Issue 12: Are Your Muscles Are Stuck In Fight-Flight-Freeze But Your Brain Knows Your Are Safe
Yes, it’s common for muscles to stay locked in fight, flight, or freeze states long after the danger has passed
Even when your logical brain knows you’re safe, your body may remain tense, rigid, or strangely numb. This happens when the autonomic nervous system keeps running an old survival script shaped by past stress or trauma. Here's the thing, your mind updates quickly but your "body keeps the score" and so, holds onto that tension for dear life.
There is often a quiet disconnect between brain and body: your mind recognizes there is no immediate threat, yet your nervous system continues to fire survival signals. Muscles brace, breath becomes shallow, sensation fades into numbness. In freeze states the body may feel either rigidly tense or completely collapsed, an involuntary response to overwhelm that leaves you feeling stuck.
Over time this can become a kind of functional freeze: you move through your day, but internally feel disconnected or exhausted. A tight jaw, lifted shoulders, restricted breath, racing heart, or that spaced out sensation are not random symptoms, they are the physiology of protection still at work.
Correlation Between Fight-Flight-Freeze States & Chronic Muscle Tension
Muscles only know how to contract– they generate force by shortening their fibers so even what we call “releasing” is simply a controlled, reduced contraction rather than an active lengthening. Muscles contract so that your bones can move in order to help you survive. Often our movements are unconscious and automatic. Like a remote control dial, the nervous system can turn up or turn down the volume. Your brain decides what level of muscle tension you’ve been holding for survival and then maintains that level. While this built in mechanism may have helped you through challenging life experiences, once the threat is no longer present we often get "stuck" in Fight-Flight-Freeze.
Think of your nervous system as your best friend– they got your back. Your amazing nervous system has learned that to keep you safe it must sustain a constant level of muscle contraction to be ready to protect you at all times. Unconscious tension becomes involuntary chronic tension that no longer serves you or your posture. Longterm, your health on many levels suffers.
Years of Old Skool Stretching Trains Your Brain to Keep Muscles Tight
Years of conventional yoga stretch classes cause repeated signals from brain to muscle to keep muscles tight. When a signal is repeated enough times muscle memory takes over in attempts to help your brain process other tasks that require higher thinking. Then you stop being aware of the 24/7 gripping because your muscles are desensitized to the sensation of tension. This is called sensory motor amnesia, or SMA.
SMA creates musculoskeletal compensations. You don't even notice your forward head posture, contracted psoas, tilted pelvis, sway back, uneven shoulders, twisted torso. Additionally, this motor control loss causes imbalances along the myofascial meridians that balance forces of tensegrity supporting effort and ease (sithira/suhka) of movement. (Bilateral Somatic Movement for the Myofascial Meridians coming soon). You feel tired and stiff so you return to yoga classes that pull muscles instead of releasing them. You feel relief for 24 hours until they tighten up again. Soon– you’re stuck.
Years Of Muscle Bracing Trains Your Nervous System To Stay On Guard
Chronically tense muscles not only exhaust the musculoskeletal system but living in a constant state of low-level stress can negatively impact the cardiovascular system. Persistent muscle tension triggers physiological responses that elevate blood pressure, strain blood vessels, and increase the risk of heart disease.
The good news is, pandiculation techniques work to release muscle bracing and reduce SMA! Voluntary contract and release exercises send messages to your brain that muscles are tense– and only when the brain is conscious of a muscle contraction can it relay messages to a muscle that it is in fact safe, to relax. A return to homeostasis restores movement choices. When muscles are tight you have very few movement options (as you may have noticed trying to perform certain yoga poses lol). Released muscles are ready for action, are stronger, more flexible, increase movement options, and help you regain autonomy. My yoga and somatic movement practices help your muscles to return to a more normal resting base level of tension. They tease your nervous system into rewiring the gamma feedback loop that is literally, stuck in a loop, with a battalion continuously firing neurons that keep you and your posture... stuck. We'll talk more about fight-flight-freeze reflexes and posture below!
The Lizard Brain & Polyvagal Theory
Your "Lizard Brain" is your Body Guard-- It's main job is your survival
In popular psychology, the “lizard brain” is associated with the basal ganglia and the brainstem– deep neural structures involved in survival, habit, and autonomic regulation. What is referred to as the lizard brain overlaps with older vagal circuits and brainstem mechanisms that regulate fight, flight, and freeze states beneath conscious awareness. From the perspective of Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, these primitive survival responses are mediated through hierarchical autonomic pathways that prioritize safety, mobilization, or immobilization.
Although contemporary neuroscience understands the brain to be far more integrated than these models suggest, the metaphor is useful for helping people understand how the human nervous system functions. It points to subcortical systems that organize instinct, rhythm, protection, and repetition which are the underlying patterns that shape posture, breath, and reflex before conscious thought and conscious movement arises.
Clinical Somatic Education
How you move (or don't move) shapes you
Habitual thoughts, words, and actions shape posture. From a somatic movement perspective, these survival circuits are not abstract ideas. How you live in your body-mind affects muscle tone, fascial tension and expression, and breathing patterns.
