Bottom-Up & Top-Down

Feeling better means working with both the body and the mind. You can't fix one and leave the other alone, because each one keeps setting the other off.

Our early experiences may create tension in our body. A child who often felt unsafe can grow into an adult whose shoulders brace, jaw tightens, and breath holds without them noticing. The body wakes up tense, as if to say: There IS danger. I just need to find it.

Our thinking creates tension in the body too. A thought like "I'm going to mess this up" is enough to set off a racing heart and a knot in the stomach.

The brain reads those sensations as proof. "My chest is tight, so something must be wrong." That makes the anxious thinking louder, which makes the body tighter. Round and round it goes. This is the feedback loop, and it's why so many of us feel stuck on high alert.

Most therapy addresses this loop in one of two ways:

• Bottom-up: Somatic therapies start with calming the body, the nervous system, and the feelings we hold physically in order to calm our thoughts.
• Top-down: Talk therapies start with the mind (our thoughts, beliefs and habits) to calm our bodies.

You can step into the loop from either end. You get the most lasting change when you work with both.

Bottom-up: starting with the body

Bottom-up calms the nervous system first, so the thinking mind has room to work. When we're too activated (anxious, wired) or too shut down (numb, foggy), reasoning with ourselves rarely helps. We're outside our window of tolerance, and the body needs to come back first.

Why the body holds our history

Our brains are prediction machines. If we spent early childhood in protective mode, we learned to predict that danger is there, not that it might be. The body stays braced, and the brain goes looking for the danger. It always finds some, in our relationships, our work, the world or ourselves.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the body as the scorecard. A tight chest or a knot in the stomach is a sensation first. Our mind then gives it meaning, and emotions are the meaning we give to those body feelings. Change the physical state, and we open up more options for how a trigger plays out.

As Peter Levine puts it, trauma is not what happened to us. It's what we hold inside because it happened without an empathic witness.

What working somatically looks like

Somatic means "of the body". In practice, bottom-up work can include:

• Breath: slow out-breaths, longer than the in-breath, which signal safety through the vagus nerve
• Grounding: feeling your feet on the floor and the support beneath you, and noticing how now is different from then
• Tracking sensations: finding where an emotion lives in the body and staying with the sensation rather than the story. It means noticing rather than avoiding or trying to stop it
• Movement: any movement counts; our muscles release chemicals that help us cope with stress
• Deep rest: practices like yoga nidra or NSDR, where even 10 minutes can restore focus and energy

Pure somatic work teaches us to separate our thoughts from our body sensations. That interrupts the body-to-brain side of the loop. It's a brilliant start. But on its own, it can leave the beliefs that keep setting the alarm off untouched.

Top-down: working with thoughts, beliefs and reactions

Top-down work changes the beliefs and habits that keep setting off the body's alarm. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the best-known top-down approach. It looks at our thinking patterns, our core beliefs, and our reactions: our ways of being and ways of doing.

Beliefs act like a filter

A core belief filters how we see reality. Say I believe "I'm not good enough". Evidence that fits gets noticed, saved and remembered. Evidence against it gets dismissed and forgotten. That's confirmation bias, and we all do it.

Here's how it plays out in the body. A colleague doesn't reply to my message. The belief switches on: I'm not good enough. Now the moment feels like a threat to my social safety. My jaw tightens, I hold my breath, my shoulders brace, and the inner voice says, "Idiot!"

The thought set off the body. The body then "confirms" the thought.

What CBT helps us do

• Notice the pattern: when I'm triggered, what emotions come up, what happens in my body, and who or what set it off
• Spot thinking traps: labelling (I'm a failure), overgeneralising (I always get it wrong), catastrophising, and all-or-nothing thinking
• Test our predictions: anxiety predicts the worst case, so we check what's actually likely
• Accept reality as it is: we stop shaming ourselves for how things should be and put that energy into what we can change
• Change what we do: we try new behaviours, because what we really want is often on the other side of the hard thing

CBT also gives us an outside view of our own minds, a step back from the story. But if the body is still in full alarm, it's very hard to step back. That's why top-down work goes so much further alongside bottom-up work.

IFS: where the body meets our beliefs

Internal Family Systems (IFS) links body and mind directly. It sees us as made up of many parts, each with its own feelings, beliefs and body sensations. The anxious part might live as a flutter in the stomach. The critical part might show up as a tight chest and a harsh voice.

Our parts aren't standing in our way. Protective parts are standing up for us, in a confused way, using strategies that once kept us safe. Other parts carry old wounds like sadness, shame or the belief "I'm too much".

How IFS works with the body and the mind

1. Notice: something stirs, an emotion, an urge, a familiar thought
2. Locate: where do you feel this part in your body?
3. Separate: step back a little; this is a part of you, not all of you
4. Relate: get curious about it, learn it's underlying needs, and create a sense of safety so you can respond from a calmer, more capable place.

This is bottom-up and top-down at the same time. We find the part through the body sensation, then listen for the belief and fear it carries. When the part feels understood, both the body and the belief can soften. We basically learn to self-sooth is the moments that matter most.

I have a helper part myself. She wants to fix things for me and for everyone, and she's sure she's right. Sometimes she is, and sometimes she's totally wrong. When I notice her, I gently remind her that we want to get it right, not be right, and she can relax.


In IFS, we strengthen our capacity to be curious, compassionate, and clear. We are not the emotion or the part. We're the whole.

How combining both works

Working from both ends breaks the loop in two places at once, which is why this approach can meet so many different struggles. Settling the body gives the mind room to think. Changing a belief means the body stops getting fresh alarm signals.