After a traumatic experience, your nervous system — namely your brain and nerves — can become flooded with upsetting memories and other emotional turmoil, often leading to a persistent state of distress. Luckily, the human body is resilient and the nervous system can be reset, so to speak, after experiencing trauma or a stressful event.
When something distressing occurs, the nervous system — the epicenter of the body’s messaging network that sends signals back and forth between the brain and different parts of the body to protect itself — can go haywire. Here’s how trauma affects your nervous system and what you can do to reset it.
First, a brief biology lesson.
The human nervous system is comprised of two main parts: the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal cord; it is known as the “leader of the system.” The peripheral nervous system is made of a network of nerves throughout the body and acts as the system’s messengers; it connects the central nervous system to the rest of the body. These systems work together to move your muscles, feel pain when you get hurt, as well as allow you to think and remember things.
The nervous system’s job is to coordinate and regulate bodily activities, taking into account what’s happening externally around you that affects your body as well as what’s happening inside your body.
How Trauma Affects the Nervous System
Within your peripheral nervous system, there is a subsystem called the autonomic nervous system, which regulates your involuntary bodily functions. Your autonomic nervous system is broken down into the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric nervous systems. When someone experiences trauma, the sympathetic nervous system is activated.
“When we’re under threat, our bodies react as if we’re actually in a survival-threatening situation,” explains psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dave Rabin, MD, PhD. “And so, to get out of [the] threat, our bodies have a highly evolved process that they undergo automatically, which is to divert all available resources and fight, flight, or freeze to get us out of a threatening situation.”
Dr. Rabin explains that the sympathetic nervous system activates the heart or lungs, skeletal muscles, amygdala (the fear center of our brain), and other parts of the body that are essential for getting to safety.
Because your body stores trauma, it’s important to pay attention to the daily triggers and stressors you experience physically after a trauma to help your nervous system heal.
“In the short term, we want those systems to engage when we experience a survival threat — like there’s a predator around or there’s a lack of physical safety, or we don’t have enough food, water, air, or shelter,” Rabin says. Once a trauma experience is over and a person is back in a safe place, this system is supposed to turn off and allow the body to return to a recovery state.
However, when the nervous system doesn’t get the message that a threat is over, the person will constantly re-experience trauma as a result, explains Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) consultant Rebecca Kase, LCSW. “When the nervous system is unable to metabolize the experience and move on, it continues to respond to reminders — triggers — of the trauma in the present as if it were still the past,” she says.
As a result, a person can develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, says Anna Deibel, a licensed clinical professional counselor at Grow Therapy. PTSD impacts mental, physical, social, and/or spiritual well-being long after the trauma has taken place. “Some of the most common post-traumatic stress reactions are flashbacks, hypervigilance, sleep disorder, anxiety, and depression,” Deibel tells DailyOM. “A person may also have the inability to accept positive emotions.”
Finally, trauma can change your fundamental way of being in the world. Kate Crawford, a certified trauma-informed breathwork practitioner and physical therapist, adds that a traumatic experience can lead to continuous hypervigilance and a state of stress. “Your ‘known experience’ or baseline level of being can shift,” she explains. “Your nervous system will pick up on more cues from your environment and veer toward seeing the danger in everything in an attempt to keep you safe."
Interested in learning more? Check out Holistic Vagus Nerve Stretches for Immediate Relief.
7 Ways to Reset Your Nervous System Post-Trauma
When you’re stuck in this state of perpetual stress, your nervous system essentially needs to be told that you are no longer under threat and that it’s okay to feel safe again. While nothing can erase a traumatic experience, the following expert-backed actions may help you regain your nervous system’s equilibrium.
1. Diaphragmatic Breathing
Your body’s respiratory system helps bring the nervous system back to a place of stability, and deep belly breaths slow down your heart rate, which will decrease cortisol levels in the body, Crawford explains.
"Whether you have experienced a complex trauma or you have a tendency toward anxious thoughts and urgency, your breathing is going to greatly influence how your body reacts to stressful events in real time,” Crawford explains. Breathing, she says, is an easy, free solution to deactivating the sympathetic nervous system.
She suggests taking a nice, slow, deep breath into your belly (you can place your hands by your sides to feel your stomach expand) through your nose for a count of five, then slowly exhaling through your nose for a count of five. Repeat this five times, aiming for six breath cycles per minute.
2. Somatic Stretching
When you encounter a situation that might pose a threat, the body’s survival mechanism kicks in, prompting a reaction of fight, flight, or freeze. As soon as this survival response is triggered, the body promptly retains these emotions and memories, which, as time passes, can result in feelings of unease and distress.
Somatic stretching can actually help with post-trauma healing, research shows, by fostering mind-body awareness and physically releasing tension from your body. One small study published in July 2013 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism suggests that mindfulness-based stretching may help reduce the intensity of PTSD symptoms, while a review of 16 randomized controlled trials published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022 found that this kind of stretching can improve PTSD symptoms, as well as PTSD-induced anxiety and depression.
Gentle, intentional movements differentiate somatic stretching from just regular stretching or doing yoga. Paying close attention to your body’s sensations during stretching through mindfulness can help release tension and stored emotions.
