Running as Nervous System Medicine

The trail climbs through second-growth fir, and I settle into the grade. My breath finds its rhythm—not the shallow panting of the first kilometer but the deeper cadence that comes when the body stops resisting and begins to move as a single system. Hemlock and cedar close in on both sides. The air is cool and carries the tang of wet bark, of decomposing needles, of the quiet decay that feeds these forests.

I have run this trail for years, through seasons of rain and the rare weeks of summer when dust rises from the path. The route is familiar enough that my legs know the roots and stones without my attention, and this frees something else—some watchfulness that usually hums beneath my thoughts. On the steeper sections my heart rate climbs and my breathing sharpens, and then on the descent it eases, and in that easing I feel the whole system recalibrate. Not relaxation, exactly. Something more like flexibility. The capacity to rise and then return.

I pass a Douglas Fir scarred with blackened streaks, the marks of a fire that moved through here decades ago. The tree is massive, thriving, its bark furrowed and dark. I have thought about this tree often—not as a symbol of strength through adversity, the misleading idea that what harms us makes us stronger, but as evidence that damage and continued life can coexist. The fire did not make the tree stronger. The tree was already strong, and survived, and continued. The scars remain visible on a trunk that kept growing. The nervous system, too, can carry marks of what has passed through it and still stand—not because trauma builds character but because the capacity for regulation, once present, can be recovered.

The Paradox of Running

Running presents an elegant paradox for those whose nervous systems have been shaped by trauma. The very movement pattern that might represent flight from danger becomes, under certain conditions, a pathway toward embodied presence and regulation. This transformation—from escape to encounter—requires understanding how sustained rhythmic movement reorganizes the autonomic nervous system through what clinicians call bottom-up pathways: changes that begin in the body and move toward the mind, rather than the other way around. Talk therapy works top-down, through insight and reappraisal. Running works from below, through sensation and rhythm, bypassing cognitive processing entirely.

I think of this often on the trails: how the body learned, long before language, to move toward safety. Flight, freeze, orient, fight—these are not choices but autonomic responses crafted by millions of years of evolution. The nervous system initiates them without consulting the conscious mind. And trauma, which is any experience that exceeds our capacity to manage stress, can lock these responses into patterns that persist long after danger has passed. The body does not differentiate between threats; it simply reacts as if survival is at stake.

The forest offers a different kind of running. Not flight from, but movement through. Not escape, but encounter with the sensations the body has been trained to avoid.

What the Research Shows

The evidence base for aerobic exercise in trauma recovery has matured considerably. A 2025 network meta-analysis by Li, Xia, Yu, Hu, and Zhu examined thirty randomized controlled trials with over fourteen hundred participants and found an inverted U-shaped dose-response relationship. The optimal dose sits at approximately 730 MET-minutes per week—a technical measure of metabolic effort that translates, roughly, to four thirty-minute moderate-intensity runs. At this dose, effect sizes were comparable to established trauma-focused psychotherapies.

MET-minutes measure the metabolic cost of activity: one MET equals the energy expended sitting quietly, and activities multiply from there. A moderate jog runs about seven METs. The math matters less than what it points to: there is a therapeutic window, a range where running helps most. Too little shows smaller effects; too much may show diminishing returns or the risks of overtraining.

Björkman and Ekblom’s 2022 meta-analysis found similar results, with particularly robust improvements in sleep quality, quality of life, and substance use patterns—the constellation of symptoms that often prove most treatment-resistant. The therapeutic action occurs not through conscious reappraisal of traumatic memory but through direct influence on nervous system regulatory systems. Running speaks to subcortical systems in their native language: sensation, movement, rhythm, breath.

The Autonomic Nervous System as Training Ground

The cardiovascular rhythm of running directly engages autonomic regulation through measurable pathways. What might be called vagal calisthenics—repeated cycles of sympathetic activation during exertion followed by parasympathetic restoration during recovery—builds the nervous system’s capacity to upregulate and downregulate as context demands. The sympathetic branch accelerates the system: heart rate rises, breathing quickens, muscles prepare for action. The parasympathetic branch calms it: heart rate slows, breathing deepens, the body settles toward rest. Flexibility means moving fluidly between these states rather than getting stuck in one.

