realised Sunday nights used to be when the mood in the house changed—when the drinking started, or the shouting began, or everyone just stopped talking. No dramatic memory. Just a shift in the air that the body clock never forgot.
This is what I mean when I say your body remembers what your mind has forgotten. You might find it interesting to read more about how your brain can store anxiety and fear with memory in my anxiety guide, where I expand more on how you can remember to be anxious.
And its the same sort of idea in my more rect articles; Does Anxiety Run in Families? where I talk about how early nervous system learning is passed on—not through DNA, but through how we co-regulate, how we react to distress, and how our environment teaches our body what to expect.
When people talk about being triggered, this is often what’s happening. It’s not always about trauma with a capital T. Sometimes it’s small, repeated emotional experiences that taught your body what to expect. And now, even as an adult, your system tries to protect you the way it did back then and why some people experience panic attacks that feel like they come out of nowhere. In my post on Emotional Memory and Panic, I explain how emotional memory gets activated in real time, without a clear story attached. That’s why you can feel fine one minute and suddenly overwhelmed the next.
So what can you do?
First, you recognise it for what it is. Not weakness. Not overreaction. Just memory. Not in your head—in your body.
Then you begin to rebuild a sense of safety. That’s what we do in therapy. That’s what I teach in Retrain Your Brain. Not to erase the memories, but to help your nervous system realise you’re not back there anymore. That you don’t have to brace. That you can actually feel safe now.
And this is slow work. Gentle work. You don’t override these reactions with logic alone. You have to give your body new experiences of calm. You have to show it, not just tell it, that the danger has passed.
If you’re interested in how these memory patterns influence your day-to-day anxiety, you might also like my foundational article on Anxiety: Causes, Symptoms, and How to Retrain Your Brain. It ties together the neuroscience behind anxiety, the three-brain model, and how the body stores emotional responses over time.
