Why we shake · Dance · Heal

Why we shake

Why we shake — and what's actually happening in your body 🌿

Most of us were taught to hold very still when things got overwhelming.

Compose yourself. Keep it together. Don't make a scene.

But here's what we now know: the body has a built-in mechanism for discharging stress — and it looks a lot like shaking.

There are actually two kinds of shaking worth knowing about.

Volitional shaking is conscious and chosen. You initiate it — hands first, travelling up through the arms, into the torso, the hips, the whole body. You're in control throughout. You can stop at any moment. This kind of shaking is therapeutic in its own right — it moves accumulated stress hormones, activates the body's natural discharge pathway, and begins to complete stress response cycles that were never finished.

Neurogenic tremor is something different. It's involuntary — the nervous system initiating movement on its own, bypassing the thinking brain entirely. You didn't ask for it. It just happens. Think of a dog after something frightening — not just after a swim, but after something that scared it. That full-body shake it does immediately after? That's neurogenic tremor. Pure biology. The body completing what it started.

Humans do this too — or we're supposed to. We just learned to suppress it.

Volitional shaking is the door. Neurogenic tremor is what can begin to move through it when conditions are right. You start with the conscious shake — and sometimes in the quiet moments that follow, something involuntary begins to emerge. A subtle trembling in the hands or legs. A vibration in the chest that you didn't put there.

That's not something going wrong. That's something finally going right.

Something to sit with:

Have you thought of using shaking before to 'shake something off"?

Never thought of it

Yes, when I have a big day or moment, I deliberately shake it off

I only shake, when I'm cold

I only shake when there is a state of change in my body - it happens naturally.

I've never noticed myself shaking

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Why we shake