Why Do I Feel Like I Am Always Waiting for Something Bad to Happen?

Nervous System & Somatics • May 04, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: The feeling of always waiting for something bad to happen is hypervigilance, a trauma-rooted state in which the nervous system stays in chronic low-grade alert, scanning for threat even when no present danger exists.

The weight of the silent moment

It’s 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and Tanvi is sitting at the kitchen table long after her family has gone to bed. The dishwasher finished its cycle twenty minutes ago. The only sound left is the low hum of the refrigerator and the occasional tick of the ceiling fan. Her laptop is closed, but her phone sits face up next to her chipped Le Creuset mug, screen dark, waiting for a notification she is half hoping will come and half dreading. Her fingers drum on the worn wood surface. Her eyes flick to the microwave clock every few seconds, though she couldn’t tell you what she’s checking for.

She had a good day, objectively. She led a product launch that went off without a hitch. Her team applauded. Her manager sent a one-line email that just said nice work today, and she read it four times. And still, here she is at nearly midnight, chest tight, waiting for something she can’t name.

She knows, intellectually, that nothing immediate threatens her or her family. Her kids are asleep. Her husband is asleep. The doors are locked. But her nervous system doesn’t care what she knows intellectually. It thrums with the conviction that the next disaster is close, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning in an inbox she hasn’t opened yet. This isn’t a fear built on facts. It’s a somatic alarm that has been ringing quietly for years, so quietly she stopped noticing it was on.

She feels like she’s always waiting for something bad to happen.

Tanvi’s late-night vigil isn’t unusual. In my work with driven women, I hear a version of this kitchen-table scene constantly, women who look composed and accomplished from the outside and who are, on the inside, running a low, constant scan for the next threat. There’s a tension between what the mind knows and what the body still expects, and that tension is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside it. The silent moment stretches on, loaded with a dread that has no object.

This feeling tends to sneak in during the stillness of night, or in the gap between one task ending and the next one starting, when the mind finally has room to wander into every “what if.” It tends to show up right then, in fact, because that’s when the body finally has the bandwidth to tell you what it’s been carrying all day.

Understanding why this happens, and learning how to work with it rather than against it, can be a real step toward getting some of your evenings back.

What is anticipatory anxiety and hypervigilance? A clinical definition in plain English

Anticipatory anxiety is the experience of intense worry or dread about a future event, often without clear evidence that the feared outcome will occur. It’s the nervous system’s way of bracing for a threat that may or may not show up. Hypervigilance is the state of heightened sensory sensitivity that goes with it, an exaggerated intensity of scanning and checking behaviors whose whole purpose is threat detection. Put the two together and you get a cycle: the brain and body stay on high alert, scanning the room, the inbox, the relationship, for danger, even when nothing dangerous is actually present.

Here’s the clinical piece, in plain terms first. Your nervous system is running a background program that never got the memo that the danger passed. Think of it like a smoke detector installed in a kitchen that had a real fire once, years ago. The detector still works exactly as designed. It just can’t tell the difference anymore between a real fire and someone making toast. So it goes off at the smell of anything remotely like smoke, a raised voice, an unanswered text, a slow-loading webpage. What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday is you snapping awake at 3 a.m. convinced you forgot something, running through your calendar twice, finding nothing wrong, and still not being able to fall back asleep for another hour.

This state can show up in subtle ways: a racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, trouble concentrating, or an overwhelming sense of dread that doesn’t attach to anything specific. The brain is essentially on guard, anticipating trouble before it arrives, which makes it hard to relax, rest, or feel joy without some part of you bracing for the other shoe.

For many women who are competent, accomplished, and impressive on paper, this can feel contradictory. Outer success paired with inner turmoil doesn’t add up on paper, and yet it’s one of the most common presentations I see. It’s often tied to what I think of as trauma-shaped prediction, the brain’s learned anticipation of threat based on past relational or developmental injuries rather than on anything happening now.

Anticipatory anxiety and hypervigilance are adaptive in the context of real danger. If a child grows up in an unpredictable or unsafe environment, her nervous system learns to constantly scan for threats as a survival strategy, and it works. It keeps her safe. But when that scanning persists into adulthood, into a life that is actually safe, it stops being protective and starts being a source of suffering.

