Why Do I Feel Unsafe All the Time Now?

Stephen Porges coined the term neuroception to describe the autonomic nervous system's unconscious evaluation of environmental safety. This brainstem function operates below awareness, cataloging exits, scanning faces, assessing proximity. In women with histories of harassment or violence, neuroception becomes calibrated to a higher baseline of threat. The scanner is always on. The system never fully rests.

I find it striking how poorly this mechanism is understood outside of trauma research circles. Your neuroception does not require a conscious threat to activate. It responds to subtle cues: a shift in someone's vocal tone, a shadow in peripheral vision, footsteps matching your pace on an empty street. Porges's polyvagal theory maps how the vagus nerve toggles between states of safety, mobilization, and freeze. Women reporting chronic women's safety concerns are often locked in a mobilization state that was designed for acute danger but has become their default.

The metabolic cost of this is enormous. Chronic sympathetic activation raises cortisol, disrupts sleep architecture, impairs digestion, and compromises immune function. A study by Baker and Greenfield found that 44% of British women aged 16 to 34 avoided walking alone in the dark. Forty-four percent. That is not a handful of anxious individuals. That is nearly half of an entire demographic altering their behavior based on perceived threat. And the perception is grounded in reality. The WHO reports that globally, 1 in 3 women has experienced physical or sexual violence. Your nervous system knows the statistics even if you have never read them.

What frustrates me most about the clinical response to women's safety concerns is the tendency to treat the anxiety as the problem. Prescribe an SSRI. Suggest cognitive restructuring. Challenge the catastrophic thinking. But the thinking is not catastrophic. The threat environment is real. The appropriate clinical response is not to dampen the alarm but to help the nervous system distinguish between acute danger and ambient threat without losing its protective function.

There is another layer to this that rarely gets discussed outside of specialized trauma literature. The body stores threat memories differently from regular memories. Bessel van der Kolk's work on somatic trauma shows that the body can maintain a fear response to situations that the conscious mind has processed and moved past. A woman who was followed home from a bar at 22 may have done years of therapy about it by 38. But her body still tenses when she hears footsteps behind her in a parking garage. That is not unresolved trauma in the traditional sense. That is neuroception doing its job with imperfect data. And women's safety concerns that originate from these somatic memories are real, physiological responses, not anxiety to be thought-challenged away.