When Stillness Feels Like Falling: The Neurobiology of Rest Resistance

IN THIS POST

• When driven women stop, the nervous system—calibrated for threat—can interpret stillness as danger, producing anxiety, dread, or that itchy, falling sensation that chases rest away.
• Polyvagal theory and window-of-tolerance research explain the neurobiology of rest resistance: a hyperaroused system that’s never learned to downregulate safely.
• Rest resistance isn’t a character flaw or a productivity problem—it’s a survival adaptation that made sense in its original context.
• Titrated exposure to stillness, somatic down-regulation practices, and relational healing can gradually teach your nervous system that rest is safe—and eventually, welcome.

HEALING & RECOVERY • June 01, 2025

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The First Day of Vacation (and Why the Panic Sets In)
2. What Is Rest Resistance?
3. The Neuroscience: Polyvagal Theory, Window of Tolerance, and the Hyperaroused Nervous System
4. When Stopping Feels Like Breaking: Camille’s Story
5. How Rest Resistance Shows Up in Driven Women
6. The Productivity That Never Pauses: Dani’s Story
7. Both/And: You Need Rest AND Your Nervous System Has Learned to Treat It as Danger
8. The Systemic Lens: It’s Not Just Personal
9. The Path Forward: Titrated Rest and Building Capacity for Stillness
10. A Note Before You Go
11. FAQ
12. Related Reading

“The most important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves

The First Day of Vacation (and Why the Panic Sets In)

You’ve been counting down to this for months. The alarm is off. The laptop is closed. The out-of-office is set. You’re standing on a balcony—or sitting at a kitchen table with nowhere to be—and the morning stretches open in front of you like a door you’ve been waiting to walk through.

DEFINITION
REST RESISTANCE

Rest resistance is the clinically observed phenomenon in which individuals — particularly those with trauma histories or hypervigilant nervous systems — experience rest, stillness, or unstructured time as threatening rather than restorative. This reflects a nervous system that has become calibrated to equate activity with safety and stillness with vulnerability. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how trauma survivors often find it nearly impossible to be safely still, as the absence of threat in the environment conflicts with the body’s internally maintained threat state.

In plain terms: If you can’t sit still without anxiety creeping in, or feel guilty the moment you stop being productive — that’s not a personality quirk. It’s your nervous system doing its job, just on a setting that was calibrated for an environment that no longer exists.

DEFINITION
HYPERVIGILANCE

Hypervigilance is a state of heightened sensory sensitivity and sustained threat-monitoring in which the nervous system is chronically primed to detect danger. Peter Levine, PhD, somatic therapist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, has described hypervigilance as a trauma response that persists long after the original threat has passed — keeping the body in a perpetual state of low-grade emergency that makes genuine rest neurobiologically impossible until the underlying threat response is discharged.

In plain terms: Hypervigilance isn’t paranoia — it’s an adaptation. If you grew up in an environment where things could turn bad without warning, your nervous system learned to stay alert at all times. The problem is that it often doesn’t know how to turn that alertness off, even when you’re genuinely safe.

And then it hits you.

Not relief. Something else. A low-grade hum that starts behind your sternum and moves up into your throat. Your eyes scan the room without landing anywhere. Your hands reach for your phone before your brain has even decided to. You sit back down, stand back up. You think about the thing you forgot to delegate, the email that’s probably already arrived, the colleague who’ll handle it wrong while you’re gone. The silence feels less like a gift and more like a pressure you can’t name.

By noon on day one of vacation, you’re more anxious than you were at your desk on Friday.

If that sounds familiar—if the moment you stop is the moment you start to fall apart—you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. What you’re experiencing has a name, a neurological architecture, and a history that didn’t begin with this particular vacation. It began much earlier, in the nervous system your early life helped to build.

This post is about why stillness can feel like falling, what’s actually happening in your brain and body when rest triggers dread, and what it genuinely takes to change that pattern.

What Is Rest Resistance?

