I never thought I’d be someone who cried in parking lots. But there I was, thirty-nine years old, sitting in my car outside a coffee shop while rain hammered the windshield, sobbing like I’d just received terrible news.
Except the news wasn’t terrible. Someone had just explained to me what hypervigilance actually meant — not as a diagnosis, but as a perfectly logical response to growing up in a house where you never knew which version of your parent would walk through the door.
The story we tell ourselves about worry
For nearly four decades, I carried “worrier” like a name tag. It was right there in how I introduced my anxieties to people: “I’m just a worrier.” As if it were a personality trait, like being left-handed or preferring tea to coffee.
My mother did the same thing. For thirty years, she managed what I now recognize as undiagnosed anxiety while everyone — including her — dismissed it as “just being a worrier.” I watched her check the stove four times before leaving the house, call to make sure we’d arrived safely even on ten-minute drives, and lie awake running through tomorrow’s possible disasters. This was just who she was, we all agreed. Some people worry more than others.
When I became a clinical psychologist, I thought I’d figured it out. I had the vocabulary now. I could explain attachment styles and trauma responses. I spent twelve years in private practice, and you know what I found?
The same pattern, over and over.
People who’d learned early that their emotional needs were inconvenient to the adults around them, who’d become experts at not having those needs at all. They came to me not with diagnoses but with this persistent sense that something was off, something they couldn’t name.
When unpredictability becomes your baseline
Here’s what nobody told me about growing up in an unpredictable household: your nervous system doesn’t know the danger has passed. It keeps scanning, keeps preparing, keeps trying to get ahead of the next disruption. Mark Travers, a psychologist, puts it simply: “Your brain is wired to detect patterns because predictability creates a sense of safety.”
But what happens when there are no patterns to detect? When Monday’s rules don’t apply on Wednesday? When a parent’s mood depends on variables you can’t see or control? Your nervous system does the only thing it can: it stays on high alert. All the time.
I spent years calling this anxiety. I took the medications, did the breathing exercises, practiced the mindfulness. And those things helped, they did. But they were treating the symptom, not addressing the fact that my entire system had been calibrated for unpredictability. My baseline wasn’t neutral — it was watchful.
The inheritance we don’t talk about
in research, I saw this same calibration in so many clients. Not people with capital-T Trauma, but people whose childhoods looked fine from the outside. Good neighborhoods, family dinners, college funds. But inside those houses, there was a quality of walking on eggshells that shaped everything that came after.
One client described never knowing if her father would laugh at her jokes or tell her she was being disrespectful. Another learned to gauge his mother’s mood by how she closed the car door. These weren’t abusive parents — they were inconsistent ones. They were probably doing their best with their own uncalibrated nervous systems, passing down what had been passed to them.
This is the inheritance we don’t talk about: not just the anxiety or depression that runs in families, but the underlying nervous system patterns that create them. We inherit ways of being in the world before we inherit anything else.
Why knowing doesn’t immediately fix it
After that day in the parking lot, after I finally understood that my “worrying” was actually a finely-tuned threat detection system, I thought everything would change. I had the insight now. I understood the mechanism. Surely that would be enough.
It wasn’t. Knowing that your nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance doesn’t automatically unstick it. I still check my email compulsively when I’m stressed. I still run through worst-case scenarios before bed. The difference is that now I understand what’s happening. Instead of “I’m such a worrier,” it’s “My nervous system is doing what it learned to do to keep me safe.”
This shift might sound small, but it changes everything. When you stop seeing hypervigilance as a character flaw and start seeing it as an adaptation, you can actually work with it instead of against it. You can notice when your system is ramping up and ask: What unpredictability is my body preparing for? What pattern is it trying to detect?
The slow work of recalibration
These days, I live alone in a small apartment in Northeast Portland with a cat named Bowlby (yes, after the attachment theorist — psychologist humor). My life is deliberately predictable in ways that would have felt boring to me ten years ago. Morning coffee at the same time. Writing schedule that rarely varies. Regular meals, regular sleep, regular everything.
This isn’t because I’ve become rigid or fearful of spontaneity. It’s because I’ve learned that my nervous system needs a different kind of input than it got for the first eighteen years of my life. It needs to learn, slowly, that Tuesday will probably look like Monday, that most emails aren’t emergencies, that people’s moods usually have nothing to do with me.
The recalibration is slow. Sometimes I catch myself creating chaos just because the calm feels uncomfortable — picking fights with friends, taking on too many projects, manufacturing deadlines that don’t exist. My nervous system, so used to unpredictability, sometimes doesn’t know what to do with peace.
What this means for all of us
If you recognize yourself in any of this — if you’ve been calling yourself a worrier while your body has been doing exactly what it learned to do to survive — I want you to know that you’re not broken. Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s functioning exactly as it was trained to function in an environment that required constant vigilance.
The work isn’t to stop worrying through force of will. The work is to slowly, patiently teach your system that the danger has passed, that patterns exist now, that you can predict what tomorrow will bring. This takes time. It takes more time than anyone tells you. And that’s okay.
Some days I still feel like that hypervigilant child, scanning for signs of disruption. But more and more, I also feel like someone who understands her own wiring, who can work with it rather than against it. That’s not a cure, but it’s something. It’s perhaps everything.