STARR Exercises: Background Information
“STARR Exercises” stand for Stress & Trauma, Active Releasing & Rewiring Exercises, and was coined by Eric and our Expert Practitioner Alliance. While genetics can and often do play a large role in the development of mental health complications, so too do traumas and stresses that we experience and accumulate over time, as our lives unfold. Traumas and stresses can be minor in nature (e.g., a fight with a friend, or a disagreement at work), or major (e.g., witnessing a terrible fatal accident, or the passing of a close loved one).

Over time, these traumas and stresses build up in our central/nervous systems and change other body processes, and if we don’t do anything about them, they start to do serious damage, leading to mental at even physical health complications. There are many analogies to describe this process of trauma and stress building up over time – a balloon filling with too much air at risk of popping, a water cooler filling with too much water at risk of overflowing. As in the case of the balloon or the water cooler, where there are mechanisms to drain that “air” or “water,” so too can we drain the overabundance of trauma and stress that has built up in our systems and causes awful symptoms. While the above examples are oversimplifications for the purpose of visualizations, we can in fact ultimately rewire how stress affects us, and how we react to the emotional memories of negative experiences we have lived through.
Think of it this way – if you kept walking barefoot on a wooden patio, and continued to pick up splinters, would you allow these splinters to heal internally inside your skin, or would you remove them, so that you didn’t have to walk around in pain? Why then don’t we treat emotional traumas and stresses the way we do physical ones? To maintain or get back to a strong mental health baseline, it’s essential that we have practices that continually take out those emotional “splinters” and allow our “healing” to take place appropriately – hence Release and Rewiring. But, we call these exercises “active” exercises, because in the case of mental health, healing takes some work. We can’t just wait for magic pills or procedures or tons of sleep to be our “savior.” Our improvements are based on the work/exercises we take on.


If you are a practitioner trained in any of the STARR therapies featured, and would like to be added to our growing database of recommended practitioners who are able to offer STARR therapies to their patients in their local markets, please fill out this form.