The post-text shake: why your body panics after a boundary text
The somatic hangover and how to metabolize courage.
I was in a yoga class where the instructor had us shake our arms and legs for ten straight minutes. She said it was an excellent tool for regulating the vagus nerve. If you watch wild animals, she explained, they’ll often shake right after escaping danger; it’s how they exit fight-or-flight.
I immediately thought of the outdoor cats I grew up with, scrappy little things who’d get into brawls with raccoons or other cats and then vibrate afterward, like they were rebooting.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, I suspect you’re also the kind of person whose nervous system sometimes launches into fight-or-flight over things that aren’t life-threatening.
Recently, a kind coworker, genuinely a gentle soul, asked me out over text. The thought of saying I wasn’t interested made me feel awful. I actually lost sleep over it. Full-blown fight-or-flight.
Even after I sent the text, I couldn’t focus on the book in my lap. Exiting panic isn’t that simple.
When we send a risky, boundary-setting message, our bodies interpret it as danger. Muscles tense, adrenaline spikes, everything prepares for a blow that never comes. If that energy isn’t released, we slide into the freeze phase and that’s its own kind of misery.
We know trauma lives in the body. Maybe part of the solution is to shake it out before it has the chance to settle.
So if you ever see me shaking my arms in public, don’t worry, I’m just honouring my primal urges.
xx
jas🖤
who was your last risky text to?
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If this post regulated your vagus nerve or made you laugh, feel free to shake a few coins my way
Been pondering a boundary message for years and it eats me up like Uroboros 🐍 so I know what I'm doing tonight 🫨
I totally get this, but I would add some nuance, if you don’t mind.
Trauma is like scar tissue. I understand what you’re saying about trauma and shaking it out, but you’re not shaking out the trauma, because that would be like shaking of a scar. You can’t do that, but you can shake off the reaction of pain that you have when that old wound is poked.
I also want to push back a little on the notion that you’re the kind of person who has this kind of response. We’re all that kind of person, which is to say simply human.
We all have reactions and we all get triggered. But we all have different triggers. And certainly some people are more sensitive than others.
Sensitivity is a strength, not a weakness. There’s also a difference between being sensitive and being triggered a lot or having a strong emotional reaction to something. We’re all capable of strong emotional reactions, but we’re not all aware of what’s going on.
Sensitivity is not a hair trigger emotional response. It’s the ability to notice something. There are plenty of people who fly off the handle and they either don’t know what it was that set them off, or they have no interest in looking into it.
Sensitivity allows you to examine what happened and to learn more about it so you can have the potential for a different experience next time rather than flying off the handle and sticking your head back in the sand.