It’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it? Waking up with a tight chest, a racing mind, or a sense of dread — and not knowing why. You try to trace it back to something. Maybe it’s work, or money, or something you forgot to do. But often, there’s no clear trigger. Nothing big has happened. Nothing bad is looming. And yet the anxiety is very real.

If that’s you, I want you to know straight away: it’s more common than you think. And you’re not going mad.

As a psychologist, I’ve worked with people who’ve had panic attacks while doing the washing up, or felt a wave of fear during a quiet evening at home. No obvious danger. Just a sudden sense that something is wrong.

And that’s the key — your brain and body are reacting as if something is wrong, even when there isn’t an external threat. That doesn’t mean you’re imagining it. It means your nervous system is dysregulated. Your internal alarm system has become overactive, and it’s going off even when there’s no fire.

This can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s after a period of stress, or illness, or burnout. Sometimes it’s hormonal, or linked to long-term inflammation. For some people, it’s been going on for so long that they’ve forgotten what “normal” feels like. But just because you’ve felt this way for a long time doesn’t mean you have to stay stuck.

Your anxiety is not random. It might not be tied to a specific thought — but that doesn’t mean there’s no pattern.

Often what’s happening is that your brain has learned to stay on high alert. Maybe it started during a difficult time in your life. Or maybe you grew up always scanning for what could go wrong. Over time, those patterns can become automatic. Your body starts to react before your thinking brain even gets involved.

This is where I often bring in the idea of the “three brains” — not literally, of course, but as a way of understanding how we operate. We have the primitive brain, which reacts fast to danger (that’s the part behind the knot in your stomach). We have the emotional brain, which stores memories and creates gut feelings. And we have the thinking brain — the one that tries to make sense of it all.

When anxiety hits out of the blue, it’s usually not coming from your thinking brain. It’s coming from the deeper, faster parts of the system — the ones designed to keep you alive, not keep you calm.

And if those parts are stuck in a pattern of threat, you’ll feel anxious, even when there’s no conscious reason.

What makes this so frustrating is that traditional “talk it through” advice often doesn’t help. You can’t reason with a part of your brain that isn’t using reason. You can’t logic your way out of a nervous system response. That’s why people often come to me after trying to think their way out of anxiety — and still feeling stuck.

But here’s the good news: just because it doesn’t come from your thinking brain doesn’t mean you can’t change it. You absolutely can. You just need the right tools — tools that work with the body, not just the mind.

In my online course Retrain Your Brain, I teach you how to do exactly that. It’s based on neuroscience and my years working as a psychologist, but it’s simple and practical. You’ll learn how to work with your body’s stress response, calm the nervous system, and train your brain to stop reacting when there’s no real danger.

You don’t need to know why you’re anxious to start feeling better. You just need to know how to change the system that’s keeping you stuck.

And once your brain learns that you’re safe — really safe — the anxiety starts to fade. You stop bracing for something that never comes. You begin to feel like yourself again.

If any of this resonates with you, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to live in a constant state of hyper-awareness. You can retrain your brain. You can feel calm, even without knowing exactly why you felt anxious in the first place.

And when that happens — when you realise your brain no longer jumps into fear mode automatically — it’s one of the most freeing feelings there is.