Shake It Off: What Nature Teaches Us About Nervous System Reset

Your body is carrying more than you think, and a puppy can prove it. After seven weeks of raising Alfie and trying to decode his signals, I noticed something that changed how I look at stress: the full-body “doggy shake.” Yes, dogs shake to dry off, but they also shake after a stressful moment as a way to reset their nervous system. Once I learned that, I started seeing it everywhere on our walks, especially after sudden city noise and sensory overload. He shakes, then he trots forward. No rumination. No story. Just release. 

That tiny behavior opens up a bigger conversation about nervous system regulation and stress relief. I break down the sympathetic nervous system (the part that ramps you up for danger) and the parasympathetic nervous system (the part that brings you back down). If you have ever felt shaky after a near miss or a scary moment, you have experienced the body’s natural way of discharging stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. The challenge is that modern stress is rarely a short burst followed by safety. Work pressure, hard relationships, caregiving in the sandwich generation, social media, and nonstop news can keep us stuck in high alert, which can show up as headaches, stomach issues, indigestion, and that constant keyed-up feeling. 

We do not need a perfect routine to feel better, but we do need a way to offload stress physically. I share simple, realistic “human resets” you can do in minutes: a brisk walk with music to interrupt rumination, standing up and shaking, a one-song dance break behind a closed door, and a playful technique I used with college students called chicken breathing. It sounds silly, but it is effective active mindfulness because it brings you back into your body and back into the moment. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who’s been carrying too much, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

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Welcome And A Nature Lesson

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So I am struck all the time by the way nature reminds us of what we need. And of course, I talk about plants so often, but I got a different lesson recently, and I still find this fascinating.

New Puppy Life And Overwhelm

Mary 0:20

So y'all know that we got a puppy, and it's been about seven weeks, many, many, many challenges, um, constantly learning and trying to understand him and his needs and managing our overwhelm. But one thing that has been really fascinating is learning his body language. And it reminded me about something. So we learned that when dogs do that shake, you know, the one that starts with their nose and goes the whole way down to their tail, and they'll do it for sure. Like if they're wet, it's how they get the water off. But dogs do that doggy shake quite often.

The Doggy Shake Explained

Mary 1:05

And I never really thought about it. But when we were at one of our puppy classes, our teacher Rebecca talked to us about that being a clue that the dog is kind of resetting their nervous system. I never really thought about it as being useful to them, but it's really kind of a beautiful mechanism because now that we know that, we see how often he does it as a way to actually reset. So let me give you an example that's different than I think what we think about when they just they come out of the bath or they come in from the rain and they do that shake. Because he does this, I'm gonna say, 15 to 20 times a day. And so we will always see it when we take him for a walk because he is still very anxious about the city sounds, the modified engines, which are ridiculous. People that play their music so loud we can hear it inside the house with the doors closed. I mean, those things that really I think kind of cheapen the experience of a city, not just for the people that live there, but people that are visiting. But that's an editorial for another day. Um, but he will often do that after he experiences that noise that I'm guessing hurts his ears, it stresses him out. He'll stop and he'll do that shake before we move on and continue our walk. And he probably does that depending on the day, um what kind of traffic there is. He might do that six times in one walk. So, what that reminded me of is that we actually need the same thing, but we don't do it. So, let me explain what I mean by

Sympathetic Vs Parasympathetic Stress

Mary 2:51

that. So, you may know that the nervous system has a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system. And the sympathetic is what ramps up to help us deal with a stressor. So you're you're scared, uh, you're walking late at night, you have to defend yourself, or um maybe you just almost had a traffic accident. And so if you think about a situation like that where you were scared, you were worried for your safety, if you navigate through that and it turns out it was kind of like a false alarm, your body will often shake. You'll feel short of breath, your heart's pounding. And what is happening is after you're through that stressor and your body has ramped up, which includes elevated heart rate, um, it actually includes your stomach like stopping its digestion because it's trying to take the blood to the places your body needs it to respond. That's a pretty primitive part of this response. But when we are through the stressor and we realize, oh, okay, we're safe, then our body starts to offload that stress it's holding, that cortisol, it tries to calm us down, and that shaking is part of it. And that's what a dog does. And Alfie does this. This is our puppy. Alfie does this just automatically. He doesn't think, oh, I feel so stressed out, I need to do this. And so for us, I think somewhere along the way, we may have lost that automatic response of offloading what our body is holding.

