Channeling Our Inner Rooster:

What Anxiety Can Teach Us About Our Internal Alarm System

The Rooster

Meet Gabriel, our farm’s main man!

For all the negative stereotypes surrounding roosters, this handsome guy has been an absolute delight to have around. He has never once turned on his humans, let alone his lovely girls. Gabriel has taught me a lot about these spectacular animals—and lately, I’ve found myself noticing how much of what he does translates into my own personal life.

A rooster serves many roles within his flock, but perhaps one of the most important is that of an alarm system.

Long before alarm clocks, the rooster’s crow signaled the beginning of a new day. Crowing is also part of how he establishes his presence, communicating back and forth with neighboring roosters that this is his turf. But if you spend enough time around chickens, you begin to realize that not every sound means the same thing.

Gabriel has distinctly different calls for food, flock communication, conflict resolution, and—most noticeably—danger. His predator alerts even differ depending on whether the threat is coming from the ground or the sky.

A good rooster watches over his flock, and allows his hens to spend less time vigilantly scanning their environment because somebody else is keeping watch.

But sometimes an alarm system can become overactive.

Some roosters crow excessively or at inappropriate times. Others become overly aggressive—chasing or flogging people, attacking other chickens, harming hens, or creating chaos within the very flock they are supposed to be protecting.

Which raises an interesting question:

What happens when you can no longer trust your own alarm system?

Our Own Alarm System

Humans have an extraordinarily complex internal alarm system of our own: the nervous system—or, for the sake of this conversation, our own internal rooster.

The nervous system is involved in virtually everything we do, both consciously and automatically. Our heartbeat, breathing, movement, sensation, picking up our child, having a conversation with a friend—all depend upon an intricate network carrying information between the brain, spinal cord, and the rest of the body.

It also plays a critical role in how we respond to safety and threat.

When we feel relatively safe, our bodies are able to devote resources toward things like rest, digestion, connection, learning, and everyday life. When the brain and body perceive danger, however, priorities shift. Systems involved in survival take the lead, preparing us to fight, flee, freeze, or otherwise protect ourselves.

And physical danger isn’t the only thing capable of sounding that alarm.

A threatening interaction, an anticipated consequence, a painful memory, conflict with someone important to us, or even the possibility that something might go wrong can activate many of the same physiological processes designed to help us survive immediate danger.

In other words, there may be no bear in the room—and your body can still respond as though your life is in literal danger.

Ideally, once the threat passes, our system recognizes that we are safe again. We regulate, recover, and return to everyday functioning. Along the way, we develop ways of coping with stress. Under good circumstances, those coping strategies help us adapt, recover, and move forward.

But what happens when the alarm doesn’t turn back off?

Why Is the Alarm So Sensitive?!?!

Not everyone has a “Gabriel” running their internal alert system.

Many people live with chronic stress or have experienced traumatic events, attachment disruptions, repeated instability, or circumstances in which being highly alert was once genuinely necessary. Over time, the nervous system can become a bit like an overprotective rooster—quick to sound the alarm and reluctant to stand down.

For someone living with PTSD, complex trauma, developmental trauma, or chronic anxiety, this can create an exhausting disconnect.

Sometimes the reaction is visible: irritability, avoidance, panic, shutting down, or feeling constantly on edge. Other times, a person may appear completely regulated from the outside while internally their body feels like absolute chaos. Their heart is racing. Their chest is tight. Their stomach is turning. Adrenaline seems to surge through every part of their being.

And perhaps most frustrating of all, they may consciously know that they are okay, yet their body is sounding the alarm anyway. This leaves many feeling like they are “broken” and need to be “fixed”. However, an overactive alarm system is often not a broken one. It may be a system that became exceptionally good at protecting under circumstances where vigilance was necessary. The problem comes when yesterday’s protection becomes today’s default.

Knowing vs. Feeling

Last month, I experienced a situation that sent my nervous system into a spiral. Cognitively, I knew I was safe. I could assess the situation, challenge the worst-case scenarios, and recognize that my life was not in danger. I knew what was true.