Recognizing these symptoms as nervous system adaptations, not personal failings, is a real first step toward healing. You didn’t build this alarm system on purpose, and you don’t have to argue yourself out of it either.

Nervous system framing: The biology of waiting for disaster

Understanding why you feel like something bad is always coming means looking at how the nervous system processes threat and safety, and it means going a layer deeper than “I’m just an anxious person.”

Attachment and threat detection

Our earliest attachments calibrate the nervous system’s baseline for safety. When childhood environments were unpredictable, neglectful, or emotionally unsafe, the brain learned to expect threat as a default setting rather than an occasional visitor. This early tuning affects the autonomic nervous system, the body’s internal alarm system, and it can leave someone in a chronic state of threat detection decades later.

Picture a child whose caregiver was inconsistently available, warm one evening and shut down or volatile the next. That child’s nervous system learns, fast, to constantly monitor for the smallest signs of danger or abandonment. A tone of voice. A slammed cabinet. The particular quality of silence before a parent walks in the door. This hyper-alertness becomes a way of life. It isn’t dramatic. It’s just how the household runs, so it becomes how the child runs.

None of this is a conscious choice. It’s a deeply ingrained survival strategy that shapes how a person comes to perceive the whole world, as unpredictable, potentially hostile, unsafe by default. Even when the external environment improves dramatically, even when she is thirty-eight and married to someone steady and living in a house with a paid-off mortgage, the nervous system can stay locked in vigilance, braced for a threat that isn’t coming.

The polyvagal perspective

I recently went back and reread Stephen W. Porges, PhD, a researcher at the Kinsey Institute and Indiana University who developed Polyvagal Theory, and I keep returning to how precisely he maps what I watch happen in driven women’s bodies every week (PMID: 11587772 / DOI: 10.1016/S0167-8760(01)00162-3). Porges’s theory explains how the nervous system reads social and environmental cues of safety and danger largely below conscious awareness, and it centers the vagus nerve, the long wandering nerve that helps regulate heart rate and decide whether the body calms down or mobilizes for action.

Here’s the clinical map, translated. According to Polyvagal Theory, the autonomic nervous system runs three main programs:

• Social engagement system (ventral vagal complex): promotes calm, connection, and safety. This is the state where you can hear feedback without flinching and enjoy dinner without scanning the room.
• Mobilization (sympathetic nervous system): activates fight or flight. This is the state behind the racing heart and the snapped response to a slow Wi-Fi connection.
• Immobilization (dorsal vagal complex): triggers freeze or shutdown when threat feels like too much to survive. This is the state behind going numb mid-conversation or staring at an inbox you cannot make yourself open.

Think of these three states like settings on an old thermostat with no smart override, only a dial. When you’re chronically anticipating threat, the dial sticks on mobilization, and that shows up as irritability, a racing pulse, restlessness, the inability to sit through a movie without checking your phone four times. If the threat feels inescapable, the dial can swing to the dorsal vagal complex instead, freeze or shutdown, which looks like numbness or the bone-deep exhaustion that a full night’s sleep doesn’t touch.

In anticipatory anxiety, the dial is stuck in high arousal, unable to settle back to the ventral, connected state, even at dinner with people you love and trust. Which means you can be sitting at your own kitchen table, nothing wrong, phone silent, kids fed and asleep, and your chest is still tight, because the dial hasn’t gotten the message that it’s allowed to rest.

Naming these nervous system states helps reframe anxiety as a physiological pattern rather than a character flaw. It also opens the door to interventions that work with the body’s actual settings instead of arguing with them.

Somatic and procedural memory

These anxious states aren’t just thoughts. They’re encoded in the body as procedural memory, the same kind of memory that lets you ride a bike without thinking about it, except here it’s storing unconscious patterns of muscle tension, breath, and posture that replay old threat. Which means the feeling of “waiting for something bad” is a lived, physical experience, not a mental habit you can simply decide to drop.

You might notice shallow breathing, a clenched jaw, or shoulders creeping toward your ears without ever consciously deciding to hold that tension. Think of it like a muscle that learned a defensive posture so long ago it forgot the posture was optional. These somatic patterns are body memory of past danger, filed away long after the danger itself is gone.

This is why positive thinking alone rarely resolves anxiety like this. The nervous system runs on its own timeline, and healing has to include the body, not just the mind talking to itself. Somatic therapies and mindfulness practices target these embodied memories directly, helping the body learn, viscerally, that it’s allowed to stand down.

