Most mental health podcasts speak at you - offering clinical frameworks from a distance. This show speaks from experience. Katrin Aslani is a registered psychotherapist who spent 16 years inside the corporate pressure cooker before becoming the person who helps others survive it. She doesn’t just understand burnout, ADHD, and chronic stress academically - she navigated them personally, then trained to treat them professionally. Using integrative, somatic, and mind-body approaches, this podcast bridges the gap between what therapy teaches and what real working life demands - practical nervous system tools for Ottawa residents and professionals who are tired of being told to “just breath”
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Your shoulders are up, your jaw is tight, and your brain is saying, “Nothing is wrong.” That disconnect is one of the clearest signs that the nervous system is running the show. We unpack why anxiety is not just a thought pattern, but a full-body experience, and why many people can understand their trauma, ADHD, burnout, or chronic stress and still feel frozen in the same habits and symptoms.
We break nervous system regulation down in plain language, using a simple “security system” lens: your body keeps asking am I safe, even when the threat is an email, conflict, rejection, or uncertainty. You’ll hear how the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems work like a gas pedal and brake pedal, why vacations can feel strangely hard at first, and how an overactive amygdala can turn hypervigilance into a lifestyle. We also make polyvagal theory practical, framing the vagus nerve as the connection that helps your brain and body communicate and move through states without getting stuck.
You’ll leave with tools you can use right away: a body scan check-in, a safety inventory you can build into a personal “nervous system first aid kit,” and a 60-second reset grounding exercise to bring you back to the present. We also connect somatic therapy to ADHD and emotional regulation, including how a feeling wheel can help when you can describe what happened but cannot find the feeling words. We close with how chronic pain can be influenced by long-term activation, and why collaborative care can support real healing across mind and body.
If this resonates, share it with someone who could use a little compassion, and make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and pass the episode along to help more people learn their body’s language.
You can understand your trauma, understand your ADHD, understand your anxiety, and still feel stuck. Because understanding happens in the brain. Healing often requires the body to catch up. Welcome back to the Clear Path Podcast. I'm Katrine, registered psychotherapist, clinic owner of Clear Path Psychotherapy, located in Stittsville, Maine. Executive coach, former banking professional, ADHD woman, burnout survivor, and someone who spent years trying to think my way out of problems that my body had already been trying to solve. In today's episode, we are going to talk about how your body keeps score. If you've ever wondered, why am I anxious when nothing is wrong? Why can't I relax? Why does my body hurt all the time? And why do I feel exhausted even after sleeping? Why do I know what I need to do but can't seem to do it? Well, I hope that this episode is for you. Because today we're diving into what somatic therapy is, why talking about problems isn't always enough, what polyvagal theory actually means, and what happens when your nervous system gets stuck. And practical tools you can start using today to help your brain and body finally get on the same team. Because right now, many people's brains and bodies are operating like two coworkers trapped in a group project who haven't spoken in years, and somebody, somebody has to mediate.
Let's start with a myth. Anxiety is all in your head. False. So wrong, completely false. If anxiety was only in your head, you wouldn't feel it in your chest, shoulders, jaw, stomach, neck, heart, digestive system, but you do. Because anxiety isn't just a thought, it's a full body experience. Think about the last time you were anxious. Did your shoulders creep up toward your ears? Did your stomach twist itself into a pretzel? Did your heart start auditioning for a drum solo? Well, that's your nervous system talking. And the thing about the nervous system is, well, it doesn't just communicate through words, it communicates through sensations, which means your body often knows you're stressed long before your mind even catches
up. All right, I'm going to give you one exercise. It's called the body scan check-in. So pause for a second right now, don't do anything else, and notice. Where are your shoulders? Is your jaw clenched? Are you holding your breath? What is your stomach doing? Most people realize they've been carrying tension all day without actually noticing. Awareness is step one because you can't change what you don't notice.