My body, however, was not receiving the message.

Managing my behavior is a skill I have learned over time. I could keep myself from reacting impulsively, continue functioning, and use the cognitive tools I knew well. But knowing how to manage my behavior did not mean my body was calm. No amount of reasoning seemed able to quiet the alarms once they had been activated.

Even when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was safe, my body needed significantly more time to come back down. And once it did, there was still the exhaustion that followed—the energy spent both surviving the hyperactivation and working so hard to keep my behavior regulated while it was happening.

I was left weary by the realization that, despite all of the work I have done, my nervous system can still easily become intensely alert.

Doing this work on myself is humbling as a therapist. I am not standing somewhere above the people who sit across from me, as though I am elite having mastered everything I ask them to practice. In many ways, I am in the trenches too. Like the rooster watching over the flock, I am passing along tools I have not simply learned about, but have used, wrestled with, and continue to practice in my own life.

My own counselor has been helping me move back and forth between cognitive awareness and somatic experience—between what I know and what I feel.

I knew the situation was not life-threatening. I knew many of the outcomes my alarm system was warning me about were unlikely. Yet my body was responding as though significant danger were present, and that response was affecting nearly every moment of my day.

The alarm bells were not coming from nowhere.

They were responding to patterns my nervous system had learned over a lifetime—patterns that had once helped me anticipate what might come next. My body was not trying to betray me. It was responding to old information as though it were still current.

That distinction has become incredibly important to me:

I can know that I am safe while my body is still learning how to feel safe.

And perhaps healing begins, in part, by learning how to hold both truths at once.

Gabriel’s Lesson to Us All: Healing and Hope

When a rooster becomes overly aggressive or reactive, something has to change. Sometimes patient training and consistent boundaries can help. Sometimes the rooster needs a different environment. And sometimes, on a farm, the reality is that a rooster who cannot safely live within the flock may end up on the dinner table.

Our nervous systems are different. We do not get to rehome them. We cannot simply silence them, replace them, or decide we are finished with them because they have become inconvenient.

And we should not want to.

That alarm system developed for a reason. It has spent years—sometimes a lifetime—trying to protect us with the information it had available. Even when its responses no longer fit the present moment, it is still attempting to do the job it was designed to do.

Healing, then, is less about getting rid of our inner rooster and more about patiently retraining him.

We begin noticing the alarm without automatically obeying it. We learn to ask, “What is happening right now?”, “What do I know to be true?”, “Is there actually a predator in the vicinity”, or “Has something simply reminded my system of a danger it once knew?”

Little by little, through new experiences of safety, healthy relationships, grounding, therapy, and repeated opportunities to respond differently, the nervous system can learn that it does not have to sound the alarm quite so quickly—or quite so loudly.

That process requires patience and grace. There may be days when the rooster still sounds off at absolutely nothing. There may be moments when an old response arrives before we have time to stop it. That does not erase the work already done. A nervous system that spent years learning vigilance will not necessarily learn safety overnight. We can acknowledge that it has been doing the best it knows how to do while still teaching it that there may now be another way.

Perhaps that is one reason the rooster carries such meaningful imagery within the Christian story.

Scripture uses the rooster as a marker of watchfulness and awakening. Its crow is forever connected to Peter’s failure—but also to what came afterward. Peter was not abandoned in the moment his weakness was exposed. There was repentance, restoration, and eventually a renewed calling.

The rooster does not only announce that something has gone wrong; it announces the morning. A new day comes whether yesterday went beautifully or terribly. God’s mercies are new again. We are called to remain watchful, but we are not called to live consumed by fear.

Maybe healing looks something like that: learning to remain awake without remaining afraid; learning to honor the alarm without allowing it to govern every decision; learning, with patience, grace, and repeated experiences of safety, that vigilance and peace do not have to be opposites.

We will always have our inner rooster, but over time, we can teach him that not every rustle in the grass means the fox has returned.

And when he forgets?

We begin again.