Staying positive in the face of challenges

A positive mindset can help you navigate the emotional and physical toll of chronic conditions, but staying optimistic is challenging. Somatic, or body-based, therapies can support you by building emotional resilience and encouraging the body’s natural healing.

With somatic therapy, “healing is not so much about managing symptoms, as helping people create more capacity to be with moments of activation without feeling overwhelmed,” says Britt Piper, a trauma-trained therapist and author of Body-First Healing: Get Unstuck and Recover from Trauma with Somatic Healing (Avery, 2025).

“We’re not broken, flawed, or in need of fixing,” she emphasizes. “With this shift in perspective, it’s amazing how much healing and growth can happen when we allow it to unfold naturally.”

Stuck in survival mode

The autonomic nervous system is adept at keeping us safe using survival responses such as fight, flight, freeze, and fainting. But with trauma—which Piper says is “any experience that overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to cope”—the nervous system gets “stuck” in survival mode.

Unresolved trauma can later lead to disproportionate reactions to events, such as shrinking in your posture when a safe person raises their voice or panicking when your partner forgets to call you after work. In these situations, your nervous system is misreading cues as potentially dangerous, based on past traumatic events.

Healing by releasing trauma

Piper helps people heal trauma and other stress-related disorders by “directing them to look inward for the answers—knowing that their body is designed to self-organize and self-heal—rather than looking to the outside world for quick fixes.”

This therapy is slow, but can be effective. “We work at the outer edges of the trauma vortex,” says Piper, referring to the most intense trauma energy in the body. This might mean first moving through recent moments of frustration, before processing a past assault. “Slowly over time, you work with the vortex until you come into the middle,” she says.

State shapes your story

Piper also uses nervous system regulation with clients. This often focuses on the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and digestive tract.

Eighty percent of information on the vagus nerve travels from the body to the brain, which “is why you can’t just will your way into happiness, joy, or healing, or think your way out of anxiety or depression,” she says. “You also have to ‘feel’ your way out.”

Remaining positive can also be challenging due to the brain’s negativity bias, which developed to help early humans quickly recognize dangers. That’s why you remember rainy Saturdays and forget sunny ones, or notice the few times your partner isn’t paying attention.

Negative thoughts can be especially intrusive at bedtime. One technique that can help is cognitive shuffling, where you visualize random scenarios: for example, playing with a dog, riding a merry-go-round, watching a sunset. Research suggests cognitive shuffling may improve sleep quality.

Growing stronger relationships

Body-based therapies can have even more profound effects on your relationships with others and with yourself. “Healing through a somatic lens helps you rediscover who you were, or who you were meant to be, before the trauma told you who to be,” says Piper.

When it comes to external connections, this could look like “creating healthier boundaries with people, being able to repair after a rupture, or forming deeper connections,” she says.

Nervous system regulation goes beyond staying regulated. It’s learning to sit with the discomfort, welcoming those feelings, and allowing yourself to be upset or sad.

“When we do that, the discomfort moves through us much quicker,” she says. “That’s our lifetime work—how do we relate to these very natural things when they emerge in the body?”

This article originally appeared on alive.com as “Staying Positive in the Face of Challenges.”