How to Relearn Safety in Your Body

If you grew up in a home where love was conditional, emotions were unpredictable, or addiction ruled the atmosphere, you may have learned—deep in your nervous system—that stress equals familiarity and on some level, safety.

It sounds backwards, but for many of us, being on edge feels familiar, while calm feels alien or even threatening. This is work I’m very familiar with and something I’ve been working on to heal within myself. Let’s explore how this happens, what cortisol contagion and HeartMath coherence teach us about it, and how to begin coming home to safety within yourself.

The Body Learns What the Mind Can’t Name

As children, our developing nervous systems attune to the emotional field around us. If a parent is anxious, withdrawn, angry, or emotionally unavailable, our bodies adapt to survive.

In homes shaped by addiction, emotional unpredictability, or trauma, the air itself often carries stress. Scientists call this stress contagion—when one person’s physiological stress response activates the same system in another.

Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart describes this as “cortisol contagion”: your stress hormones can rise simply from being around someone who’s stressed. Over time, your body learns to stay in that elevated state because that’s what feels normal.

So you grow up hyper-vigilant. You anticipate moods, keep the peace (hello people-pleasing), scan for danger. Your brain and heart adapt to chaos as a baseline.

The Heart Remembers: What HeartMath Shows Us

HeartMath research has revealed that the heart isn’t just a pump—it’s an intelligent emotional centre. It generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, measurable several feet away.

When we’re anxious or frustrated, that field becomes erratic—an outward broadcast of incoherence. When we’re calm, compassionate, or grateful, it becomes ordered and rhythmic.

If you lived with caregivers in constant fight-or-flight, your own heart field literally entrained to theirs. Their stress became your baseline. Safety and softness never got the chance to wire in.

I’m happy to share, that with some gentle, consistent effort, your system can be rewired.

Healing Means Teaching Your Body That Calm Is Safe

Healing isn’t just “thinking positive.” It’s re-educating your physiology—showing your body, through experience, that peace doesn’t mean danger and that you can be safe in stillness.

Here’s where to begin:

1. Notice Your Default Setting

Do you feel anxious when things are quiet? Do you self-sabotage calm moments? That’s your nervous system searching for the chaos it knows. Awareness is the first step in creating change.

2. Practise Heart Coherence

Use a HeartMath or breath-based technique:

• Focus your attention on your heart.
• Breathe slowly in and out through your heart area.
• Recall a feeling of appreciation or love (for a pet, a person, or nature).
  This trains your body to associate calm with safety—not threat.

3. Regulate Before You Relate

Instead of trying to fix relationships while dysregulated, start by bringing yourself into coherence. When your system steadies, your perceptions, boundaries, and emotional responses become clearer and calmer.

4. Rewrite the Internal Script

Replace inherited beliefs—“I have to earn love,” “peace means something bad is coming,” “I’m only safe when I’m in control”—with grounded truth:

“Safety lives in my body, not in someone else’s behaviour.”

5. Seek Regulated Spaces

Spend time around people who feel calm and grounded. Coherence is contagious, too—your nervous system will mirror stability when exposed to it often enough.

From Survival to Self-Safety

You didn’t choose to grow up in a cortisol-saturated field. But you can choose to become your own safe space now.

Each breath, each pause, each moment of awareness tells your body a new story:

“We’re not in that situation anymore.”

Healing begins when you stop waiting for the world to feel safe and start cultivating safety within your own heart field and nervous system.

💬 Want help learning how to regulate your nervous system and break free from stress patterns?

My 6-Week Nervous System Reset teaches you the science and the practice of emotional regulation, using HeartMath-based tools and somatic techniques to restore calm, clarity, and confidence.

👉 Find out more here.