When the Nervous System Can’t Find Safety: Why lack of feedback can leave you feeling worse and make change feel unsafe

I started adding fermented foods to my diet to better support my microbiome.

Kefir with breakfast. Sauerkraut at lunchtime. Pomegranate juice alongside meals. It felt like a sensible, low-risk change. I expected I’d notice some improvement fairly quickly. Less bloating. Less flatulence. Better digestion. Something that told me, ‘this was working’.

For the first few weeks, nothing changed. Then I started feeling worse.

I felt more bloated, more uncomfortable, more aware of my digestion rather than less. There was a strong urge to stop. To conclude that this clearly wasn’t right for me and move on to something else or back to how things used to be.

If this pattern sounds familiar, even if the details are different, you’re not alone. It shows up in many areas of change, from health to habits to how we relate to rest, boundaries, or work. And understanding what’s happening here can be the difference between abandoning something too early and staying long enough to let it settle.

Lack of feedback and initially feeling worse does something peculiar to the human system.

When there are no clear visible signs that what you’re doing is having the effect you were looking for – in other words ‘working’, the conscious mind starts scanning. The body starts tightening. The urge to intervene, change course, or abandon what you’ve started can appear quickly, even if nothing has objectively gone wrong.

This response is not irrational. It’s protective.

Because the nervous system is not designed to prioritise outcomes. It is designed to prioritise safety. And safety depends on something very simple: reliable signals.

The nervous system runs on signals

Your nervous system is constantly taking in information and asking, often outside conscious awareness:
Is this safe? Is it predictable? Do I know what comes next?

Feedback helps the system orient. It gives the body something to map. When feedback is present, the system can update. When feedback is missing or ambiguous, the system has to work harder to decide what’s true.

That extra work often shows up as heightened alertness. In nervous system terms, this is called activation. It’s a state where the body becomes more alert, more tense, more ready to respond, even when there’s no immediate threat.

Not because nothing is happening, but because the system is sensing change without being able to confidently categorise it as safe yet.

Why it can feel like nothing is happening, while your body feels a lot

This is where people get confused.

At the mental level we’re taught to look for progress – visible results, clear improvement, reassurance, it so it can feel like nothing is happening yet.

Yet, at the level of physiology, a lot may be happening. You might feel more tired than usual. More bloated. More reactive or emotionally tender. Restless. Unusually sensitive. You might start feeling worse, or even feeling like you’re going backwards.

That was certainly my experience. Mentally, nothing seemed to be changing for weeks. Physically, my system was clearly responding, just not in the way I’d expected or hoped for.

These two experiences can exist at the same time because they’re measuring different things.

The mind is looking for proof.
The nervous system is sensing process.

Change is rarely quiet inside the system

When you make a change, start something new, internal systems begin to reorganise long before anything looks impressive or resolved.

New neural pathways start competing with established ones. The brain is rehearsing new routes while old ones still fire automatically. The body is adjusting to different inputs, different rhythms, different demands. The microbiome adapts. Energy regulation shifts. Sleep and digestion can wobble.

The nervous system knows this. Not as a story, but as sensation.

So when you feel unsettled, it’s rarely because nothing is happening. It’s often because something meaningful is happening and the system has yet to decide if it’s safe.

Safety is the driver, not progress

The nervous system prefers the known.

That’s not because the known is better.

It’s because the known is predictable.

Even familiar stress can be registered as safer than unfamiliar calm.

Early-stage change disrupts patterns the body has learned to rely on. Old cues loosen. New cues are not yet established. You are in an in-between phase where the system is recalibrating but cannot yet relax into the new baseline.

This is why lack of feedback feels unsafe.

It’s not the absence of progress.
It’s the absence of orientation.

Why the urge to act gets so strong

When the system can’t orient, it tends to do one of two things:

• Increase vigilance
• Seek control through action

That action might be useful. Or it might simply be the body trying to reduce uncertainty by returning to what it knows. Action creates movement, and movement provides immediate feedback, even if it doesn’t actually resolve the underlying issue.

This is why people suddenly want to overhaul everything. Add more tools. Switch approaches. Abandon the practice. Find a new plan. Not because the original plan is wrong or not working, but because uncertainty is uncomfortable and action can feel like relief, even when it isn’t coming from discernment.

How modern life makes this harder

Modern culture especially with the use of technology means we are constantly surrounded by feedback loops.

Notifications, metrics, updates, streaks, constant information. Our nervous system have become trained to expect regular signals that confirm where we stand.

So when we make a change that affects internal processes that offer no quick reassurance, the absence can be interpreted as risk. Silence starts to feel like something is wrong. Waiting starts to feel like a mistake. Rather than moving forward, you can start feeling worse.

Not because the body is fragile, but because it has been conditioned to equate feedback with safety.

Supporting the system while change consolidates

In this phase, the goal is not to force confidence. It’s to increase safety cues.

Not motivational safety. Nervous system safety.

For the nervous system, safety is built through consistency and predictability. Repeated signals that say: this is familiar, this is steady, this is not a threat. Consistency allows the system to stop scanning for danger and reduce the need for constant adjustment.

This is why doing less, but doing it consistently, is often far more regulating than trying to optimise or intervene.

In practical terms, that often looks like:

• Keeping the rest of your routines simple and predictable, especially when you’re intentionally changing one thing.Letting other parts of your day, like meals, sleep times, or daily habits, stay familiar helps the nervous system feel anchored rather than overwhelmed.
• Reducing nervous system stimulation where you can. This means fewer things that keep your system on high alert, such as constant notifications, late-night screens, background noise, rushing, multitasking, or doom scrolling – anything that involves consuming information that leaves you feeling wired or agitated.
• Making sure the body has steady access to basics, rather than optimising everything at once. Regular meals, enough protein, hydration, and avoiding long gaps or sharp swings that put extra stress on an already adapting system.
• Choosing grounding and calming forms of movement, not exercise that pushes or stimulates. Things that help you feel more present in your body afterwards, such as walking, slow strength work, stretching, or gentle practices that leave you steadier rather than buzzed.
• Limiting how much you change at once, and resisting the urge to keep tweaking, adding, or switching approaches. Staying with the same change or approach long enough for it to become familiar is what allows the nervous system to relax.

These supports don’t create results. They create the conditions in which the body can stop bracing long enough for change to consolidate and eventually show up as the visible results you’re waiting for.

The tension between waiting and knowing

One of the hardest parts of change is knowing when to wait and when to stop.

Waiting can feel passive, even irresponsible. Especially when feeling worse and reassurance is thin. And consistency can start to feel dangerously close to rigidity if you’re not careful.

But these are not failures of judgment. They are the real tensions of discernment.

Your body is not idle during this phase. It is working hard to support the change you’ve asked of it. Regulating, recalibrating, adapting. Trying to create enough internal stability for something new to take hold without overwhelming the system.

That takes time. Often more time than the conscious mind would like.

This is probably the reason February is infamous for being when most people abandon those new year resolutions. The novelty has worn off. The feedback hasn’t arrived. The discomfort feels louder than the intention. And yet, those who stay steady through this phase often find that by March or April, something has shifted in a way that lasts.

Not because they pushed harder. But because they waited long enough.

Sometimes, waiting a little longer, while supporting the nervous system rather than pressuring it, is all that’s needed.

Not blind persistence. Not stubbornness. But trust in the fact that your body is already doing far more to support your desire to change than you may realise.

Be the person who stays.
Support the system.
Let what’s already in motion show you where it’s going.