Why Modern Stress Sticks Around

Mary 4:40

And I think one of the things that makes this really difficult is the stress that we have now is quite different than hundreds or thousands of years ago when our whole environment was more primitive. And we did often have to deal with dangers in the environment where we would have to run or we would have to fight. And those situations now are often different. And we have stressors that are chronic, and it may be, you know, the things that we're dealing with at work. There might be a supervisor that is very, very stressful, has high expectations. Um it could simply be our um personal relationships, you know, something where it's chronic. Many of us have situations where we are parenting and we also are now needing to find ways to care for our parents. And so that's sandwich generation idea. But there's a lot of stressors in the world, including social media, including, you know, being bombarded by the news all the time. These are things we can't easily escape from. It's not that loop where the sympathetic nervous system ramps up, we deal with a stressor, and then we de-escalate. We often stay escalated, that our cortisol is surging, we don't have a way to get away from the situation or a way to resolve it. We have a lot of these ongoing issues in our world and our life. So I think we then hold this, and I think we may not always even realize how much it's affecting us through physical things, stomach aches, headaches, indigestion. Um that is Alfie, if you can hear him. I'm gonna try to edit this out, but that is Alfie. Um, so let me get back to my train of thought.

Physical Ways To Offload Stress

Mary 6:46

So I think if we can start to find ways to offload what we're holding, and I think often our mind goes to things like meditation and yoga and mindfulness, those are really important. But let's think about how an animal does that. Let's think about how a dog does that. He literally shakes it off. And I call it his reset now because I see him. I mean, when we're on a walk and he does that, then he trots along again. You know, he has that stressor, the noise, he does his shake and he trots away. So think about ways you can actually offload your stressors physically. And it doesn't have to be a big long thing. It might be a brisk walk. You know, maybe you need to do that a couple times a day at work if you can, maybe five minutes, 10 minutes. Briskly walk if you can listen to music while you do it so you're not ruminating. Um, it might simply be standing up and shaking. It might be that you close your office door or you go in the bathroom at home, and for two or three minutes you dance to a song. And it seems silly, but let's again let's look at nature. What an animal instinctively does to offload that stress and reset and start over is something physical. The thing, one of the things that I used to teach college students in a mindfulness class, and it's funny that we think about this as mindful, but I can say it's mindfulness because we're very much being in our body. We're being in the moment we're trying to push that stress out and focus on moving our body, maybe some moments of joy. If we're taking a walk, looking at what's around us, that is mindfulness. It's just active mindfulness.

Chicken Breathing As Active Mindfulness

Mary 8:37

So we would teach them what's called chicken breathing, where you actually stand with your feet spread apart and you make your arms into like chicken wings, and you pump your arms and you forcefully breathe out and then breathe in through your nose and breathe out through your mouth. And it's silly, but we would tell them, you know, when you're having a long night of studying, take a break, go in the bathroom, and just do some chicken breathing and bend your knees as you're doing it. It's very active, it's very silly. But when you're keyed up and you're holding so much stuff in your body, finding those ways to offload it physically can be a great, great reset. And so that's one of the things that I have learned from Alfie My Puppy is that nature knows instinctively how to process things like stressors. And in our modern society, we often forget that. And so I think it's a great lesson.

Key Takeaway And Sign Off

Mary 9:35

And so that's what was on my mind, and that's what I wanted to share with you. So until next time, stop shrinking and start thriving.