Composite vignette: Claudia’s story of success anxiety and somatic alarm

It’s 6:50 on a Wednesday evening in early October, and Claudia is standing in her kitchen still wearing the blazer she put on for a 7 a.m. deposition. She’s 42, a partner at a mid-sized firm, the kind of lawyer junior associates ask to shadow. Her briefcase is open on the counter, the strap worn pale where her hand grips it every day. Her phone buzzes with a calendar reminder for her daughter’s pediatrician appointment tomorrow, an appointment she already confirmed twice, and her stomach drops anyway, hard, like she’s forgotten something she hasn’t actually forgotten.

“I had a good day,” she tells me at our session that Friday, turning her water bottle in her hands, not drinking from it, just turning it. “I won a motion I was worried about. My daughter’s fever broke. Nothing is wrong right now, I want to be really clear about that, nothing is wrong. And I stood in my kitchen last night and I felt like a tripwire. Like something in my chest was strung so tight that if the phone rang one more time I was going to come apart. I don’t understand how I can be fine and not fine in the same five minutes.”

Sitting across from Claudia that Friday, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize in driven women who describe their own competence like a stranger describing someone else’s life. Not sadness exactly. Something closer to grief for a felt sense of safety she has never actually had, not once, not even on the good days.

Claudia’s childhood ran on unpredictability. Her mother cycled through periods of warmth and periods of flat, wordless withdrawal that could last for a week, and Claudia, by age seven or eight, had already learned to read the kitchen for signs before she walked in the door. Tone of the radio. Whether the mail was still on the table. As a child, she was scanning for cues that meant safety or threat long before she had language for either word, and that scanning became the wiring her adult nervous system still runs on, three decades and one law degree later.

What I’ve come to think of as success anxiety is exactly this: the achievements are real, the competence is real, and none of it reaches the part of Claudia that is still, some nights, seven years old at the kitchen door. She can win the motion and still stand in her kitchen unable to enjoy it, because the anticipation of the next catastrophe, her child’s fever spiking back up, a client’s case falling apart, her own spectacular failure, crowds out the five minutes where she might otherwise have felt proud. Claudia’s story is what trauma-shaped prediction looks like on a Wednesday evening in a blazer, in a life that, from the outside, has nothing wrong with it at all.

The interaction of intolerance of uncertainty and trauma-shaped prediction

Anticipatory anxiety often thrives on what researchers call intolerance of uncertainty, which is really just the clinical name for not being able to sit inside the unknown without your whole system trying to solve it. I recently went back to the original paper by Robert Ladouceur, Patrick Gosselin, and Michel J. Dugas, three researchers whose experimental work on worry has shaped how the field understands this pattern, and their finding landed harder than I expected even though I already knew it clinically: intolerance of uncertainty is one of the strongest drivers of worry and anxiety disorders they could isolate in the lab (PMID: 10957827 / DOI: 10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00133-3). Reading it, I kept thinking of the driven women in my practice who cannot leave a decision unmade for even a single evening.

Here’s what that looks like translated out of the journal and into a kitchen. The clinical term is intolerance of uncertainty. The kitchen-table version is a mind that treats every unanswered question like a pot left on a lit stove, something that has to be attended to right now or it will burn the house down. And the Tuesday-afternoon outcome is you, at 9:14 p.m., checking your email for the fourth time in an hour because a client hasn’t responded since 2 p.m., not because anything is actually wrong, but because the not-knowing itself has become unbearable.

When the future feels unpredictable or ambiguous, the brain can spiral into trying to control or predict every outcome, which can amplify anxiety and lead to avoidance behaviors or compulsive checking. This is the same spiral I watched play out for Tanvi, the engineer sitting at her kitchen table in the opening of this piece. Long after her family had gone to bed, the quiet broken only by the hum of the refrigerator, she kept drumming her fingers on the table and running the same three scenarios in her head, not because any of them were likely, but because leaving them unresolved felt more dangerous than staying up until midnight trying to resolve them.

For women shaped by relational trauma, the world is often perceived as unpredictable and unsafe long after it has stopped being either. Their nervous systems learned to predict danger as a survival mechanism, and that prediction habit, so useful once, becomes a chronic pattern of anxiety once the danger is gone but the habit isn’t.

