How Does Your Body Remember Trauma? Plus 5 Ways to Heal

• Feeling easily overwhelmed
• feeling “on edge”
• muscle tension
• chest tightness
• trouble sleeping
• nightmares
• memory issues
• brain fog or trouble focusing
• anxiety and avoidance
• depression
• dissociation

• When we have not fully processed an overwhelming experience, our amygdala — the part of our brain that activates the fight, flight, or freeze response — may become overactive.
• This can increase the level of stress hormones in your body, like cortisol, leading to an underlying feeling of being “on edge” much of the time.
• In the case of traumatic stress, when our amygdala is activated, we have limited access to our frontal lobe — the part of our brain that is involved in executive functioning,”

• Trauma triggers will vary depending on each person.
• Anything reminiscent of your trauma can activate a survival response.
• Even if you don’t remember specific details, your body sure does. The experience gets locked into your body with the associated sights, sounds, and smells.

Trauma triggers can include:

• smells
• sounds
• places or objects
• people or certain characteristics of people
• situations
• emotional states

Trauma has an interesting way of keeping the past “in the now.”

Even if you are not consciously thinking about a traumatic event, our brain has evolved in such a way that, when we are exposed to a trigger, our body will instinctually jump into survival mode