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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
The trouble is that the doing something rarely happens, because you cannot run or shout in the middle of a meeting. The aim is not to stop the surge. It is to let it complete: walk it out afterwards, shake your arms, take the stairs quickly, push against a wall for ten seconds and then let go.
'and remove the burden' (Quran 94:2). Relief is described as a load coming off, which is close to what a finished stress response feels like.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An experimental study found that a single bout of exercise before a psychosocial stressor dampened the cortisol response, with evidence pointing to stronger braking in the stress axis. That is about exercise beforehand rather than movement afterwards, so it is near the idea without being the same thing. It does show that using the body changes what the stress system does.
Zschucke E, Renneberg B, Dimeo F, Wüstenberg T, Ströhle A. (2015). The stress-buffering effect of acute exercise: Evidence for HPA axis negative feedback.. Psychoneuroendocrinology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The system was built to rise, be used and settle, and the settling comes more easily after the using.
Freezing is not something you decided on. It is what was left once the other options had gone.
Keep the explanation short when you offer this to someone. It is a way of breathing that gets your heart to send your brain a message to settle. Would you like to try it?
Getting ill the week after the exams, the deadline or the funeral is not bad luck. It is the pattern.