This trauma-shaped prediction often has roots in what the field calls betrayal trauma, meaning the very people or systems meant to protect you were, instead, a source of harm or neglect. That history creates a real dissonance between external competence and internal fear, a split that can feel confusing even to the woman living inside it.

The internal conflict is exhausting to carry: on one hand, striving for control, perfection, or constant preparedness, and on the other, feeling vulnerable, unsafe, and overwhelmed underneath all that striving. Of course it’s exhausting. You’re running two full-time jobs in the same body, the job of performing competence and the job of surviving a threat that technically ended years ago.

Understanding the roots of intolerance of uncertainty can open real pathways for healing, including learning to tolerate ambiguity in small, practiced doses and slowly building trust that safety can hold even when you don’t know what happens next.

Composite vignette: Sapna’s experience of anticipatory anxiety as a nonprofit leader

It’s the second week of March, budget season, and Sapna is standing at her kitchen counter at 6 a.m. still in yesterday’s cardigan, her laptop open next to a mug of coffee that’s gone cold because she hasn’t remembered to drink it. She’s 38, the executive director of a nonprofit she helped build from a two-person operation into a staff of thirty. Her calendar is color-coded within an inch of its life. Her inbox shows zero unread. And still, this morning, like most mornings, she wakes with a gnawing sense that the next crisis is already loading, whether it’s a funding cut, a staff resignation, or a call from her mother, before her feet have even hit the floor.

“I had a good board meeting yesterday,” she tells me, not quite meeting my eyes. “Genuinely good. They approved the budget. Everyone was warm. I got in my car afterward and I just sat there in the parking garage, and I thought, okay, so what’s next, what’s about to go wrong, because it has to be something. I have this countdown clock running in my head all the time and I don’t know how to turn it off. I don’t even remember installing it.”

Listening to Sapna describe her own parking garage, sitting perfectly still in a car she wasn’t yet ready to drive home, I felt the quiet click of recognition I get with so many driven women who lead rooms all day and then can’t settle in their own driveway. She wasn’t being dramatic. She was describing, precisely, what an unresolved threat response feels like from the inside.

Sapna grew up the oldest of three, in a house where her parents’ conflicts became her job to manage by the time she was nine or ten. She’d learn to read her father’s footsteps on the stairs, to know from the particular silence at dinner whether the night would be fine or whether she’d need to get her younger siblings upstairs. This parentification, this early, unchosen job of managing everyone else’s emotional weather, is where I trace the roots of her hypervigilance and her caretaking, both of which now run her nonprofit brilliantly and cost her sleep nightly.

What I’ve come to think of as the countdown clock is this exact pattern: a woman who can manage a funding crisis and a board meeting and a staff conflict without blinking, because her nervous system was trained on exactly this kind of vigilance decades before she had a title for it, and who still cannot sit in a parked car after good news without her body insisting something else is coming. Sapna’s story is what trauma-shaped nervous systems do when they ripple into every part of a life at once, professional, familial, and deeply personal, and it’s why managing the crisis in the room is often so much easier for her than managing the quiet afterward.

Both/And

For women like Tanvi, Claudia, and Sapna, holding both their external achievements and their internal struggles with compassion isn’t optional, it’s the whole point. You can be a competent, driven professional and still have a nervous system wired for chronic threat. It’s the imprint of survival, doing exactly what it was built to do, just decades past its expiration date.

I read psychotherapist Judith Herman‘s Trauma and Recovery years ago in graduate school, and I still go back to it, because she names something I watch in my office nearly every week: trauma survivors often build complex adaptations that let them function, even thrive, in demanding environments while carrying wounds no one else can see. Herman’s framing is why I don’t ask driven women to choose between their competence and their pain. Both are true at once. The goal isn’t to erase anxiety overnight. It’s to build enough relational safety and nervous system regulation that a fuller presence and a steadier baseline become possible.

Claudia’s tripwire feeling and Sapna’s countdown clock are both, in their own way, this exact both/and. Claudia can win the motion and still stand in her kitchen unable to enjoy it, and that isn’t a contradiction to resolve. It’s two true things sitting next to each other. Sapna can run a nonprofit through a funding crisis without flinching and still sit frozen in a parking garage afterward, unable to drive home, and that isn’t a sign that her leadership is fake. It’s a sign that competence and threat response can live in the same body without canceling each other out.