DEFINITION

Rest Resistance

Rest resistance is the physiological and psychological inability to tolerate stillness—even when the body is exhausted and the mind knows rest is safe. It’s not laziness in reverse. It’s not some ironic character flaw in ambitious people. It’s the predictable output of a nervous system that learned, in its formative years, that downregulation equals vulnerability. For driven women with histories of relational stress or trauma, the body’s alarm system remains switched on even when every external threat has been removed. Stillness, rather than signaling safety, registers as danger. And the body responds accordingly.

Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and developer of Polyvagal Theory, has spent decades mapping how the autonomic nervous system governs our sense of safety and connection. His foundational insight is deceptively simple: the nervous system is always scanning the environment—a process he calls neuroception—and this scanning happens below conscious awareness. You can’t think your way out of it. You can’t logic yourself into feeling safe.

Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, extends this framework into practical clinical application. She describes the nervous system as having a kind of “personal profile”—a set of cues that have been tagged, through experience, as safe or dangerous. For women who grew up in environments where they had to stay alert to survive emotionally, the nervous system’s profile often tags the absence of demand as a warning signal. When nothing’s happening, something must be wrong.

That’s rest resistance, in neurobiological terms. And it’s worth understanding from the inside out, because you can’t heal something you haven’t accurately named.

The Neuroscience: Polyvagal Theory, Window of Tolerance, and the Hyperaroused Nervous System

To understand why stillness can feel like threat, you need a working map of what’s actually happening in the body. Three frameworks are particularly useful: Polyvagal Theory, the window of tolerance, and the concept of the hyperaroused nervous system calibrated for danger.

Polyvagal Theory: The Three States

Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and developer of Polyvagal Theory, describes the autonomic nervous system as having three primary states, each mediated by different neural pathways:

Ventral vagal (safe and social). This is the state we associate with genuine rest, connection, and ease. When you’re in ventral vagal activation, your breath is full, your face is expressive, your digestion works, and you can be present without bracing. It’s the physiological signature of feeling safe.

Sympathetic (mobilization). This is the fight-or-flight state—accelerated heart rate, shallow breathing, scanning for threat, readiness to act. This state is appropriate in genuine emergencies. For many driven women, it’s also the state that masquerades as productivity, ambition, and high performance.

Dorsal vagal (shutdown). When threat feels overwhelming and escape is impossible, the nervous system collapses into a freeze or shutdown state—numbness, disconnection, the flat affect of someone who’s been running on empty so long that they’ve gone hollow.

The critical insight Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, offers is this: transitions between states aren’t always smooth, and for many trauma survivors, the pathway from sympathetic activation to ventral vagal rest is one the nervous system has never reliably traveled. The moment you begin to downregulate—the moment your shoulders start to drop—the system may interpret that loosening as danger and fire the alarm again. You literally can’t land in stillness because your nervous system keeps yanking you back up into vigilance.

What makes Porges’ framework so clinically valuable is the specificity it provides around the vagus nerve itself. The vagus is not a single pathway but a two-part system — a ventral branch that evolved in mammals and governs social engagement, and a dorsal branch that is phylogenetically older and governs immobilization responses. When the ventral vagus is online, we feel connected, regulated, and capable of rest. When it goes offline under perceived threat, we drop into sympathetic mobilization or, further still, into the dorsal shutdown that looks like depression, dissociation, or that particular brand of exhaustion that doesn’t respond to sleep. Understanding this hierarchy of responses explains something important: why you might arrive at a long weekend and feel not rested but flat, empty, or vaguely unwell. That’s not laziness. That may be a dorsal drop — a collapse beneath the level of activation your system had been using to hold itself together.

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Porges also introduced the concept of neuroception to describe the way our nervous systems constantly — and subconsciously — evaluate environmental cues for risk or safety. This scanning process precedes conscious awareness by milliseconds, which is why you can’t simply decide to relax. By the time you’ve consciously registered that you’re tense, your nervous system has already made its assessment and acted on it. In my work with clients, this is one of the most relieving reframes available: the reason you can’t just “choose” to rest isn’t a failure of willpower or intention. It’s biology responding exactly as it was shaped to respond. And biology, unlike willpower, responds to practice, co-regulation, and felt experience — not to insight alone.