Thomas Hanna’s Somatics and the Postural Reflexes
Thomas Hanna described how chronic stress becomes embodied in reflex patterns. More than muscular habits, postural reflex patterns are neurophysiological adaptations driven by the autonomic nervous system. In essence, neurophysiology, links physical, tangible mechanisms such as nerves and electricity to functional output such as thoughts, actions, sensations.
Hanna identified three primary postural reflexes:
Red Light Reflex: Withdrawal / Flexion Pattern
Correlated with the freeze or protective withdrawal response, this pattern is associated with fear, overwhelm, or sustained stress.
Posturally, it shows up as:
Forward head and rounded shoulders
Collapsed chest
Flexed hips
Shallow breathing
This is the body curling inward, a bracing against perceived threat. Over time, the reflex becomes habituated and feels “normal,” even when the original stressor is gone.
Green Light Reflex: Action / Extension Pattern
Correlated with the fight-or-flight response, this pattern is associated with striving, urgency, and forward drive.
Posturally, it may appear as:
Tight spinal extensors
Anterior pelvic tilt
Lifted chin
Over activation in the back body
Here the organism is mobilized, ready to move toward or against something. In today's culture, this reflex is often chronically activated through productivity pressures and constant stimulation.
Trauma Reflex: Startle / Side-Bending Pattern
Associated with shock or injury, this pattern correlates with asymmetrical protective bracing— often linked to freeze states combined with sudden threat.
Posturally, it presents as:
One shoulder elevated
Lateral spinal shortening
Rotational holding patterns
Asymmetrical gait
These reflexes are not psychological weaknesses. They are intelligent survival adaptations mediated by deep brain and autonomic structures. However, when they become chronic, they lead to what Hanna termed sensory-motor amnesia (SMA), the loss of conscious control over muscles we can no longer fully feel nor voluntarily, consciously release.
Do you feel any of these reflexes are a spitting image of you? If so, I invite you to book a free Consultation Call for a 1:1 Somatic Exercise Coaching. I'd love to help you.
Your Story is written on your Body
Habitual Posture as Autonomic Memory
The so-called famous “lizard brain” organizes survival responses. When threat is perceived both physically or socially, the autonomic nervous system shifts into protection mode. Muscles contract. Breath changes. Vision narrows. Mouth becomes dry. Heart beats faster. If this state persists, the contraction becomes habituated through the basal ganglia’s role in pattern encoding. The body keeps the score by maintaining this elevated, yet familiar tension, which becomes your "new normal" base level of muscle tension.
In this way, posture becomes a visible expression of autonomic history. It is the blueprint of your personal story. The fight-flight-freeze responses are etched into tissue, referred to as muscle memory. Muscles don't actually have memory, but your autonomic nervous system remembers trauma and injury and the reflexes fire long after the hardship has passed.
Pandiculation and Autonomic Rewiring
Hanna’s primary tool for reversing these reflexes is pandiculation— a slow, conscious contraction followed by a controlled, gradual release. Unlike passive stretching, pandiculation actively engages the sensory-motor cortex.
The process works in three phases:
Voluntary, conscious contraction
Heightened sensory awareness and mindfulness
Voluntary, conscious slow release
These steps restore cortical control over chronically contracted muscles. Only when your brain is able to register that a muscle is contracting and bracing, is it able to send a message to the muscle to relax. By reintroducing conscious regulation to areas governed reflexively, pandiculation interrupts automatic loops encoded in subcortical and autonomic circuits.
#PutYourMindIntoYourMuscle
Your Body is a living organism
My students over here at Yoga Somatics Online, practising somatic movement modalities in the specialized trainings, programs, and 1:1 Coaching, give results. Overtime, somatic practices do more than lengthen muscle, you gain flexibility and strength by recalibrating the relationship between the voluntary (somatic) and autonomic nervous systems.
Your body is a living organism, not a mechanical construction of levers, pulleys, nuts and bolts. At Yoga Somatics this distinction is essential. Your body needs to learn, and inherently, truly, 100% believe that it is safe enough to release and relax. Instead of imposing flexibility onto a defensive, guarded system, we are communicating safety through voluntary, conscious, slow, and internally sensed movement.
And so, the metaphorical physical and emotional armour melts away. When reflex patterns soften, breath deepens. When breath deepens, autonomic tone shifts. When autonomic tone shifts, posture reorganizes from within.
This is how somatic movement restores agency to the Soma, the lived, sensing body, so that ancient survival circuits no longer unconsciously dictate our structure. The so-called “lizard brain” is not primitive in a dismissive sense. It is foundational. And through conscious movement, we can update, reboot, and rewire its patterns with gentle, effective, nervous system hacks, somatic muscle science and awareness.
If any of this material resonated with you— connect with me by email.
Stay tuned for Issue 13: Somatic Muscle Science Unveiled— Your Nervous System Story, The Gunas, And Fascia