Acknowledging this both/and reality can be genuinely freeing. It invites you to honor your strengths while also tending to your vulnerabilities, and it frees you from the impossible pressure to perform perfectly or “get over” your anxiety on some arbitrary timeline. Practically, this means a few specific things:

• Allowing yourself to feel anxious without judgment or shame. Anxiety is a signal, not a flaw.
• Recognizing that your nervous system’s responses are understandable given your history.
• Creating space for rest and recalibration, even when life feels busy.
• Seeking support that honors your whole experience, including the parts that feel hidden or difficult.

Holding both sides at once, the achievement and the alarm, tends to build more self-compassion than choosing one to believe in. It doesn’t erase the anxiety. It just stops the anxiety from being the only thing that gets to be true about you.

The Systemic Lens

Anticipatory anxiety doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s worth saying that plainly before going further. Family-of-origin dynamics, societal expectations, and cultural narratives about women’s roles all shape how this anxiety takes form in a given woman’s body and calendar.

I recently reread Lisa M. Hooper and Kathryn Doehler’s 2012 work comparing how parentification gets measured across different retrospective tools, and it clarified something I’d been circling clinically for years: women who parent while working in demanding careers often carry the specific weight of parentification, meaning early, unchosen responsibility for a family’s emotional or physical care (PMID: 23066751 / DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2011.00258.x). That early training in vigilance and caretaking, Sapna’s training, essentially, doesn’t stay contained to childhood. It hardwires a persistent readiness for crisis that follows a woman straight into her forties and her corner office.

Picture a young girl who was expected to manage her siblings’ emotions or the household’s logistics before she was old enough to manage her own homework. She often grows into a woman who feels responsible for managing everyone’s wellbeing but her own, which creates a chronic state of alertness alongside a quiet, practiced minimization of her own needs. This is the terrain Claudia and Sapna were both standing on long before either of them held a title.

Cultural norms that glorify “doing it all” while demanding emotional control can isolate women from authentic expression and real relational support, which reinforces the feeling of waiting alone even when a room is full of people. The pressure to appear strong, capable, and composed at all times can discourage the vulnerability that would actually let someone ask for help.

Workplaces that reward constant availability and nonstop productivity tend to make this worse, not better. They can make it harder to even recognize anticipatory anxiety as a pattern rather than simply calling it ambition or a strong work ethic.

Recognizing these systemic factors shifts some of the burden from the individual to the broader context. It also highlights the importance of building supportive communities and challenging cultural narratives that contribute to chronic stress.

Practical Healing/Coaching/Recovery Map: Reclaiming your nervous system and your life

Healing anticipatory anxiety and hypervigilance isn’t a single insight or a single breakthrough session. It’s a slow process of reconnecting your body, mind, and relationships in ways that let the alarm system finally stand down. Here’s a step-by-step map, the one I actually walk through with clients:

1. Build awareness of your nervous system:

Begin by learning to identify sensations of threat (tightness, breath holding, rapid heartbeat) versus safety (ease, openness). Practices like body scanning and somatic mindfulness can help you notice these subtle cues. For example, set aside a few minutes each day to check in with your body from head to toe, observing areas of tension or ease without trying to change them.

1. Build a toolkit of grounding practices:

Simple interventions such as paced breathing (e.g., 4-6 breaths per minute), safe touch (like placing a hand on your heart or gently stroking your forearm), and sensory engagement (noticing colors, textures, or sounds around you) activate the ventral vagal pathways of safety (Porges, 2001).

Try integrating these during moments of anxiety or anticipatory dread. You might also explore grounding exercises such as feeling your feet on the floor or holding a comforting object.

1. Challenge intolerance of uncertainty:

Work with cognitive-behavioral strategies to gently face “what if” thoughts without avoidance. This can include journaling your worries, rating their likelihood, and experimenting with gradual exposure to uncertainty. For example, intentionally delaying checking emails or refraining from seeking reassurance can help retrain your brain’s fear response. Mindfulness meditation can also build acceptance of ambiguity.

1. Develop relational safety:

Seek out trusted connections where you can express vulnerability without judgment. Therapeutic relationships, coaching, or peer support groups are valuable. Sharing your experience can reduce isolation and recalibrate your nervous system toward safety. Consider joining groups focused on trauma recovery or anxiety management, or building friendships that encourage authenticity.

