Releasing Stress When Chronic Pain and Trauma Change How I Move

For a long time, I released stress by moving for a long time.

Long walks.Long hikes.Long bike rides.

Not fast. Not intense. Just long enough for my nervous system to settle into a rhythm and let whatever needed to move, move. I never thought of it as regulation back then. It was just what felt good. What worked.

And then, not so slowly I couldn’t do that.

Foot problems. Back problems. Endometriosis. Surgery. Recovery. Vertigo. Unpredictability.

It wasn’t one thing. It was a pileup. And somewhere along the way, the main way I knew how to get energy out of my body didn’t work.

I didn’t just lose exercise. I lost a pressure valve.

When energy has nowhere to go

Stress doesn’t politely stay in the brain.

It shows up in the body whether we invite it or not. And when I couldn’t move the way I used to, the stress didn’t disappear. It just stayed. It pooled. It poked. It pressed.

I didn’t always notice it right away. Sometimes it showed up as irritability. Sometimes exhaustion. Sometimes sadness that didn’t seem to belong. Sometimes it was just a sense of being weighed down by something I couldn’t name.

The hardest part was not knowing when my body would cooperate.

💡 Check out the Substack post that goes into this topic in more detail: https://mybodycan.substack.com

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