The Window of Tolerance

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, developed the concept of the window of tolerance to describe the optimal zone of nervous system arousal within which we can function effectively—thinking clearly, feeling emotions without being overwhelmed by them, and engaging relationally without defensiveness or shutdown.

Outside that window, in either direction, cognitive and emotional processing become impaired. Hyperarousal (above the window) looks like anxiety, racing thoughts, hypervigilance, and an inability to settle. Hypoarousal (below the window) looks like numbness, disconnection, flatness, and a shutdown quality. Many driven women spend most of their time at the upper edge of the window—or above it—because their nervous system was calibrated to stay alert, and their adult environments reward exactly that calibration.

What this means for rest resistance is precise: when you try to move from your habitual hyperaroused state into genuine stillness, you’re not just changing your activity level. You’re asking your nervous system to cross a threshold it may have almost no practice crossing safely. The drop feels vertiginous—like the ground giving way—because, from your nervous system’s perspective, that’s exactly what it is.

The window can be expanded, but it requires a different kind of work than most driven women have been taught to value. It doesn’t expand through discipline or cognitive reframing alone. It expands through repeated, successful experiences of dropping below the activation threshold and finding that nothing catastrophic happens. That’s the core mechanism behind titrated rest — and we’ll get there later in this post.

The Hyperaroused Nervous System Calibrated for Threat

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist, trauma researcher, and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented extensively how early chronic stress reshapes the neural architecture of the developing brain. The amygdala—the brain’s threat-detection center—becomes hyperreactive. The prefrontal cortex, which governs rational appraisal and emotional regulation, becomes less able to override those threat signals. The result is a nervous system that’s essentially stuck in a threat-detection loop, reading neutral or safe inputs as potentially dangerous.

For driven women who grew up in emotionally unpredictable households, who were parentified, who learned that their safety depended on staying one step ahead of a parent’s mood, or who were only valued for their performance—stillness isn’t neutral. Stillness was the gap in which bad things happened. The quiet before the criticism. The moment of letting your guard down right before the ground shifted.

The body remembers this. Even decades later. Even in a perfectly safe apartment on a perfectly safe Sunday morning.

Van der Kolk’s research points to something else worth naming: the role of interoception — our ability to sense what’s happening inside the body — in rest resistance. Many people with chronic trauma histories show impaired interoceptive awareness, meaning they’ve learned to override or dissociate from bodily signals in order to keep functioning. The body says slow down, and the trained response is to push through it. Over time, this disconnect makes genuine rest even harder to access, because the body’s signals that would naturally initiate downregulation have been systematically suppressed. What I see consistently is that healing rest resistance often requires rebuilding a relationship with the body’s interior language before stillness becomes possible.

When Stopping Feels Like Breaking: Camille’s Story

Camille is a 38-year-old management consultant who has, by any conventional measure, built a remarkable life. She travels internationally for work, leads a team of twelve, and maintains a social calendar her friends joke is “aspirationally chaotic.” She books massages she doesn’t take. She plans retreats she postpones. She schedules rest like it’s a meeting, then finds reasons to reschedule.

“I always think I’ll rest when the project’s done,” she tells me. “But then the project’s done, and there’s another one. And honestly? I prefer it. The next project feels like relief. The space in between feels… dangerous, almost.”

How Rest Resistance Shows Up in Driven Women

Rest resistance rarely announces itself as a nervous system problem. What I see consistently in my work with clients is that it shows up wearing other clothes — disguised as ambition, conscientiousness, or just the kind of personality that “doesn’t do well with downtime.” Part of what makes it so hard to address is that the cultural environment for driven women actively rewards it. Busyness is a status symbol. Exhaustion is evidence of commitment. The inability to rest can look, from the outside, like a strength.

