Why Do I Overreact to Small Things?
Overreacting to small things is usually a nervous system response, not a character trait. When a survival response gets interrupted, your body stores it and replays it whenever something resembles the original threat. Somatic tracking helps that stored response finish, which reduces the reaction.
Someone uses a certain tone and your chest locks up.
A text sits unanswered for a few hours and your stomach drops like something's wrong.
A cabinet shuts a little too hard and you're already flooded, before you've had a single thought about it.
Then an hour later you're replaying it. It was nothing. What is wrong with me?
Nothing is wrong with you.
The reaction isn't too big. It's aimed at the wrong moment.
Your body wasn't reacting to the tone, or the text, or the cabinet. It was reacting to a pattern it recognized.
Somewhere earlier in your life, your body started a protective response and never got to finish it. Couldn't fight, couldn't leave, so the response got stopped partway through. It's still there, waiting, and it fires whenever something in the present looks close enough to the original.
So the size of the reaction matches the old thing. Not the new one.
That's not being dramatic or too sensitive. It's an unfinished piece of biology. And unfinished things can be finished.
Your body decides before you do
You've noticed this. You're already reacting before you've decided anything.
That's the actual order of operations, not a failure of self-control. Your nervous system runs a constant background scan for danger that's much faster than thought. Dr. Stephen Porges, whose Polyvagal Theory underpins most body-based trauma work, calls it neuroception.
After trauma, that scanner gets miscalibrated. It starts flagging things that aren't dangerous: a flat expression, a silence that runs a beat too long.
Your reaction made sense based on what your body thought it saw. It just saw wrong.
Why talking about it hasn't fixed it
This is the part that frustrates people most, especially people who've already done years of therapy.
You can know you're safe. Completely, intellectually, no doubt about it. And still feel none of it in your body.
That's not you being bad at therapy. Understanding lands in your thoughts. But if your body is still running the threat program, it keeps producing physical evidence that contradicts what you know. Racing heart. Clenched jaw. And your body's evidence wins, every time.
The body has to shift first. Then the understanding sticks, because your body finally agrees with it.
I say a version of this to almost every client who sits down across from me, and I'll say it here too: you have probably already tried so hard. The effort was never what was missing. I've written more about that in EMDR versus talk therapy.
The five pieces of any experience
Dr. Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, found that every experience is made of five ingredients. He called the SIBAM Model.
When life is fine, all five arrive together and you don't notice the seams. When something overwhelming happens, they come apart, and you're left holding pieces instead of a whole memory.
Here's what each one is, and what it looks like when it gets stuck:
Channel | What it is | What it looks like when it's stuck |
S: Sensation | The raw physical stuff. Heartbeat, breath, temperature, tension, where your limbs are. | Tension with no story attached. A stomach that knots at nothing. Pain your doctor can't find a cause for. |
I: Image | Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, plus the mental pictures that surface on their own. | Someone's perfume, or a certain ringtone, wired straight to your alarm system. A mood that seems to arrive out of nowhere. |
B: Behavior | What your body physically does. Posture, gesture, movements you aren't choosing. | A jaw that's always clenched. A tight chest. Shoulders that never come down. Also the good sign: a real breath arriving on its own, or the urge to open up your posture. |
A: Affect | Emotion, plus the physical charge that comes with it. | Numb and flat, describing awful things in a level voice. Or flooded and sideways over something small. |
M: Meaning | The story you built out of it. | I'm too much. It was my fault. I'm broken. Beliefs that won't budge no matter how much you understand. |
The Sensation row has a name in the research: interoception, your ability to read signals from inside your own body. A paper in Frontiers in Psychology identifies interoception and proprioception as the core working ingredients of Somatic Experiencing. After trauma it tends to break one of two ways, either everything registers as alarming or almost nothing registers at all.
Two more things worth pulling out of that table.
The jaw, the chest, the shoulders are unfinished movements. When you couldn't fight and couldn't run, your body still started the movement. It just got stopped partway, and it stayed in your muscles. The clenched jaw is words you didn't say. The tight chest is a body still braced for impact. And the impulse to stretch and open up your posture is that stopped movement finally finishing, which is what you're actually working toward.
Meaning updates last, not first. You can know none of it was your fault and still not believe it anywhere that counts. That's not failing at therapy. As long as your body is running the threat program, it keeps generating evidence against you. Once the physical state shifts, the story revises on its own, and it holds, because your body stops arguing.
What somatic tracking actually looks like
This is how you work with those five channels instead of just naming them. Three steps, in order.
