Somatic exercises to release trauma

Why trauma lives in the body

When something overwhelming happens, your nervous system does what it was built to do: it mobilizes. Heart rate up, muscles braced, attention narrowed — fight or flight. Or, when neither is possible, it does the opposite and shuts down — freeze. These are survival responses, and they’re supposed to be temporary.

Trauma, in the somatic view, is what happens when those responses never get to finish. The event ends, but the body doesn’t fully receive the message. Months or years later, that unfinished business shows up as chronic tension, a jumpy startle response, exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, numbness, or a body that feels like somewhere you’d rather not be. Talking about what happened doesn’t always reach this layer — which is why body-based approaches exist, and why somatic exercises have become so popular.

Five exercises you can try today

These are gentle, widely taught practices drawn from approaches like Somatic Experiencing and polyvagal-informed work. The goal of each is not to relive anything — it’s to give your nervous system small, repeated experiences of settling.

1. 1. Orienting

   Let your eyes wander slowly around the room, without a goal. Let them land on whatever they find — a color, a corner, the light. Take about a minute. Orienting tells the oldest part of your brain what it most wants to know: right now, here, there is no threat. Notice what happens in your breathing when your eyes find something they like.

2. 2. Grounding through your feet

   Sitting or standing, press your feet into the floor — really feel the contact, the temperature, the weight of your body being held. Push slightly and feel your legs engage. Thirty seconds of genuine contact with the ground beats ten minutes of trying to “relax.”

3. 3. The physiological sigh

   Two inhales through the nose — a full one, then a short top-up — followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth. Repeat two or three times. This is one of the fastest known ways to downshift an activated nervous system, and it’s something your body already does on its own after crying.

4. 4. Self-holding

   Place one hand under the opposite arm, and the other hand on the opposite shoulder or upper arm — a self-hug, unhurried. Stay there for a minute or two and let your attention rest on the places being held. Containment tells a scattered system where its edges are.

5. 5. Pendulation

   Find one place in your body that feels neutral or even okay — maybe your hands, maybe your seat in the chair. Rest your attention there. Then, briefly, let it touch a place that feels tense or uneasy — and return to the okay place. Back and forth, gently, always ending at the resourced place. This teaches your system the skill trauma takes away: that activation can rise and come back down.

What exercises can do — and what they can’t

Practiced regularly, exercises like these genuinely help: they build your capacity to notice what’s happening in your body and to settle yourself when activation rises. That skill — self-regulation — is real, learnable, and worth having for life.

What solo exercises rarely do is complete the deeper work. Releasing trauma isn’t mainly a technique problem; it’s a safety problem. The survival responses stuck in your body were shaped in relationship to threat, and they tend to unwind in relationship to safety — with a skilled, attuned person tracking your pace, keeping the work inside what your system can integrate, and lending you their steadiness when yours runs out. That’s called co-regulation, and there is no worksheet for it.

Consider working with a practitioner if:

• exercises consistently leave you flooded, panicky, or more numb than before
• you’re dealing with nightmares, flashbacks, or intrusive memories
• the symptoms are reaching your relationships, sleep, or work
• you’ve been practicing for months and feel stuck at the same place

What working with a somatic practitioner looks like

Sessions look like conversation with more attention to felt experience. A somatic practitioner — trained in approaches like Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, or sensorimotor psychotherapy — helps you notice sensation, work in small doses, and let stuck responses finish at a pace your nervous system can actually use. Many people who found talk therapy helpful-but-incomplete describe this as the missing piece. If the phrase that resonates for you is feeling stuck “on” or stuck “off,” you may also want to read about nervous system regulation therapy.