When Trauma Disrupts Your Body’s Rhythm, and How to Restore It
Your body is a symphony of rhythms. The steady beating of your heart, the rise and fall of your breath, the cycles of waking and sleeping, all of these biological patterns keep your physical, emotional, and mental processes synchronized.
When these rhythms are intact, you feel balanced, grounded, and connected. But when trauma enters the system, the harmony falters. The effects ripple outward, touching every part of your being.
Trauma and the Nervous System: The Breakdown of Rhythm
Your body’s rhythms are regulated by the nervous system. When it functions optimally, you naturally move between alertness and calm, activity and rest, effort and recovery.
But trauma interrupts this coordination. Dysregulation follows, leaving you feeling disconnected from your body’s innate wisdom and flow.
As Bessel van der Kolk, MD, famously wrote in The Body Keeps the Score:
“Rhythm is essential to the structure of life… Trauma is the ultimate interrupter of rhythm.”
Hyperarousal and Hypoarousal: The Two Survival States
When trauma hijacks your system, you can become stuck in survival mode. Instead of smoothly shifting between activation and rest, your body defaults to extremes:
Hyperarousal (fight/flight): Your sympathetic nervous system is overactive, showing up as racing thoughts, rapid heartbeat, hypervigilance, shallow breathing, and insomnia.
Hypoarousal (freeze/shutdown): The dorsal vagal system dominates, leading to dissociation, numbness, fatigue, and emotional flatness.
Many people swing back and forth between these states, wired one moment, numb the next, never quite reaching the balanced middle ground where true regulation lives.
The Science of Disrupted Rhythm
Trauma alters the body on a deep physiological level:
Brainstem & limbic system: These survival regions become overactive, trapping you in stress cycles.
Heart rate variability (HRV): Trauma reduces HRV, a key marker of resilience and adaptability.
Cortisol cycles: Elevated stress hormones throw off sleep-wake rhythms and repair processes.
Interoception: Your internal sensing system—awareness of hunger, breath, muscle tension, fatigue—often goes offline, leaving you feeling cut off from your body.
This is why trauma survivors often feel “stuck.” Their biology is literally out of rhythm.
Rebuilding Interoception: Your Inner Compass
Take a moment right now. Can you sense your heartbeat? Feel the rhythm of your breath? Notice if your muscles are tense or soft?
This simple act of tuning inward is called interoception. Trauma disrupts it, but somatic practice can rebuild it—like tuning an instrument back to pitch.
Somatic Practices: Medicine for Your Nervous System
One of the most accessible ways to restore rhythm is through your breath. Breath is both automatic and under your control, making it a direct line into your nervous system.
Here are two science-backed practices you can try today:
Coherent Breathing: Slow your breath to 5–6 breaths per minute, keeping inhales and exhales equal in length. This has been shown to regulate HRV and balance your autonomic nervous system.
Extended Exhale Breathing: Inhale for 4 counts, exhale for 6 counts. The longer exhale stimulates your vagus nerve, signaling safety and activating the body’s natural “rest and digest” state.
These are just the beginning. Rhythmic movement, guided interoceptive awareness, and somatic practices all act like medicine for the nervous system—helping you restore flow, balance, and resilience.
An Invitation to Return to Flow
Trauma may have interrupted your rhythms, but your body still remembers how to return to harmony. With practice, you can restore the natural ebb and flow that supports healing, connection, and vitality.
💫 Inside The Collective, we explore somatic teachings like these every month—practices designed to re-regulate your system, rebuild resilience, and return your body to its natural state of flow.
Because healing isn’t about “fixing” what’s broken. It’s about restoring the rhythm you were always meant to live in.
For a brief video on this theme and more related somatic practice, click here!
What bodily rhythms are asking for your attention today?