Step | What happens | Why it matters |
1. Get steady (resourcing) | Find something that feels okay. Feet on the floor, the chair holding you, one slow exhale. | Widens your window of tolerance, the range you can handle without flooding or shutting down. |
2. Small doses (titration) | Work at the edges, never the center. Pieces small enough that you stay present. | Keeps activation below the level that triggers dissociation or panic. |
3. Back and forth
(pendulation)
| Notice the tight spot. Stay a moment. Move attention somewhere neutral. Come back. | Teaches your system it can be in it and get out of it. |
You'll know it's working because it's physical. A breath that arrives on its own. A temperature change. Your stomach gurgling. A slight shake in your hands. The jaw letting go without you telling it to.
Most people stop right there and say, "wait, what just happened."
Curious what this would feel like for you? I offer a free introductory consultation if you want to understand what your nervous system is doing before committing to anything. Schedule a free consultation
Where EMDR fits
EMDR works from the top down. It targets a specific memory and uses bilateral stimulation, like guided eye movements or tapping, to help your brain reprocess it.
Somatic tracking works from the bottom up. It follows what your body is doing right now and doesn't require you to recall or retell anything.
When people ask me what EMDR actually does, I tell them this: it doesn't erase what happened. It strips away the intense emotional sting. The event stays. The charge doesn't.
They fit together at two points in the eight-phase EMDR protocol:
What the protocol asks | Where somatic work comes in | |
Near the start | An image, a belief, an emotion, and where you feel it in your body. That's four of the five SIBAM channels | If you can produce the picture and the belief but honestly feel nothing physically, you're dissociated. Starting eye movements there pushes you further out. |
Near the end | Scan your body for anything left over. | The I know I'm fine but my shoulders don't know it moment. The belief shifted, the bracing didn't. That's what somatic tracking is for. |
Does this actually work?
Fair question, especially if you've already spent money on therapy that didn't do much.
Researchers have put Somatic Experiencing through a controlled trial with people who had PTSD. After 15 weekly sessions, their symptoms improved substantially compared to people who hadn't started yet.
Another study followed 91 people with chronic back pain and PTSD. The ones who added somatic work had fewer PTSD symptoms and less fear of moving their bodies, and that was still true a full year later.
EMDR has a bigger pile of evidence behind it. Researchers reviewed 76 separate studies and found it clearly helps, though results varied a lot from study to study.
Being straight with you: the somatic research is newer and the studies are smaller than what exists for regular talk therapy. It's promising and growing. It isn't finished.
And you're in good company here. CDC data found that roughly two out of three American adults went through something hard enough in childhood to count as an adverse experience. About one in six went through four or more.
If you've been telling yourself your stuff isn't "bad enough" to bother with, that's most people.
Questions people ask
Do I have to talk about what happened? No. This works through what your body is doing now, which makes it usable for things you don't remember, can't put words to, or don't want to relive.
Is this just mindfulness? No. Mindfulness is general noticing. This is aimed at something specific: finding stuck survival energy and helping it finish.
How do I know if I'm dysregulated? Swinging between wired and shut down. Startling easily. Physical symptoms with no medical cause. Exhausted but unable to rest.
How long does it take? Depends what you're carrying. Single incidents move faster than things that went on for years. A therapist can give you a real answer after meeting you.
Ready to stop asking what's wrong with you?
Feeling like you overreact, and not being able to explain why your body does what it does, is one of the most common reasons people come to me. It's also one of the most treatable, once you stop treating it as a personality problem.
My practice is built for people who have already done the talk therapy and still can't get their body to settle.
You don't need to arrive with a clear memory, a diagnosis, or the right words for it. Bringing the question is enough.
Sessions are by secure telehealth, available anywhere in Indiana. No commute and no waiting room, which means you can do this work from a space where your body already feels reasonably safe. That matters more in somatic work than most people expect.
Call (317) 500-4789 or book online.
About the author
Becky VanDenburgh, LCSW, LCAC is the founder of Think Well Live Well Counseling and Telepsychiatry, based in Indianapolis, Indiana and serving clients across the state by telehealth. She is an EMDR Certified Therapist with more than two decades of clinical experience, working with adults on trauma and PTSD, persistent anxiety and depression, and complex developmental trauma. Her approach draws on EMDR, somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, CBT, and DBT.
Indiana Department of Health data found that more than 61% of Hoosier adults report at least one adverse childhood experience.
Educational only, not individual clinical advice. If you're in acute distress, please contact a licensed professional or crisis line.
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