Therapist Shari B. Kaplan explains how the salience network flags what's urgent in your brain and body. Stress and trauma can push it into overdrive, making it misread everyday cues as emergencies. Therapy aims to calm the system so it can tell real danger from normal stress again.
The salience network is not about networking. It's about parts of the brain that work together to detect what is relevant and what is not relevant internally and externally. And it's constantly taking the temperature between the two as to, is there something urgent I need to be attending to, or is there an emergency I need to be attending to? Now you can see how this could go sideways really fast. So if you have had chronic or traumatic stress, or if you've had illness, injury, or surgeries and your body got stuck because you've had trauma in the past, then the salience network can kind of work on overdrive and might forget that there are things that aren't urgent and important. And it's a helpful thing to be able to get the salience network back on track, to be able to calm the body down and know when something is really urgent and emergent and when it is not.
