Movement—Physical Activity and Sport

To regain and strengthen stability, any form of movement is helpful. In a traumatic experience, our body mobilizes all its strength to fight or flee, or it freezes or collapses if both are not possible. If our instinctive defense reactions are not carried out or completed and the freezing cannot be released, the enormous activation remains in our body. Consequently, it is obvious that after a traumatic experience, any form of movement and physical activity supports our body to reduce this great activation and, amongst other things, release stress hormones. This is all the more important if “timely restoration of autonomic homeostasis” does not occur and “more and more stress” accumulates in our autonomic nervous system (Levine 2019, p. 40). This is particularly the case with repeated or chronic traumatization. In the long term, this can affect our health and cause various symptoms such as hypertension, arrhythmia or migraine and, among other things, lead to gastrointestinal and autoimmune diseases (McLeay et al. 2017).