Breaking Open, Not Down: Emotional Healing Through Movement

In addition to being a recovering people pleaser, I am also a recovering emotional hoarder. If the inside of my heart were visible to the world, it would have a Davy Jones–style chest in the centre — chained, padlocked, and fitted with a non-return flap for inserting new difficult emotions.

The problem is, as I’ve discovered to my dismay many times, there’s a secret key to this emotional box… and it lives in the gym.

I’ve found myself in tears in a squat rack more times than I care to count. I’ve felt sudden waves of emotion before a handstand so strong they’ve made me step back and take a breath. In those moments, I used to think I was being weak — which is, firstly, a terrible thing to say to anyone expressing emotion (so, sorry past me), and secondly, something I now understand through the lens of the mind–body connection. There’s a scientific reason for this phenomenon.

What your body hears when you workout

When you work out, you’re putting yourself into a controlled fight-or-flight response. You’re actively placing your body under stress. This adrenaline surge acts like panning for gold through your nervous system. The stress begins to flow, and the emotions — tiny flakes or huge nuggets of gold — float effortlessly to the surface.

Because we’re comfortable in this self-inflicted stress state, our bodies don’t feel the need to cling on to those emotions like they would in an unexpected fight-or-flight situation (think: an argument with a colleague or your child crying in the supermarket queue). Instead, those emotional juices are free to leak out — all over your dumbbells.

Your body also plays its part in this bounty hunt. As you move, the tension you’ve been holding starts to fade. Yes, you’re bracing — but your shoulders drop, your lungs draw in more air, your belly softens, and your amygdala (the brain’s alarm system) finally switches off. Cue a bucket of cold emotion you’d long forgotten being thrown in your face.

Add in the repetitive nature of movement and the lack of distraction, and you’re lulled into a high-intensity meditative state where your body and brain start working in tandem — your mind saying, “This is hard, but I’ve been here before,” and your body replying, “Perfect. Time to let some of this emotional load out while she’s not looking.”

Strength meets softness

So if you ever find yourself crying mid-squat or sniffling through savasana, know this — you’re not alone. And you’re not breaking down — you’re breaking open.

Those tears are the evidence of your strength meeting your softness, of old stories finally leaving your body.

And for anyone struggling to find emotional release, may I kindly but firmly offer exercise to you as a way to start processing and healing. The weight we lose in the gym is far from just physical — I’d go so far as to say we shed far more emotional baggage than body mass.

Every rep, every breath, every wobble is another key turning in that old Davy Jones chest.
And little by little, you’re setting yourself free.

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