Here’s how it actually presents:

The perpetual project queue. There’s always something that needs to happen before rest becomes permissible. One more deliverable, one more errand, one more inbox zero. The finish line moves. What this pattern reflects, clinically, isn’t poor time management — it’s a nervous system that uses the structure of tasks as a regulating scaffold. The tasks aren’t the point. The activation they provide is.

Physical substitution. Many driven women will swap one form of doing for another when the original demand is removed. The work laptop closes, and the house gets cleaned. The cleaning finishes, and there’s an organizational project to tackle. What looks like productivity is often the nervous system’s attempt to maintain a baseline level of stimulation that keeps anxiety at bay. Rest is perpetually one task away.

Rest that doesn’t restore. Sleep happens, but it’s not restorative. Vacations are taken, but anxiety spikes from day one. Weekends pass in a blur of low-grade obligation. Many women in this pattern describe waking up already tired — not from lack of sleep, but from a nervous system that never fully releases its grip. If the body can’t enter ventral vagal regulation, it doesn’t matter how many hours are spent lying down. Restoration requires a nervous system state, not just a behavior.

Guilt and self-criticism during stillness. When rest is attempted, it’s accompanied by a running commentary: I should be doing something. I’m falling behind. Other people aren’t taking breaks like this. This is indulgent. This internal critic isn’t a separate problem from rest resistance — it’s part of the same architecture. Many driven women internalized early messages that their value was conditional on their output. Rest threatens that equation, and the inner critic fires to re-establish control.

Physical symptoms at transitions. A remarkably consistent pattern across clients is the onset of physical illness — headaches, colds, digestive complaints — on the first day or two of a genuine break. This is sometimes called “leisure sickness,” and while the mechanism isn’t entirely settled in the research literature, it’s consistent with what happens when a chronically activated immune system finally gets the signal to relax and begins processing accumulated stress responses all at once. The body, given permission to stop performing, starts doing the maintenance it couldn’t do while the alarm was running.

Difficulty with pleasure that isn’t earned. For women whose early attachment environments conditioned them to earn safety through performance, pleasure that arrives unearned can feel deeply wrong. A spontaneous afternoon off. A gift without occasion. A day with no obligations and no justification. These can trigger not gratitude but a kind of free-floating anxiety that has no obvious source. What’s happening isn’t ingratitude — it’s the nervous system encountering a state it has no template for.

The Productivity That Never Pauses: Dani’s Story

Dani is a 44-year-old executive director at a public health nonprofit. She is thoughtful, analytically sharp, and has spent most of her adult life putting other people’s needs at the center of her work. Last summer, she took her first real vacation in four years — ten days in Portugal with her partner. She planned it meticulously. She looked forward to it for months.

On day three, she texts me: “I can’t stop making mental task lists. I’ve reorganized our whole itinerary twice. My partner wants to sit by the sea and I keep thinking about the grant report that’s due when I get back. I feel like I’m in two places at once.”

What Dani is describing isn’t a failure to be present — it’s a nervous system that never received permission to be anywhere other than on guard. She grew up in a household where her role was to manage the emotional temperature of her parents’ volatile relationship. Stillness, for the child she was, meant something was about to change. The habit of vigilance isn’t something she chose; it’s something she built to survive. And it followed her, quietly, to the coast of Portugal.

Both/And: You Need Rest AND Your Nervous System Has Learned to Treat It as Danger

Here’s the both/and that matters most in this conversation: rest is a biological necessity and your nervous system has genuinely learned to treat it as dangerous. Both of these things are true. The solution isn’t to dismiss one in favor of the other.

The wellness-industrial complex tends to resolve this tension by placing the responsibility entirely on the individual. Just prioritize rest. Just set boundaries. Just say no. The implicit message is that if you’re not resting, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough or chosen correctly. This framing is not only unhelpful — it’s inaccurate. It misses the neurobiological reality that rest resistance isn’t a preference or a habit that can be overridden by intention. It’s a body-based adaptation that took years to form and requires a body-based approach to shift.