3. Listening to Your Body
Because your body stores trauma, it’s also important to pay attention to the daily triggers and stressors you experience physically after a trauma to help your nervous system heal.
“Trauma memories, when they are unable to resolve or integrate adaptively, are highly charged and, when activated, can lead to intense emotions, distressing thoughts and images, and even sensations in your body,” Kase says.
While recovering from trauma and making your body more resilient against traumatic memories takes a mixture of skills, behaviors, and practices, Kase says, going into therapy can help. “Therapy can help you to further process the traumatic experience so it doesn’t hijack your body with unpleasant feelings and sensations that take over,” she explains.
If you are in a situation or around people who elicit feelings of fear and frustration or increase your heart rate on a regular basis, think about what changes you need to make and boundaries you need to set in order to allow your nervous system the opportunity to get back to its normal, calm state, Crawford advises. “Remember, your body is never wrong and you have complete control and agency over how you want to feel in it,” she says.
Which boundaries should you start with? Kase says that being protective of your sleep is number one, since sleep lays the foundation for good health. The second thing to do, she advises, is to surround yourself with people who support and respect you. “A common experience after trauma is feeling isolated, alone, and like no one understands you,” she explains. “Some people will help to ease those unpleasant feelings and some people will exacerbate them. Cut out or limit those relationships that bring you stress [or] leave you feeling like something’s wrong with you or that you aren’t good enough.”
4. Breaking the Replay Cycle
After a traumatic event, you may notice your mind replaying the experience over and over, Kase says. While you might think that distracting your brain could diminish the process of accepting and healing from what happened, giving your mind a break from reliving your trauma is actually helpful for resetting your nervous system.
In fact, a study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry in March 2017 found that survivors of motor vehicle accidents had fewer intrusive memories after playing the video game Tetris in the hours immediately following the event than those who did not. Researchers believe that focusing on the game disrupted the brain’s establishment of traumatic memories and therefore made the subjects less likely to continue to replay those memories.
Because so many of us, over the course of our lives, may experience a traumatic event (estimates say up to 70 percent), scientists are continuing to explore other simple, effective ways to disrupt these intrusive thoughts.
5. Seeking Mental Health Counseling
Getting counseling for trauma can also help to reduce the likelihood that said trauma will cause significant issues for you down the line, including suffering from PTSD, Kase says. “Having a professional to talk through the experience with and process it can help you move forward and prevent more serious symptoms from creeping up,” she explains. If wait times are too long to see a provider in person, or you prefer to speak with a therapist from the comfort of your own home, look into telehealth counseling, either through your insurance, your company, or online teletherapy platforms.
While seeking help right after a traumatic event is ideal — the sooner you seek help, the sooner you can manage trauma triggers and symptoms — it’s never too late to find healing.
6. Utilizing Bilateral Stimulation
Bilateral stimulation can help reset your nervous system after trauma, particularly when done through EMDR therapy, which is an evidence-based therapy for trauma that helps the nervous system integrate or metabolize a trauma memory.
Bilateral stimulation is essentially stimuli — typically tactile, visual, or auditory — occuring in a rhythmic left-right pattern. During EMDR, a person is asked by a trained practitioner to think about a traumatic memory and notice feelings and sensations that arise, and then the practitioner adds bilateral stimulation to help ease the intensity of that trauma memory.
“EMDR can be useful for anyone who is struggling with unresolved trauma, no matter if the trauma happened yesterday or two decades ago,” Kase explains. “However, some EMDR protocols can be preventative in nature in that they reduce the likelihood someone will go on to develop depression or PTSD if they receive EMDR in the first few months after a traumatic event.”
Aside from professional EMDR therapy, engaging in bilateral stimulation on your own by running, listening to sound baths that incorporate bilateral stimulation, or engaging in bilateral tapping exercises can help reset your nervous system as well.
7. Maintaining Healthy Routines
After a trauma, it’s normal to feel off, Kase says, adding that it’s also easy to let health habits fall by the wayside. You may experience sleep issues, crave unhealthy foods (or lose your appetite), feel unmotivated, or turn toward substances like drugs or alcohol in an effort to numb out.
“These symptoms are all normal, and for most people, they subside after a period of time,” Kase explains. “Try to stick to your routine in these times and stay hydrated, eat nutritious food, and get sleep as best you can.”
Taking care of your basic needs not only allows your body to feel physically safe and cared for, but research also shows that maintaining your routines in general can be helpful for healing after trauma. A study of Israeli adolescents published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in August 2006 found that a reduced level of routine was a significant predictor of higher post-traumatic stress.
Adding new routines to encourage healing can be beneficial, too. Starting a daily journaling, meditation, or gratitude practice can help you feel more grounded after a challenging time.
While the above strategies can help your nervous system reset after a trauma, Kase adds that one of the most important factors for recovery is having supportive relationships as you go through this post-trauma period. “We know that if you experience something traumatic, but you have a safe person, or people, to turn to, who help you and support you, you are less likely to develop difficult symptoms and challenging diagnoses,” she says.
Staying silent and trying to muscle through on your own will likely only make you feel more isolated. Whether you work with a therapist, confide in a friend, or even find support through a pet, having someone who can help you feel less alone as you recover from trauma can make a significant difference in the process.