The vagus nerve, wandering from brainstem through heart and gut, mediates the body’s ability to calm after activation. Heart rate variability—the subtle fluctuation in time between heartbeats, abbreviated HRV—provides a window into vagal function. Higher variability, within normal ranges, indicates a nervous system with flexibility: the capacity to accelerate when needed and slow when threat has passed. Trauma consistently associates with reduced HRV, a nervous system stuck in one gear.

Cabanas-Sánchez and colleagues’ 2022 systematic review found significant improvements in vagal-related heart rate variability from exercise training in sedentary adults. Liddell and colleagues, studying trauma-exposed individuals in a post-conflict setting, found that reductions in HRV were associated with increases in PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—symptoms. The pathway runs both directions: trauma reduces flexibility, and interventions that restore flexibility may interrupt the cascade.

On the trail, I feel this in the simplest terms. The steep climb demands everything—heart pounding, breath short, legs burning. Then the grade eases and the forest opens and the system settles back toward baseline. Not simply rest, but the capacity to have risen and returned. Each run practices this oscillation. Over time, the range expands.

But there is a flip side, as there always is. High-intensity interval training may prolong sympathetic activation and delay parasympathetic recovery, potentially reinforcing rather than resolving dysregulation—the state of being unable to regulate arousal, of remaining stuck in activation or shutdown, of losing the capacity to return to baseline. I see this often in my work: clients in early recovery who take up running, then become over-enthusiastic and do too much, too fast, with intensity that exceeds what would support healing. For some, there is an addictions replacement dynamic at work—running becomes another way to get high, to maintain frenetic intensity, to run so fast they stay ahead of feelings they know are inside. Often these are former stimulant users who discover familiar patterns wearing new shoes.

Finding the balance, with clients whose nervous systems carry the marks of trauma, is always hard. There is the danger of replacing one compulsion with another, the risk that new activity becomes a different version of locked and repetitive patterns.

Flight: Running From Versus Running Toward

For the survivor whose primary defensive adaptation was flight—literal or metaphorical running from danger—the act of intentional running creates productive confusion in subcortical systems. The body experiences the same cardiovascular activation, the same recruitment of large muscle groups, the same forward propulsion through space. Yet the context differs entirely: movement toward health rather than away from threat, chosen rather than compelled, sustainable rather than desperate.

Running provides opportunity to complete thwarted flight responses within a context of safety and control. The proprioceptive feedback from sustained rhythmic movement—feet striking ground, arms swinging, core stabilizing—can begin to overwrite earlier associations between cardiovascular arousal and mortal danger. The nervous system receives data from muscles and joints indicating purposeful, controlled exertion rather than panicked escape. Over repeated sessions, this vocabulary of sensation starts to teach something new.

I think of the trail as a kind of grammar the body learns. Each footfall a syllable. Each breath a phrase. The route through the forest becomes a sentence the nervous system can complete—not fleeing toward safety but arriving, already, in the safety of chosen movement.

Yet the distinction between therapeutic running and dissociative flight is precarious. Schmitz and colleagues identified body dissociation—habitual disregard of internal signals—as the sole significant mediator between traumatic childhood experiences and emotion dysregulation, with particularly strong effects in PTSD populations. Running undertaken to avoid awareness, to overwhelm sensation through intensity, or to escape embodied experience may reinforce rather than resolve trauma-related patterns. The therapeutic vector points not toward speed or distance but toward sustained, rhythmic engagement with present-moment bodily experience.

How do you know which kind of running you are doing? There are signals. If you finish a run with no memory of the middle kilometers, you may have been absent from yourself. If you notice you are pushing harder specifically when difficult feelings arise, intensity may be serving as escape. If slowing down feels unbearable, if the prospect of a gentle pace brings anxiety, speed may be doing the work that presence should do. The body knows the difference between running with sensation and running from it—and with practice, you can learn to notice which is happening.

The distinction is not between exertion and ease, but between presence and flight. Running that carries awareness through the body differs from running that leaves the body behind. Both may cover the same ground. Only one changes the map.

Freeze: Breaking the Spell of Immobilization

Perhaps running’s most direct therapeutic action addresses freeze responses—the shutdown that represents the nervous system’s final defensive strategy when neither fight nor flight nor orienting proves possible. The freeze state combines preparation for action with immobilization, creating what some call bound energy awaiting discharge. The body is ready to move but cannot. It remains suspended in the moment before flight, locked in place.