At the same time, naming the neurobiological underpinnings isn’t a reason to stop trying. It’s a reason to try differently. If your nervous system has learned that stillness is dangerous, the work isn’t to force yourself into stillness through willpower — that just adds another layer of stress on top of the existing alarm. The work is to gradually, in small enough increments that the system doesn’t panic, introduce your body to the experience of rest that doesn’t end in danger.

You need rest. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. Both of those things can be held without contradiction — and holding them both is, paradoxically, the beginning of change.

The Systemic Lens: It’s Not Just Personal

Rest resistance doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s shaped by individual history, yes — but also by the cultural water we swim in, the systems we operate inside, and the particular pressures that fall on driven women navigating institutions that were not designed with their wellbeing as a priority.

Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and author of Rest Is Resistance, argues that the compulsive inability to rest in American culture is deeply tied to histories of extraction — the message that human value is located in productivity, that rest is a reward rather than a right, and that those who rest without earning it are somehow failing. These aren’t just ideas we encounter in the workplace. For many women, they were transmitted through family systems that modeled exhaustion as love and busyness as virtue. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between cultural messaging and personal experience — both become embodied.

For driven women specifically — particularly women of color, women in male-dominated industries, women who were first-generation strivers — the stakes of being perceived as insufficiently productive are often genuinely high. Rest resistance isn’t just about early nervous system calibration; it’s also a rational response to real structural pressures. The woman who can’t stop working isn’t simply dysregulated. She may be responding to an environment that has made explicit or implicit that her standing is contingent on her output. Addressing rest resistance without acknowledging these realities produces an incomplete and often frustrating conversation.

What this means clinically is that healing rest resistance is never purely an individual project. It happens in relationship — with a therapist, a partner, a community — and it often requires examining not just personal history but the larger systems that have taught the body that stopping is dangerous. The individual work matters enormously. And so does the broader conversation about what kind of culture we’re trying to build — one in which rest is a luxury for the few, or a foundation available to everyone.

The Path Forward: Titrated Rest and Building Capacity for Stillness

Here’s what I want you to hold before we get to specifics: healing rest resistance is not about finding the right meditation app or the right productivity hack that finally makes downtime feel okay. It’s about gradually, systematically expanding your nervous system’s capacity to tolerate states it has learned to treat as threatening. That’s slower work. It’s also more durable work.

Start with Active Rest, Not Stillness

If your nervous system has never safely traveled the path to stillness, asking it to go there directly is like asking someone who’s never swum to jump into deep water. The nervous system needs something to track — some degree of engagement — while it begins to learn that dropping activation doesn’t mean danger.

Active rest looks like: a slow walk without headphones, where your attention can rest on what’s immediately in front of you. Gentle stretching or restorative yoga, where the body has structure but not urgency. Listening to music while lying down with no other task attached. Tending a plant or cooking a simple meal without multitasking. These activities give the nervous system just enough input to stay regulated while also introducing a lower activation state than your usual one. Over time, repeated successful experiences of this gentler state begin to build a neurological pathway toward genuine rest.

Use Co-regulation as a Bridge

One of the most underutilized tools for nervous system regulation is other people. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal framework makes clear that the ventral vagal state — the state of safety and ease — evolved specifically in the context of mammalian social connection. We are wired to regulate through relationship. A calm, attuned presence — whether a therapist, partner, friend, or even a trusted pet — can literally help your nervous system shift states in a way that solitary practices often can’t.

In my work with clients, I see this most clearly in session: the nervous system can access a depth of regulation in the presence of a co-regulating other that it struggles to reach alone. This isn’t weakness — it’s biology. If you’ve been trying to learn to rest in isolation and finding it nearly impossible, co-regulation isn’t a workaround. It’s often the primary pathway.

