We’ve all heard it: “Just change your mindset.” That thinking differently will automatically lead to transformation and growth. Yes, mindset work is powerful — reframing beliefs, shifting perspectives, seeing possibilities where before there were none. But here’s the truth: mindset alone can’t take us the whole way.
Mindset work alone often leaves people frustrated because change is not long lasting. Why? Because the body keeps the score. Thoughts live in the mind and survival patterns live in the body.
Mindset work reshapes beliefs, perspectives, and narratives. Somatic work helps regulate the autonomic nervous system — the unconscious part of the body that drives how safe, open, or shut down we feel.
You can reframe a belief, but if your nervous system is still stuck in fight, flight, freeze or collapse, the body won’t believe the new story.
When you’ve lived through stress, overwhelm, or trauma, those experiences aren’t just “thoughts” you can reframe away. They’re stored in the wiring of your peripheral nervous system — especially in the autonomic nervous system, the part that runs quietly in the background, keeping your heart beating, your breath flowing, your digestion moving.
This is where survival patterns live. It’s the part of you that tightens before you even know you’re scared, or goes numb before you’ve had time to think.
That’s why affirmations or positive thinking can sometimes feel like they bounce off the surface. Your body hasn’t caught up with the new story yet.
Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is a part of the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system links the brain and the spinal cord to the rest of the body. The ANS governs all the responses that happen without conscious thought: heart, breath, digestion, organ control and stress responses. It is also a key regulator of when and how hormones are released. It doesn’t directly secrete hormones but the state of the nervous system influences hormone production. For example, if you are in a chronic state of stress, the ‘release stress hormones’ button is going to be pressed and the body won’t get any good rest or repair until this state shifts. Trauma and chronic stresses get stored in here which means they shape how we react before we even think. This is why we can’t think our way out of these survival patterns.
Wrong part of the brain to be working with.
If the ANS is dysregulated, no amount of mindset reframing will create sustainable change. True transformation requires working with the felt sense of safety in the body. When the nervous system is regulated, mindset work becomes far more effective — the two integrate rather than compete.
Often we hear that we can reset our nervous system, I have been guilty of saying it in the past too, when I am perhaps tired or being a bit lazy with my terminology. But we are not doing our body any favours when we think of it in such a mechanical way. It is a dynamic, fluid, adaptive and ever changing organism. Something I often say is, you are not a laptop, and your nervous system is not something you “reset” or “reboot.” You can’t push a button and start fresh. But you can repair, rejuvenate, and expand your nervous system’s capacity. That’s what somatic work makes possible.
When you learn to listen to the felt sense of your body — the subtle cues of tension, breath, and sensation — you’re speaking directly to the nervous system. Over time, this is what allows your system to trust safety again. And when safety returns, mindset work suddenly has somewhere to land.
Think of it this way: mindset work is like planting new seeds. Somatic work is tending to the soil. If the soil is depleted, the seeds won’t grow. But when the soil is nourished, every new seed has a chance to flourish.
Many people are told they “just need a growth mindset.” But what often sits beneath the drive to constantly grow, achieve, or “do better” is actually shame. And shame isn’t a faulty mindset — it’s a relational wound.
Shame begins in relationship, often in the parent–child bond, when parts of us were not met, seen, or accepted. Because it’s relational, it can’t be solved by thinking differently. It has to be healed relationally, too. This is where somatic work comes in — not just through being with our own body, but through the way we experience safety and repair in connection with others.
Secure attachment doesn’t grow in isolation. It emerges through safe friendships, through therapeutic relationships, through being with people who can hold us gently and consistently. Over time, those experiences get woven into the body, and we begin to establish secure attachment within ourselves. That’s when true growth happens — not from shaming ourselves into a “better mindset,” but from softening into safety and belonging.
Somatic work is important because we all have those survival patterns, and those parts of us are the parts that get stuck in our early childhood adaptive responses. Or maybe it was a car accident you had many years ago and your body is stuck in a flight and fight response, or a sports injury and you are stuck bracing. I have had a lot of medical intervention and surgery and found that my body was stuck in a bracing posture for many years. I made do by pushing through but we can only do that for so long before our bodies freeze up and collapse.
All of this is what makes us not take up space, think we are too much, or not enough. Makes us play small in life. Our body posture greatly affects our nervous system state. Do you know when your tongue is in the right position resting at the top of our mouth, our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest state) is activated. When it’s not in that state, we move into sympathetic activation (fight and flight). When we spend all day on a computer, with a narrow focus, this pulls you into sympathetic activation, which is why many people get grumpy or stressed when they have been staring at a screen all day.
You have to get up and move. I recommend to my clients to move every two hours, get up and look around, use your eyes to regulate, orient in the space you are in, look at the horizon. You will be surprised at what a small difference this makes to your mental and physical health.
So if you’ve ever felt like you know better but still get pulled into the same old patterns, please don’t blame your mindset. It’s not that you’re failing — it’s that your body is asking for care. Healing isn’t about outthinking your patterns. It’s about partnering with your body, with your autonomic nervous system in particular, so your mind and body can finally move in the same direction.