Crombie and colleagues’ 2021 randomized controlled trial with women who had PTSD related to interpersonal violence demonstrated how aerobic exercise enhances what researchers call fear extinction—the process by which the nervous system learns that cues once associated with danger no longer predict threat. The neurobiological mechanisms are increasingly well-characterized: both anandamide—a compound in the body’s own cannabinoid system—and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports the growth of new neural connections, mediated the relationship between moderate-intensity exercise and reduced threat expectancy.

For freeze-response survivors, the physical act of running—forward momentum, muscular activation, purposeful navigation through space—provides somatic evidence contradicting the immobilization narrative written into muscle memory and autonomic patterns. Each footfall, each breath synchronized with movement, each decision about pace or route exercises agency that developmental trauma may have foreclosed. The body learns through direct experience that mobilization is possible, that activation need not collapse into shutdown, that the cardiovascular arousal once associated exclusively with inescapable threat can signal something else entirely.

The frozen places in the forest are the swamps and bogs where water pools without moving, where the trail disappears into standing water and deadfall. Running carries you past these places, through them, reminds the body that stasis is not the only option. The trail continues. The legs remember how to move.

Hyperarousal: Channeling the Vigilant Mind

The hypervigilant survivor scans constantly for threat, environmental and internal. Elevated autonomic arousal creates a feedback loop: heightened baseline sympathetic tone generates cardiovascular sensations—rapid heartbeat, shortened breath, muscle tension—that the hypervigilant mind interprets as danger signals, further amplifying arousal. This is the orienting response locked in perpetual assessment, constant scanning, chronic readiness. Those caught in this pattern never arrive anywhere; they search for but never find safety.

Hegberg, Hayes, and Hayes reviewed observational and intervention studies examining aerobic exercise and PTSD, finding that vigorous-intensity exercise was specifically associated with reduced hyperarousal symptoms. Notably, light or moderate intensity exercise did not demonstrate this effect, suggesting that hyperarousal may require intensity-matched intervention. The hyperactivated nervous system, paradoxically, may find relief not through gentle calming but through purposeful, controlled discharge of elevated arousal.

Fetzner and Asmundson’s randomized controlled trial assigned PTSD-affected participants to two weeks of moderate-intensity stationary cycling, manipulating attentional focus across three conditions. Remarkably, 89% reported clinically significant PTSD symptom reductions regardless of what they focused on while cycling. Particularly strong effects emerged for hyperarousal and anxiety sensitivity—the fear of arousal sensations themselves. The nervous system organizes itself implicitly during aerobic exercise, even without explicit instruction to attend to bodily sensations.

This represents graded exposure to the very arousal states that hypervigilant individuals fear and monitor. During running, cardiovascular activation rises predictably, breath quickens, muscles fatigue—yet the context remains one of self-determined challenge rather than threat. The nervous system receives repetitive data points: high arousal without danger, cardiovascular activation that resolves through natural recovery, physical sensation as information rather than alarm. Over time, the association between arousal and threat weakens, not through argument but through accumulated somatic evidence.

The hypervigilant runner scans the trail differently at first—watching for roots, for other runners, for anything unexpected. But the forest teaches a different kind of attention. The rhythm of footfalls becomes its own focus. The breath finds a pattern. The scanning softens into something more like presence. Running provides, perhaps, a means of discovering that here, now, it might finally be safe enough to rest.

Fight: The Alchemy of Anger

When flight proves impossible, freezing threatens overwhelm, and hypervigilant orienting provides no pathways, the nervous system activates fight—mobilization with aggression, defensive assertion, the muscular preparation for combat. In developmental trauma, this energy often becomes trapped, unexpressed, turned inward as self-harm or outward as dysregulated aggression.

The literature offers less direct evidence on exercise for anger specifically than for other trauma responses, yet the physiological pathways suggest clear mechanisms. Dong and Lin’s 2025 narrative review noted that exercise down-regulates opioid receptors—which may seem counterintuitive given opioids’ association with pleasure and pain relief. However, chronic stress causes opioid receptor upregulation that contributes to emotional numbing—the inability to experience pleasure or appropriate emotional range. Exercise-induced down-regulation paradoxically restores emotional responsiveness, allowing appropriate expression of emotions including anger rather than either suppression or dysregulation.

