Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
If you start shaking or trembling after a fright, or partway through a difficult conversation, that is usually your body finishing something rather than falling apart.
Animals do it visibly. A creature that has been hunted and got away will shake hard for a while and then walk off as though nothing happened. In people it is usually smaller: chattering teeth, a wobbling leg, a wave of heat through the arms. If the situation is safe enough, let it run rather than clamping down on it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'that weighed so heavily on your back' (Quran 94:3). The weight is described as sitting in the body, so it follows that its leaving would be bodily too.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The animal picture is vivid and the human research is thin. A narrative review of qigong and tai chi, practices built on posture, rhythmic breathing and focus, describes promise for mood regulation while saying plainly that the mechanisms are not established. Claims about shaking sit in about the same place: worth allowing, not demonstrated. Nobody has shown that trembling discharges anything in the way the story suggests.
Yeung A, Chan JSM, Cheung JC, Zou L. (2018). Qigong and Tai-Chi for Mood Regulation.. Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The trembling is leftover energy leaving, and holding it in tends to keep it there.
When not to
Shaking with chest pain, fainting or confusion is a medical matter. Get help rather than waiting it out.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Getting ill the week after the exams, the deadline or the funeral is not bad luck. It is the pattern.
You can tell you are back when there is choice in it again: you can pick which thought to keep hold of, and how to answer what you feel.
Reaching for another person when you are wound up is not a distraction from coping. Contact can turn the alarm down at the source.