Work Directly with the Body

Because rest resistance is a body-based phenomenon, body-based interventions tend to be more effective than purely cognitive ones. Extended exhales — breathing out for twice as long as you breathe in — activate the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system and directly signal safety to the body. This isn’t metaphor; it’s physiology. The exhalation phase of the breath cycle is when the heart rate slows and the vagal brake engages.

Somatic grounding practices — feeling the weight of your body against a chair or floor, noticing temperature and texture, orienting slowly to the space around you — help bring the nervous system out of its internal threat loop and into present-moment sensory data that communicates safety. Peter Levine, PhD, somatic therapist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, emphasizes the importance of titrated exposure to body sensations that have been associated with threat — not flooding the system, but making careful contact with what the body holds and allowing it to process in small enough doses that regulation is possible.

Address the Inner Critic Directly

The voice that says you should be doing something during rest is not simply a productivity mindset to be reframed. In many driven women, it’s an internalized early relational experience — a parent’s implicit or explicit message that value is conditional on output. Addressing it cognitively, with affirmations or rational counterarguments, often doesn’t reach far enough into the body’s learned response. What does help is compassionate inquiry: whose voice is that? When did I first learn that stillness was a problem? What was I protecting myself from when I learned to stay in motion?

This kind of work is most effectively done in therapy, particularly in modalities that integrate body awareness — EMDR, IFS (Internal Family Systems), Somatic Experiencing, or polyvagal-informed relational therapy. These approaches can access and begin to update the early experiences that taught the nervous system to treat rest as threat, in ways that conversation alone often can’t reach.

Build in Recovery Time Before You Need It

One of the most practical shifts driven women can make is to begin treating rest proactively rather than reactively. Most of us have learned to rest only when we’re on the verge of collapse — and at that point, what the nervous system actually needs is often more than a weekend can provide. Scheduling smaller, regular doses of downregulation — ten minutes of active rest in the afternoon, one genuinely unscheduled evening per week — begins to normalize the experience of a lower activation state before it becomes associated only with crisis.

This is graduated exposure, not luxury. You’re building the neurological equivalent of a muscle — the capacity to tolerate and eventually welcome states of ease. That muscle grows through repetition, not through occasional grand gestures. A week-long vacation for a nervous system that has never practiced resting in smaller doses is often not restorative. It’s disorienting. The path toward sustainable rest runs through the ordinary week, not around it.

A Note Before You Go

If you’ve read this far and recognized yourself here — in the itchy discomfort of vacation mornings, in the perpetual project queue, in the guilt that arrives the moment you try to stop — I want to say something directly: the capacity to rest is not something you either have or don’t have. It’s something your nervous system either learned or didn’t learn. And what was learned through experience can, with the right support and enough time, be unlearned. Not perfectly, not overnight, and not through willpower alone. But genuinely.

Rest isn’t a reward you haven’t yet earned. It’s a biological need your system has been working hard to protect itself from accessing. The work of healing rest resistance is, at its core, the work of teaching your nervous system — through direct experience, through relationship, through practice — that the ground is actually there when you let yourself land.

That’s slow work. It’s also some of the most important work a driven woman can do. Because a nervous system that can rest is a nervous system that can sustain. And sustained presence — to your work, your relationships, your own life — is worth more than any sprint you can manage on empty.

If you want support in this work, you can learn more about trauma-informed therapy with Annie, explore Fixing the Foundations, or read more about nervous system dysregulation and how it heals.

Related Reading

• The Long Shadow of Childhood Emotional Neglect
• Nervous System Dysregulation: What It Is and How to Heal It
• When Perfectionism Is a Trauma Response
• The Window of Tolerance: A Clinician’s Guide for Driven Women
• Burnout in Driven Women: The Neurobiology Behind the Crash

References

• Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
• Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• Britton, W. B. (2019). Can mindfulness be too much of a good thing? The value of a middle way. Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.12.011
• Woodman, M. (1990). The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women. Inner City Books.
• Hersey, T. (2022). Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer