Shake It Off
What our dogs might teach us about stress, release, and the wisdom of the body
You’ve seen it a thousand times. Your dog has an encounter with another dog that gets just a little intense. Or the doorbell rings and suddenly there’s a flurry of barking and excitement. Maybe they’ve just gotten through a nail trim or stepped down from the exam table at the vet.
And then... they shake. Not a little shiver, but a full-body, nose-to-tail, ears-flapping, jowls-flying SHAKE. And just like that, they carry on. Maybe they wander off to sniff something or head into the next room as if nothing ever happened.
It’s such an ordinary dog behavior that most of us barely notice it. But lately, I’ve found myself paying much closer attention, because there may be far more happening in that shake than we realize.
The Shake Between Moments
We usually think about a dog shaking when they’re wet, but dogs shake when they’re perfectly dry, too. Behaviorists have long observed these “shake-offs” around moments of stress, excitement, social tension and heightened arousal. More recently, researchers have begun looking more closely at exactly when dogs do it.
One fascinating study observing dogs in natural social settings found that shake-offs occurred disproportionately during transitions between activities or behaviors. In other words, the shake often appeared right there in the space between what just happened and whatever came next.
I love thinking about it as a kind of punctuation mark written by the body. That happened. Shake. Now, this.
Of course, we shouldn’t interpret every shake as an emotional release. Dogs shake for all sorts of reasons, and persistent trembling can indicate cold, fear, pain or illness. But when we start paying attention to the context - what happened before the shake and what the dog does afterward, we may begin noticing something really interesting.
Our dogs seem remarkably good at allowing one moment to end.
A Nervous System Designed to Move
Every mammalian nervous system is built to respond to what’s happening around it. When something gets our attention, the body mobilizes. Heart rate may change, muscles prepare for action, stress hormones shift and energy becomes available to deal with whatever is in front of us.
None of this is inherently bad. In fact, it’s an incredibly intelligent survival system. The problem is that we aren’t meant to stay there. A healthy nervous system needs the ability to respond when necessary, but it also needs to know how to come back down again. We are designed to move between activation and rest as life changes around us.
Movement may be one of the ways the body helps make that transition, and this is one of the things I find so fascinating about watching dogs. They don’t seem nearly as concerned with looking composed as we humans are. They stretch when they need to stretch. They let out those wonderfully enormous sighs. They roll around on their backs, run wild circles through the house and occasionally make movements that seem to have no logical purpose whatsoever. And sometimes, they simply shake.
The Body Likes Movement
There’s another interesting piece to all of this, and that’s the lymphatic system. Unlike our circulatory system, the lymphatic system doesn’t have one central pump like the heart. Lymph movement is supported by several mechanisms within the body, including the contractions of lymphatic vessels themselves, our breathing and skeletal muscle contraction. In other words, movement matters. It’s one of the reasons regular physical activity helps support healthy lymphatic circulation.
Being that this is the kind of area where wellness claims can get ahead of the science, I want to be sure to say shaking for ten seconds isn’t guaranteed to magically “detox” the body, and evidence is limited in proving that bouncing on a trampoline is some uniquely powerful lymphatic cleanse. But walking, dancing, stretching, jumping rope, bouncing on a rebounder (or simply getting up and moving our bodies) all involve muscular contraction and movement throughout the body.
Our bodies were built for this, and interestingly, humans have been intentionally using rhythmic movement as part of healing and wellbeing practices for a very long time.
Ancient Wisdom in a Modern Body
Traditional practices such as qigong have incorporated bouncing, swaying and whole-body shaking for centuries. Through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine, these practices are often described as helping move qi, encourage circulation and release stagnation. Modern science uses different language, of course, and there is growing research into qigong and other mind-body practices and their possible effects on stress, mood and overall wellbeing.
There has also been increasing interest in somatic practices that use trembling or shaking intentionally, particularly after periods of tension or heightened activation. The research here is still emerging, and I think that distinction matters. We don’t yet have the evidence to say that shaking literally “releases trauma stored in the tissues,” even though you’ll hear that phrase quite often.
But I’m fascinated by the fact that long before anyone was talking about autonomic regulation or measuring cortisol, humans were already experimenting with a very simple idea: when something feels stuck, move the body. I learned this personally many years ago.
When I Learned to Shake
Years ago, when I spent time at Osho’s ashram in Pune, India, I experienced this idea in a much more dramatic form. Osho developed a number of active meditation practices around the idea that modern humans sometimes need movement and expression before we can become truly still.
During one of these practices, we spent fifteen full minutes simply shaking our bodies. And I mean shaking - wildly, freely, without trying to make it look like anything at all. I remember how strange it sounded at first and how incredible it felt.
That experience stayed with me. When I returned home, we eventually incorporated a version of the practice into Healing the Heart, a program I helped facilitate at the Chopra Center alongside its co-founder, Dr. David Simon.
Over the years, I guided hundreds of people through this movement as they emerged from some very deep, cathartic emotional work. I had the opportunity to watch what happened when people stopped trying to process everything intellectually and simply allowed their bodies to move. There could be a palpable shift.
After doing the difficult work of feeling and expressing what was there, we shook our bodies and allowed movement to become part of the experience. Eventually, we became still. And that was always the part that fascinated me.
The shaking wasn’t really the destination. Stillness was.
Looking back now, after so many years spent observing dogs, I find it pretty remarkable that they seem to understand something similar without anyone ever teaching them.
Sometimes We Move Our Way to Stillness
Perhaps this is one of the things we humans have forgotten. We have become very good at trying to deal with stress from the neck up. We analyze what happened, replay conversations, distract ourselves, tell ourselves to calm down and wonder why our minds won’t cooperate.
Meanwhile, there is an entire body beneath all of those thoughts that experienced the moment, too. Sometimes that body may simply need to move. Maybe that means going for a walk or dancing around the kitchen. It could be jumping on a rebounder, stretching on the floor or even putting on some music and allowing yourself to shake for a few minutes without caring how ridiculous you look.
There’s something freeing about remembering that we don’t always have to think our way from one state into another. Sometimes we can move our way there. And apparently dogs, ancient Eastern practices (and yes, even Taylor Swift) have all landed on some version of the same advice: sometimes, you really do need to shake it off.
What Our Dogs Already Know
The next time your dog gives that enormous full-body shake, notice it. You don’t need to immediately decide what it means. Just become curious about what was happening beforehand, and then watch what happens next. Maybe your dog softens and starts sniffing the ground. Maybe they wander away, return to playing or simply curl up somewhere and rest. That little moment can tell us quite a lot.
We spend so much of our lives with dogs teaching them how to function in our very human world. We teach them to sit and stay, to wait at doors, to walk nicely beside us and settle when we need them to. But after all these years of sharing my life and work with dogs, I’m increasingly convinced that some of the most important lessons have been moving in the other direction.
Our dogs remind us how to inhabit a body, how to respond to what is actually happening instead of what happened three hours ago, and how to let a moment be over when it’s over. And every now and then, how to give ourselves one really good shake... and move on.
Want to explore more?
If this way of looking at our dogs - through science, holistic health, and the deeper wisdom they have to share - speaks to you, this is exactly the kind of exploration we share inside Sama Circle, our monthly membership community for dogs and their humans.
By Amanda Ree, Founder of Sama Dog
If this message resonated with you, we invite you to explore more, like our unique membership group dedicated to natural wellbeing for dogs and their humans, called Sama Circle.
References & Further Reading
Bryce, A., Nurkin, P. & Horowitz, A. (2024). Shake It Off: Investigating the Function of a Domestic Dog Behavior in Social Contexts. Animals.
Beerda, B. et al. (1998). Behavioural, saliva cortisol and heart rate responses to different types of stimuli in dogs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Korthuis, R.J. (2011). Skeletal Muscle Circulation. NCBI Bookshelf.
Wang, C.W. et al. (2014). Managing stress and anxiety through qigong exercise in healthy adults. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Osho International. Kundalini Meditation.