What If You Can't Relax?

What is wrong here? Why can’t we relax?

I saw a client recently with a very common issue. They came to me because they couldn’t put their finger on what was wrong, but they knew they wanted to change the way they felt. Here’s what they told me.

“I don’t know how to relax and stop worrying. I have a good life. I have a great job, a loving relationship, brilliant and beautiful kids, and I am usually very happy. Everything is good. But for a while I've been having a hard time relaxing. I even noticed it on vacation a couple months ago. We went to a beautiful resort and had a great time, but most of the vacation I felt tense and uptight for no reason. People around me have noticed, and they are telling me to relax and enjoy my life. They just don't get it. No matter how hard I try, I just can't relax. I think I have been this way for a while now. Nothing is different, and there haven’t been any life-changing events. I have the same amount of stress that I think I’ve always had. Sometimes when I'm stressed, I don't want to do things with my family and friends, and I just don’t want to feel like this anymore. Why can't I relax even when things are good?”

Does this sound familiar? It did to me, and not just because I have helped many clients navigate through this same issue.

Everyday I hear people tell me how much they want to be able to relax, stop the busyness in their lives, calm the chaos, and live more peacefully. They complain about the pace of life, the overwhelming amount of things to get done in a day, the way they are bombarded on the TV, internet, cell phones, the need to keep up with Facebook, and the demands of their career.

As much as there is busyness all around us, the busiest place is in our own mind. And until that inner chatter has a chance to quiet down and be examined, it will be next to impossible to experience true relaxation.

That’s why so many today are turning to Yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi as a way of slowing down and finding calmness and peace inside.

Relaxation begins with permission, and for my clients, that permission happens when they call to schedule their first appointment. At that moment, they acknowledge that something in their life needs to change.

Think About This...

We know that our bodies affect our minds and that our minds affect our bodies. In order to stay healthy, we know we need well-exercised, well-rested and well-fed bodies. And we know that the same is true for mental health and productivity as well. So we work at exercising, work at eating right, work at learning, and we work at playing. And yes, we work at relaxing.

Scientific research suggests that when we stress about relaxing we simply cannot actually let go enough.  The simple truth: you may be having trouble enjoying your time off because you are working too hard at relaxing!

From the moment of our birth, we are driven to learn and change. One of the great motivators for change is the desire for mastery.  We want to do something and get really good at it. So even though the desire to rest and relax seems logical, when we stop pushing so hard, we don’t feel as though we are mastering anything.

So then we feel uncomfortable. We feel guilty about relaxing. We often have made so many plans for ourselves that we cannot possibly accomplish them all. Most of us do not read the novels, or clean up the messy file drawers, or take the French lessons that we set as goals for the summer. We get back to work without having lost 5 pounds or run every day, or written all of the thank you notes.

We haven’t mastered anything, but most especially, we haven’t mastered the art of relaxing.

Not accomplishing what we set out to do creates a cycle of disappointment, maybe guilt, and our stress increases even more.

Think about how kids are being taught to learn. They are expected to work hard at school, and to work hard at sports and clubs. During the summer, even camp is work, for honing athletic skills, losing weight, learning new skills. Kids do not have time to do nothing. So no wonder that by the time they get to college, adolescents are anxious, depressed and stressed out.

The same is true for adults. We work hard at work, and at parenting, and at socializing, and even at improving ourselves. Then, we work hard at relaxing, participating in groups and classes with strict schedules and regimens.  All too often, we come away from these activities feeling the same, or even more stress than before.

How do we deal with these feelings? Some people work hard at what they see as relaxation. For some teens and adults, relaxing looks like binge drinking or using drugs, because it’s the fastest and most efficient way they know to let go and have fun, and it works really well at stopping feelings of guilt, anxiety and stress, for a little while. And the alcohol turns off the achievement/mastery center of their brains, so that we don’t feel guilty for not working at something.

What does this mean? First, we live in a world that makes it really hard to unwind. The demands of daily life are intense and never ending. We have come to equate success with achievement, and achievement with happiness. What’s more, stress, anxiety and depression, which come as a result of this kind of non-stop pressure to achieve, physically interfere with the body’s relaxation mechanisms. And of course, focusing on relaxation as just another high pressure goal (“I must relax, I must relax, I must relax”) is only adding to the problem.

So, we need to think about learning to relax in a different way.

The Role of Hypnosis

Relaxing doesn’t have to mean sipping a cold drink by the beach. It just means being able to tune out stress and anxiety. It means not being tense all the time about how things were, are, or will be. Relaxing helps you refresh and come more equipped to deal with each day as it comes.

Set yourself the task of learning how to relax. Lowering your heartbeat, calming your spirit, quieting your mind, and resting your brain and body are skills that have to be learned. Your vacation time is a great time to start to learn them.

Choose one or two mechanisms for doing this, and pursue them in a structured way throughout your vacation. Self-hypnosis, meditation, and yoga have been shown to have powerful effects on the body and the mind. Make this vacation a time when you begin to learn to do one of them. Take a class, or read a book about them, but make learning one of them a priority.

Practice sleeping. Practice resting. Practice staring into space. The idea of practicing doing something tricks your mind into activating the desire for mastery.

Why Hypnosis?

Hypnosis brings you a place of intense focus, where you can create real and permanent change in your life. This state of relaxation is profound, and just a half hour of hypnosis can feel like a full night of restful sleep.

While in hypnosis, you are able to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system that brings you out of stress to a restful place, and this state allows you to heal your body and your emotions.

I’ve had many people come in with committed relationship, good job, and stable finances, but unhappy, perpetually anxious, or, in other words, unable to relax. It typically doesn’t take too much time before we are able to identify the areas in someone’s life where there is dissatisfaction. Using hypnosis to explore these areas creates an opportunity to develop insight into the cause of the unrest. Then, once there is a deeper understanding of what is actually happening, concrete steps can be taken to address it. Sometimes the solution is less concrete, however. For some, the dilemma is more existential in nature, and they are seeking answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of their life. In these cases, hypnotherapy provides an opportunity to explore these questions while providing the support that may be needed when no definitive answers are found.∎