Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
The tools that reach what words cannot are physical: feet on the floor, a long breath out, pushing hard against a wall, deliberately walking away from something.
Some of what happened is held below language, which is why the most articulate account of it can leave you unchanged. Movement that finishes something is often the useful kind: pushing with your arms when you never got to push, taking steps you could not take then. Build slowly and stay with what you can actually feel rather than going numb. Two minutes is plenty to start.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'We gave him hearing and sight' (Quran 76:2). You were equipped to sense as well as to think, and this is the sensing half of the work.
إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مِن نُّطۡفَةٍ أَمۡشَاجࣲ نَّبۡتَلِيهِ فَجَعَلۡنَٰهُ سَمِيعَۢا بَصِيرًا
We created man from a drop of mingled fluid to put him to the test; We gave him hearing and sight
Qur’an 76:2read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta review of systematic reviews concluded that exercise improves neuropsychiatric and cognitive outcomes across a wide range of mental and substance use disorders, while noting that the strength of the evidence varies considerably by condition. Physical work reaches things that talking does not. General exercise research is not the same as research on completing a defensive movement, which is a much thinner literature.
Ashdown-Franks G, Firth J, Carney R, Carvalho AF, Hallgren M, Koyanagi A, Rosenbaum S, Schuch FB, Smith L, Solmi M, Vancampfort D, Stubbs B. (2020). Exercise as Medicine for Mental and Substance Use Disorders: A Meta-review of the Benefits for Neuropsychiatric and Cognitive Outcomes.. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Actions that never got finished stay live in the body, and doing a version of them now gives them somewhere to go.
When not to
If pushing or moving fast brings on flooding or a blank, stop and do this kind of work with a therapist rather than alone.
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
Digestion runs on the resting side of your nervous system, which is one reason long stress and gut trouble travel together so often.
Feeling worse as things get safer is confusing, and it is common. When the guard finally comes down, whatever it was holding down gets felt.
Neurofeedback reads your brain's electrical activity through sensors on your scalp and turns it into a game. Nothing goes into your head.