High-intensity running particularly suits fight-response discharge. Where moderate-intensity exercise optimizes vagal enhancement, vigorous-intensity running provides an intensity-matched outlet for mobilized defensive energy. The muscular exertion, cardiovascular demand, and metabolic challenge mirror the body’s preparation for combat while occurring in a context that requires no aggression toward self or other. This represents purposeful assertion rather than reactive defense—agency expressed through chosen challenge.

Bryant and colleagues’ landmark study randomized adults with PTSD to prolonged exposure therapy augmented by either moderate-intensity cycling or passive stretching immediately after each exposure session. While groups showed no differences at one-week post-treatment, the aerobic exercise group demonstrated significantly greater PTSD symptom reductions at six-month follow-up. This delayed emergence of benefits suggests exercise effects unfold through consolidation processes rather than immediate relief—the gradual reorganization of threat responses through enhanced neuroplasticity.

Those with a locked-in fight response are not choosing to be angry or oppositional. The entire system is organized around the impossibility of accepting powerlessness without fighting back, around the survival strategy that says defiance is the only way to maintain any dignity, any sense of self—even when that defiance destroys everything they might otherwise want. Running provides, perhaps, a way of finding that power can be claimed constructively rather than grasped desperately, a means of discovering purposeful engagement rather than opposition to everything.

The trail through the forest is not a battle. But it asks something of the body. It demands effort and receives it. And in that exchange—exertion offered, ground covered—something of the fight response finds expression without destruction.

The Body as Informant: Interoceptive Awareness

Beneath these diverse mechanisms lies a common pathway: running develops interoceptive awareness—the capacity to perceive, interpret, and respond adaptively to internal bodily signals. Physiologists coined the term a century ago to describe the body’s internal sensing systems, but clinicians treating trauma, particularly van der Kolk, brought attention to how profoundly this capacity is disrupted in survivors. Those with PTSD often struggle to attend to internal sensations without becoming overwhelmed by residual trauma-related perceptions—or, conversely, have learned to ignore bodily signals entirely.

Running provides continuous interoceptive training: monitoring heart rate and cardiac output, tracking respiratory rate and depth, sensing muscle tension and fatigue, registering temperature changes, detecting energy depletion. This feedback arrives constantly, demanding interpretation and response. Should I slow? Push slightly harder? Walk briefly? The questions require attending to bodily signals, appraising their meaning, making decisions based on what the body reports. Over time, this practice builds interoceptive skills: identifying sensations, accessing inner experience, sustaining attention to sensation, and interpreting internal signals adaptively.

Critically, running allows titrated exposure—gradual, controlled increases in interoceptive intensity. A beginning runner might experience overwhelming sensation at moderate intensity; starting with walk-run intervals provides manageable doses of interoceptive input. As tolerance builds, intensity can increase, expanding what somatic therapists call the window of tolerance—the range of arousal within which a person can function without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Below the window lies numbness and disconnection; above it lies flooding and panic. The goal is not to eliminate arousal but to widen the range the nervous system can hold.

The quality of attention during running determines whether interoceptive exposure proves therapeutic or dysregulating. Mindful body scanning while running, attending to breath-footfall patterns, monitoring form and perceived exertion—these practices cultivate adaptive awareness. Conversely, dissociating during runs, pushing past signals of pain or exhaustion, using intensity to override bodily awareness—these patterns may reinforce body dissociation and turn running into yet another unregulated activity that leads to harm.

On the forest trail, the body speaks in a language older than words. The ache in the calves on the climb. The settling of breath on level ground. The flush of heat that rises and dissipates. Learning to listen to this language—without flinching, without fleeing, without flooding—is its own form of recovery.

When Running Doesn’t Help

The research reveals important limitations and individual differences. While meta-analyses show moderate aggregate effects, substantial variability exists in individual responses. Not all trauma survivors benefit equally from running; some may find it activating, triggering, or ineffective.