Now let's talk about the star of today's show. Your nervous system. Imagine your nervous system as a security system for your house. Its only job is to answer one question. Am I safe? That's it. Am I safe? Every second of every day, your nervous system is scanning for safety or danger. The problem, however, it isn't very good at distinguishing between a bear chasing you and a passive-aggressive email from your boss. To your nervous system, a threat is a threat. And if you've experienced any kind of stress, trauma, burnout, or you suffer from ADHD or chronic pain or any type of major life adversity, well, your nervous system may become hypersensitive. Like a smoke detector that starts going off because somebody made
toast. Let's meet the two major players. Think of them as your body's gas pedal and brake pedal. Your sympathetic nervous system, this is your gas pedal, okay? It's your fight, flight, action, energy protection. It helps you run from danger, meet those crazy deadlines, react quickly, problem solve. The sympathetic system isn't bad, it's necessary. The issue is though, when it never turns off. Many people today are living in permanent go mode. Coffee, emails, kids, work, stress, you know what I'm talking about. Your parasympathetic nervous system, though, this is your brake pedal. This is where you rest, digest, you recover, you heal, you connect. And you actually get some sleep and you are able to repair. Your body heals in this state. Your digestive system feels better because it actually is digesting your food. It reduces inflammation, processes emotions more effectively. The problem is many people just don't know how to get there anymore. They're so used to living in stress that calm actually feels really, really uncomfortable. Have you ever taken a vacation and spent the first three days unable to relax? Your nervous system is actually sitting there saying, Hello, why are we resting? Is this a trap? Am I being punked right now? Where's the camera roll? That's not you being bad at vacations. That's your nervous system struggling to trust safety. I used to say that I can't just take a vacation for one week because the first four days would be me actually trying really hard to focus on relaxing. Now that sounds really silly, right? Instead, I would focus my efforts on two-week vacations and actually feel like, well, my shoulders are finally coming down. My brain is not in constant, oh, what should we do next? But rather, I'm so relaxed I could be really here all day. It wasn't until I learned about the nervous system that I finally clued in that, oh, I guess I'm not really supposed to feel that way, and that I was in constant fight or flight. Now, think really hard about how you are on vacations. Do you actually feel relaxed when you come back? Or do you think back at the nice things you did, but it felt like an out-of-body experience?
Now let's talk about one of the smallest but loudest structures in your brain, right here. It's called your amygdala. I lovingly refer to it as the drama queen of your nervous system. Its job, its only job, is protection. Its job is survival, its job is not happiness, and sometimes it's a little over enthusiastic. The amygdala can react to an angry email, conflict, rejection, embarrassment, pain, uncertainty. The problem is that many people's amygdala has been running the show for years, especially if they're experienced ADHD, trauma, burnout, chronic pain, addiction, any kind of medical trauma, or childhood adversities. The amygdala becomes hyper-vigilant. It's always out on the watch, always preparing, always expecting something bad. Exhausting, right? It's funny, I used to pride myself with being the type A and how I always had a plan. B, C, D, E, and so on. Well, I guess the joke was on me, is really the A stood for amygdala, and it was not the badge of pride with always being prepared, but rather a nervous system on overdrive. Sound familiar? I know there are some of you out there. Dig deep because this took me 40 years to figure out. Hopefully, it's not too late for you.
Now let's tackle the big scary therapy term: polyvagal theory. Ooh, don't worry, I'm not about to turn this into a neuroscience lecture. Think of your vagus nerve as the internet cable connecting your brain to your body. It's constantly sending messages back and forth. This is where your vagus nerve starts. The healthier the connection, the better the communication becomes. Your polyvagal theory actually teaches us that our nervous system moves through different states, safe and connected, fight or flight, shut down and collapse. Many people bounce between these states without actually realizing it. The goal isn't to stay calm all the time, the goal is to create flexibility, to move in and out of states without getting stuck.
Now let's do an exercise. This one is called the safety inventory. Okay. Ask yourself what helps me feel safe? A walk, listening to music, petting my pet, a trusted friend, sunshine, movement, laughter. Just create your own list. These become your nervous system first aid kit. This is where everything starts coming together.
