Why Your Body Won’t Relax: Understanding Chronic Body Bracing

How’s your neck feeling? Has it disappeared somewhere between your shoulders and your ears during the evening commute? Or perhaps you’re sitting forward, glutes tight and at the ready even though you’ve got another hour of desk bound work ahead of you?

Body bracing is a chronic issue I see on the treatment table at Sensalium. It often reflects a mismatch between our body’s protective mechanisms and modern life.

The body remains prepared for danger long after the immediate threat has passed or long after chronic stress has become normalised.

Body bracing exists on a spectrum.

At one end is the person who cannot fully surrender the weight of their head onto a pillow. At the other is the person completely unaware that their body is rigid.

Tension and stiffness in the body can have many causes which can include:

• self preservation in an increasingly uncertain world,

• the need to keep on keeping on when the body yearns for rest,

• physical, financial or emotional trauma,

• disconnection,

• chronic pain

The armoured body is an expensive body to live in.

It can cost us:

Mobility — by restricting movement and altering posture

A sense of safety — the body stays primed for action

Adaptability — reducing our capacity to rest, recover and respond to the present

It can also cost us a lot of money, time and distress. It’s not easy to live with.

I once had a client who presented with TMJ. Laura (not her real name) had lost teeth due to years of night grinding and had multiple crowns replaced with gold after her porcelain crowns could no longer withstand the load.

She indicated that many stressful life challenges meant she felt like she was always ‘on’ and as a result felt unbearably tight all over.

During the session Laura found it difficult to let go of her body’s muscular contractions particularly around her shoulders but as the nervous system integration session progressed her breathing deepened as her guarding softened and she had many moments of revelation as she realised how much tightness and soreness her body was experiencing.

Most importantly she began to remember the difference between what a contracted muscle feels like and what a relaxed muscle feels like. This is something that must be felt to be understood.

How can we relearn how to move consciously between bracing and release?

Awareness is the first step but practical ways to experience release include little daily wins by recognising our body bracing patterns:

• realising that your stomach is clenching for no reason and then clenching and releasing it a few times,

• becoming conscious of where your shoulders are (up near your ears?) when you go to bed and gently making space between them and your ears

• noticing when you are jamming your tongue into the roof of your mouth and gently releasing your mouth by opening it while placing your tongue behind your front teeth.

One of my favourite exercises to give clients to facilitate release is the fascia ‘wobble’. It’s a fun and easy way to transition from one state to the other and teach the body to consciously let go. I notice my dog does a shake when it transitions from one state to another. I think there’s something in it for us humans.

Because sometimes healing does not begin with fixing the body but rather noticing when subconscious effort has become a habit that’s no longer needed.

How to do the fascia wobble

Simply stand comfortably and then raise yourself onto the balls of your feet. Slowly move up and down. Begin with a small, gentle bounce and notice the movement ripple through your tissues. Feel free to progress to a full scale wobble and shake. It's surprisingly liberating and playful. It always makes me smile.