1. Process trauma through integrated therapy:

Approaches like sensorimotor psychotherapy (Ogden & Fisher) and polyvagal-informed modalities address the body-mind connection and help rewire procedural memory. Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help you identify triggers, develop regulation skills, and process past experiences safely. Therapy can also support rewriting your internal narrative from one of threat to one of steadiness.

1. Create boundaries around success anxiety:

Recognize when perfectionism and over-responsibility fuel your anxiety. Coaching frameworks from Mary Beth O’Neill’s Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart can support setting limits compassionately. This might involve delegating tasks, saying no to additional commitments, or redefining your internal standards of success. Boundaries protect your energy and support sustainable wellbeing.

1. Practice compassionate self-talk:

Use affirmations and narrative reframing to counteract internalized shame and catastrophic thinking. For example, remind yourself: “I am doing my best,” “It’s okay to not have all the answers,” or “My feelings are valid and understandable.” Writing or speaking these affirmations regularly can shift your inner dialogue toward kindness.

1. Engage in consistent self-care:

Prioritize sleep hygiene (Riemann et al., 2010; PMID: 19481481 / DOI: 10.1016/j.smrv.2009.04.002), nutrition, and physical activity to stabilize mood and energy. Establish routines that support rest and restoration, such as winding down before bed, eating balanced meals, and incorporating movement you enjoy. Physical health profoundly influences nervous system regulation.

1. Integrate creative and expressive outlets:

Activities like journaling, art, dance, or music can help process emotions nonverbally and reconnect with your body. These outlets offer alternative pathways to express and transform anxiety.

1. Celebrate progress and practice patience:

Healing is nonlinear. Recognize and honor small steps forward. When setbacks occur, treat yourself with the same compassion you would offer a friend.

Weaving these strategies into daily life tends to shift a nervous system, slowly, from one locked in anticipation of threat toward one that can rest, engage, and actually enjoy a Tuesday. It’s not linear and it’s not fast. It’s more like sanding down a groove that took decades to carve.

Claudia still stands in her kitchen some evenings feeling like a tripwire. That hasn’t fully stopped, and I want to be honest about that rather than promise a clean ending. What’s shifted, six months into our work, is that she can now name the feeling out loud within a minute of noticing it, instead of an hour later, and some nights she sets the water bottle down and just breathes instead of pacing. Sapna still sits in that parking garage sometimes. But last month she texted me one line after a hard board meeting: “Sat in the garage for four minutes instead of forty.” Four minutes instead of forty isn’t a cure. It’s a nervous system learning, one Tuesday at a time, that it’s allowed to stand down sooner than it used to.

If you find yourself living in the shadow of “what if,” you’re not alone in it. Many women who carry the weight of responsibility, competence, and care also carry this same silent alarm, often without ever saying so out loud to another person. Healing begins with acknowledgment and a kind of gentle curiosity toward your own inner experience, the same curiosity you’d extend to a friend describing this exact pattern.

Your nervous system has been working hard to protect you, even if the strategy doesn’t serve you anymore. Reclaiming a felt sense of safety is possible, with patience, support, and practice, though it rarely arrives all at once.

I invite you to join the newsletter for insights, tools, and stories that speak to exactly this pattern. You might also be interested in the quiz to explore your nervous system’s patterns, or the Learn page for deeper trauma education. For those ready to go further, the Fixing the Foundations^™ coaching program offers structured support in reclaiming safety and presence.

Your nervous system wants to rest. Your heart wants connection. Together, we can find a way there.

Related Reading and Research

• Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998. PMID: 9635069. DOI: 10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8.
• Porges SW. The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 2001. PMID: 11587772. DOI: 10.1016/S0167-8760(01)00162-3.
• Ladouceur R, Gosselin P, Dugas MJ. Experimental manipulation of intolerance of uncertainty: a study of a theoretical model of worry. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2000. PMID: 10957827. DOI: 10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00133-3.
• Riemann D, Spiegelhalder K, Feige B, et al. The hyperarousal model of insomnia: a review of the concept and its evidence. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2010. PMID: 19481481. DOI: 10.1016/j.smrv.2009.04.002.
• Hooper LM, Doehler K. Assessing family caregiving: a comparison of three retrospective parentification measures. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. 2012. PMID: 23066751. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2011.00258.x.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.

Medical Disclaimer