The intensity question lacks complete resolution, and this matters for practical guidance. Vigorous exercise specifically reduced hyperarousal in observational studies—for those stuck in chronic activation, intensity-matched discharge may provide relief that gentle movement cannot. Yet moderate intensity optimizes fear extinction and parasympathetic recovery, making it the safer default for most survivors, particularly early in the process. The distinction: if your nervous system is locked in hypervigilance and you need to discharge accumulated activation, vigorous running may help. If you are building foundational capacity to tolerate arousal, moderate intensity serves better. Very high intensity—running so hard you cannot maintain awareness—may prolong sympathetic activation and delay recovery, potentially contraindicated regardless of presentation.

Van der Kolk and colleagues’ study of yoga for treatment-resistant PTSD in women provides instructive contrast. Yoga—combining controlled breathing, postures, and meditation—produced remission in 52% versus 21% of controls, with large effect sizes. This suggests that gentle, rhythmic movement with explicit interoceptive focus may suit some survivors better than vigorous aerobic exercise, particularly when trauma involved profound helplessness or when aggressive intervention feels threatening rather than empowering.

If you are someone for whom running feels activating rather than regulating, or if the idea of cardiovascular exertion carries associations with panic or danger, this does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means running may not be your trail through the forest. Walking might be. Swimming might be. Yoga might be. The nervous system finds its own pathways toward flexibility, and the research supports multiple routes.

For more on the potential complications of running as a healing pathway—particularly the ways that exercise can become its own pattern of avoidance—please see the companion article, When Movement Maintains the Pattern.

Toward Practice

The accumulated evidence suggests several principles for therapeutic application.

The optimal dosage, according to the 2025 network meta-analysis, sits at 730 MET-minutes weekly—approximately four thirty-minute moderate-intensity runs. Lower doses show benefits but smaller magnitude; higher doses may show diminishing returns or risks of overtraining that decrease HRV.

Moderate intensity—roughly 60-75% of maximum heart rate, the range where you can still hold a conversation—optimizes fear extinction consolidation, endocannabinoid activation, and parasympathetic enhancement. Vigorous intensity (75-85% of maximum heart rate) may better address hyperarousal specifically but requires careful attention to avoid dysregulation.

Running after exposure or trauma-processing sessions may enhance consolidation of therapeutic gains. This differs from running as standalone intervention or running before therapy sessions.

The quality of presence during running matters. Mindful body awareness, rhythmic breath attention, monitoring of internal states—these practices cultivate adaptive interoceptive awareness. Dissociation during running or intensity that overwhelms capacity may reinforce rather than resolve patterns.

Starting with walk-run intervals, gradually increasing duration and intensity, allows titrated exposure that respects individual windows of tolerance. Progress is measured not by speed or distance but by capacity to remain present and regulated during and after activity.

Group running provides co-regulation opportunities and social engagement that enhance individual autonomic regulation. Connection during exercise may amplify benefits.

Excessive exercise can decrease HRV and compromise recovery. Tracking subjective energy, mood, sleep quality, and resting heart rate helps identify overtraining that would undermine therapeutic goals.

The Body’s Argument

Ultimately, running’s therapeutic action may reside less in specific neurobiological mechanisms than in the cumulative embodied argument it makes against trauma’s central claims. Trauma teaches that arousal means danger, that the body cannot be trusted, that freeze or dissociation provides the only safety. Running offers counter-evidence written in the language of direct experience.

Each run demonstrates that cardiovascular activation can signal challenge rather than threat, chosen exertion rather than helpless terror. Each return to baseline breathing proves that arousal resolves, that the nervous system can upregulate and downregulate rather than remain stuck. Each increase in endurance or pace shows capacity expanding rather than permanently fixed by past trauma. Each run completed despite initial resistance exercises agency—the capacity to choose adaptive challenge despite fear.

This somatic education occurs through channels more fundamental than cognition. The research base, while growing, requires continued development. Yet the existing evidence supports running as a promising intervention for trauma—not as replacement for trauma-focused psychotherapy but as approach that addresses trauma’s embodied residue through direct reorganization of nervous system patterns.

The trail descends through the forest toward the trailhead where I began. The light has shifted; what was shadow is now dappled with late sun filtering through hemlock and cedar. My heart rate has settled. My breathing moves easily now, without effort, the kind of quiet that comes after the body has been asked something and has answered.

I pass the Douglas Fir again, its fire-scarred trunk dark against the green. The marks of what moved through it decades ago remain visible, will always remain visible. The fire did not improve this tree. But neither did it end it. The tree stands, massive and present, its roots deep in soil that was once ash, continuing what it was already doing before the burning came.