Somatic therapy focuses on the relationship between the body and the mind. Traditional therapy often focuses just on thoughts. Somatic therapy includes sensations, breathing, movement, body awareness, and most especially your nervous system regulation. Because here's the truth: you can understand your trauma, understand your ADHD, understand your anxiety, and still feel stuck. Why? Because understanding happens in the brain. Healing often requires the body to catch up. Somatic therapy helps the body process what words alone cannot. Many people think ADHD is only about attention. Well, it's not, it's also about regulation, emotional regulation, stress regulation, your nervous system regulation. Many ADHD clients arrive feeling they're constantly overwhelmed and their nervous system is already overloaded. But somatic approaches help reduce the volume on it, not by forcing this calm, but by teaching the body how to access it. I find that this particularly relevant for my ADHD clients. How many of you actually can articulate what emotions you are feeling when you are in distress? When describing these emotions, are you sure they are actual feeling words? In most of my ADHD cases, the number one correlation I have found is that people with ADHD have a very difficult time with being able to describe what they are actually feeling. They can tell me what they did or the outcome of their experience, but great difficulty in articulating emotion words to associate their experience. They will often say, Well, I don't know. I just know I don't feel like this is right. There are many reasons why this is happening, and your prefrontal lobe, which is right here, and your amygdala have everything to do with it. In later episodes, we will discuss the importance of the prefrontal lobe and neurodivergency.
ADHD people are visual people, and so that means they understand, comprehend, and can relate better when illustrated visually. In these cases, when my clients have a difficult time with creating more self-awareness about what they are experiencing emotionally, I provide them with what we call a feeling wheel. I have provided a link below for you to explore it and utilize it. This is a great tool for clients to recognize and relate to an emotion because it provides a roadmap for the seven primary human emotions. They're called sad, disgusted, angry, fearful, bad, surprised, and happy. With this tool, I connect that feeling you may have in your tummy with an emotions list that could spark deeper awareness. For instance, a client may feel their tummies churning every Sunday. I would ask, what goes through your mind when you think of Sunday? Usually prompts come up for you. Some would say, Well, dreading going back to work for the next day. I would then tell them, okay, use the feeling wheel as a guide to help you narrow down exactly what that feeling in your tummy could be. Someone would say, fearful, insecure, inferior. As you go down the wheel, the word inferior aligns with the primary emotion fear. I would then follow by asking the client, why inferior? They would then relate it to always feeling like they are not good enough at work, and then everyone else gets noticed, but not them. This path to navigating emotions out of clients can be incredibly powerful and one that is tangible for clients to learn and then do independently when feeling off or in distress.
One of the most fascinating things I've learned personally and professionally is how connected chronic pain and the nervous system really are. Pain is real, very real, but pain is also influenced by your nervous system getting activated. When the nervous system feels unsafe for long periods of time, inflammation increases, your muscles tighten, your pain signals become amplified, the body becomes protective, and somatic work helps create conditions where the body feels safe enough to reduce some of that protective response.
Let's move on to the next exercise. This one's called the 60-second reset. Try this. Look around the room. Name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Congratulations, you just helped your nervous system return to the present moment. Simple, free, and it's effective.
At ClearPath, we don't believe healing happens exclusively in your thoughts. Nor do we believe it happens exclusively in your body. It happens in both. Our approach is collaborative because humans are complex. Psychotherapy, EMDR, somatic therapy, ADHD coaching, naturopathy, physiotherapy, osteopathy, nutrition, TCM, these approaches aren't competing, they're collaborating. Because healing isn't about finding one magic answer. It's about helping all parts of you work together. If there's one thing I want you to remember from today's episode, it's this your body isn't betraying you, your anxiety isn't weakness, your exhaustion isn't laziness. Your nervous system, well, it's been doing its best to protect you, even when it's been over-protective, even when it's been exhausting, even when it's gotten stuck, healing begins when we stop fighting our bodies and start listening to them. Because your body has been keeping score, not to punish you, to protect you. And sometimes the path forward begins with simply learning its language.
If today's episode resonated with you, share it with someone whose nervous system could use a little compassion. A friend, a coworker, a parent, a partner, or maybe the person who needs it most is you. Until next time, be kind to your nervous system, listen to your body's wisdom, and remember, you are not a machine. You are a human being. And healing isn't about forcing yourself forward. It's about creating enough safety to finally move forward with yourself. I'm Katrina Aslani, your local therapist. Thanks for listening.
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