About the Author: Steve Elfrink is a psychedelic somatic therapist and founder of OmTerra, offering trauma-informed, body-centered healing in Oregon.
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They’re Autonomic Nervous System States, and Psychedelics Reveal Them.

Most people think about anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder as psychological problems or chemical imbalances. But when you look at the body’s threat physiology, a different picture emerges:

These states are biological survival responses, n , ot personal failures.

Understanding this is critical for anyone exploring psychedelic-assisted therapy, because psychedelics reveal what the nervous system has been protecting you from.

And unless you understand that map, you can easily misinterpret what’s happening inside you.

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The Five Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) States

— A Complete Map of Stress, Overwhelm, and Shutdown**

Whenever you feel threatened, overwhelmed, or unsafe — whether physically or emotionally — your body moves through five predictable states.

To better understand this, here they are:

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STATE 0 — Homeostasis

Calm, connected, present, embodied. Think of being on a beach in Maui at sunset.

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STATE 1 — Mild Stress

The slight tightening you feel when:

• something feels “off”
• a conflict is brewing
• someone’s tone shifts
• you sense tension

Most people live here more than they realize.

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STATE 2 — Fight–Flight (Anxiety)

This is the body mobilizing:

• racing thoughts
• panic
• restlessness
• hypervigilance
• tightening
• a sense of urgency

This isn’t “anxiety disorder.”
It’s the nervous system trying to solve something.

The important part:

State 2 cannot be maintained indefinitely.

When the system can’t resolve the stressor, it collapses downward.

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Overwhelm of the Nervous System if State 2 continues.

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STATE 3 — Dissociative Collapse (What We Call Depression)

When fight–flight isn’t working, the body releases endogenous opioids — a built-in numbing system.

This produces:

• emotional flatness
• heaviness
• shutdown
• fatigue
• loss of motivation
• “I don’t care”
• reduced sensation
• hopeless/endless
• suicidality (as solution)

This isn’t sadness.
It was initialwas orignaly a protective freeze state.

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STATE 4 — Deep Dissociation (Emotional Anesthesia)

If the system feels truly overwhelmed or trapped:

• feelings disappear
• sensations go quiet
• the world feels distant
• the body feels sedated
• you appear “fine” on the outside

This state often develops early in life and becomes a default way of coping.

It’s not calm — it’s shutdown.

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Why People Oscillate Between Anxiety and Depression

A very common pattern looks like this:

State 2 → State 3 → State 2 → State 3

The nervous system:

1. activates to solve the problem
2. becomes overwhelmed
3. collapses
4. partially recovers
5. activates again

This explains why so many people say:

• “I feel anxious in the morning and totally numb by afternoon.”
• “I swing between overload and shutdown.”
• “I feel like a switch flips inside me.”

Nothing is wrong with you.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do — but without a way to finish the cycle.

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Understanding Bipolar Through the ANS Lens

The bipolar pattern makes much more sense when viewed through autonomic states:

• “Mania” = prolonged State 2 activation
• “Depression” = State 3 or State 4 collapse

The swings are not random.

They reflect:

An overwhelmed system trying to mobilize… then giving out.

When trauma or chronic stress is unprocessed, the pendulum swings harder.

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Why Psychedelics Can Make These States More Obvious — or More Intense

Psychedelics temporarily quiet the brain’s “manager,” the Default Mode Network (DMN).

This allows the deeper layers of the nervous system—sensation, emotion, and implicit memory—to emerge.

If someone’s system is already carrying:

• unprocessed activation (State 2)
• collapse (State 3)
• dissociation (State 4)

…psychedelics don’t cause the experience —
they expose it.

This can be:

• deeply healing
  or
• deeply destabilizing

depending on the person’s baseline state and the support they have.

This is where trauma-informed, body-based approaches matter.

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Why Body-Based Processing Helps Where Talk Therapy Doesn’t

Talk therapy often cannot reach:

• dissociation
• shutdown
• preverbal trauma
• autonomic cycling
• implicit memory
• early attachment wounds

These patterns do not live in the thinking brain.
They live in sensation, reflexes, and physiology.

Body-led approaches (including somatic therapy, containment, selective inhibition, and psycholytic methods like low-dose ketamine) help because they work with:

• involuntary impulses
• stored survival energy
• the freeze/thaw cycle
• waves of activation
• the completion of defensive responses

When the body gets to finish what it couldn’t finish earlier in life, symptoms shift naturally.

Anxiety decreases.
Shutdown lifts.
Oscillation stabilizes.
Presence returns.

Not because someone “learned a new thought,”
but because the body finally completed a biological loop.

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A More Compassionate Paradigm for Psychedelic Work

The psychedelic field is maturing.
And with that comes a deeper responsibility:
We must stop interpreting difficult states as psychological failure — and start understanding them as autonomic expressions.

A trauma-informed approach to psychedelic therapy recognizes:

• “Anxiety” is mobilization.
• “Depression” is collapse.
• “Shutting down” is dissociation.
• “Bipolar” is cycling between threat states.
• “Bad trips” often reflect dissociation meeting activation.
• “Breakthroughs” often occur when a trapped impulse completes.

When we understand these states, we can work with them — not fear them.

This is the direction the field is heading.

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The Takeaway: Your Body Isn’t Broken — It’s Protecting You

The nervous system isn’t malfunctioning.
It’s doing what it learned to do when things were overwhelming.

That may not feel good.
It may not feel adaptive.
But it is internally coherent.

And that means healing is possible — not by fighting your symptoms, but by understanding the biology underneath them.

Psychedelics can illuminate this terrain.
Somatic approaches can help integrate it.
And the combination, when trauma-informed, can create transformation that finally makes sense.

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