For the survivor whose body learned to associate arousal exclusively with danger, whose interoceptive awareness became either overwhelming or absent—running offers opportunity to complete interrupted movements, to experience controlled arousal in safety, to rebuild trust between awareness and bodily sensation. The therapeutic action unfolds not through insight but through accumulated moments of staying present in an activated body, of choosing forward momentum, of discovering that the rhythm of footfalls and breath can carry one toward rather than away from embodied life.

The trail continues. The legs remember how to move.

(For more on the potential complications of running as a healing pathway, please see the companion article below. Running is not a panacea for everyone in all situations.)

When Movement Maintains the Pattern

The Shadow Side of Physical Activity in Recovery

The seawall stretches north toward the mountains, a grey ribbon of concrete between the harbor and the city. At this hour the light has not yet reached the water; the inlet lies dark and still bene…

Sources

Björkman, F., & Ekblom, Ö. (2022). Physical exercise as treatment for PTSD: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Military Medicine, 187(9-10), e1103–e1113.

Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312.

Bryant, R. A., Dawson, K. S., Azevedo, S., Yadav, S., Cahill, C., Kenny, L., Maron-Katz, A., Williams, L., de Wet, C., Galatzer-Levy, I., & Harvey, S. B.(2022). Augmenting trauma-focused psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder with brief aerobic exercise in Australia: A randomised clinical trial. The Lancet Psychiatry, 10(1), 21–29.

Cabanas-Sánchez, V., Guallar-Castillón, P., Higueras-Fresnillo, S., Rodríguez-Artalejo, F., & Martínez-Gómez, D. (2022). Does exercise training improve cardiac-parasympathetic nervous system activity in sedentary people? A systematic review with meta-analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(21), 13899.

Crombie, K. M., Sartin-Tarm, A., Sellnow, K., Ahrenholtz, R., Lee, S., Matalamaki, M., Adams, T. G., & Cisler, J. M.(2021). Aerobic exercise and consolidation of fear extinction learning among women with posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 142, 103867.

Crombie, K. M., Sartin-Tarm, A., Sellnow, K., Ahrenholtz, R., Lee, S., Matalamaki, M., Almassi, N. E., Hillard, C. J., Koltyn, K. F., Adams, T. G., & Cisler, J. M.(2021). Exercise-induced increases in anandamide and BDNF during extinction consolidation contribute to reduced threat following reinstatement. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 132, 105355.

Dong, Y., & Lin, J. (2025). The effects of exercise on post-traumatic stress disorder: Multiple dimensions, nonlinear mechanisms, and clinical perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1483523.

Fetzner, M. G., & Asmundson, G. J. G.(2015). Aerobic exercise reduces symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 44(4), 301–313.

Hegberg, N. J., Hayes, J. P., & Hayes, S. M.(2019). Exercise intervention in PTSD: A narrative review and rationale for implementation. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 133.

Leech, T., Stapleton, P., & Patching, S. (2024). Interoceptive awareness and trauma: A scoping review of the literature. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1355442.

Li, X., Xia, H., Yu, G., Hu, Y., & Zhu, F. (2025). Optimal exercise dosage and type for improving post-traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 60, 102004.

Liddell, B. J., Kemp, A. H., Steel, Z., Nickerson, A., Bryant, R. A., Tam, N., Tay, A. K., & Silove, D. (2016). Heart rate variability and the relationship between trauma exposure, age, and psychopathology in a post-conflict setting. BMC Psychiatry, 16, 133.

Schmitz, M., Bertsch, K., Löffler, A., Steinmann, S., Brück, C., Herpertz, S. C., & Bekrater-Bodmann, R. (2023). Body connection mediates the relationship between traumatic childhood experiences and impaired emotion regulation. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 10, 12.

Schneider, M., & Schwerdtfeger, A. (2020). Autonomic dysfunction in posttraumatic stress disorder indexed by heart rate variability: A meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 50(12), 1937–1948.

Van der Kolk, B. A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 75(6), e559–e565.

Voorendonk, E. M., De Jongh, A., Rozendaal, L., & Van Minnen, A. (2023). Adding physical activity to intensive trauma-focused treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder: Results of a randomized controlled trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1215250.