Why You Can't Relax (Even When You Try)
Stress, anxiety and mental overthinking are more than just mental noise and bad habits. If you’ve ever sat down to relax only to feel restless, wired or mentally loud, you aren’t failing at relaxation, it’s simply that your body hasn’t been shown how to switch out of stress mode. Your nervous system controls your physiological state and that dictates how you feel and respond.
We have two nervous system states called sympathetic and parasympathetic. Each one commands a different physiological response in the body, and this is why most people feel like even when they switch off, they can’t switch off.
The sympathetic nervous system is your survival mechanism, designed to help you in situations where you need to escape danger. In the past, this state helped us to escape from predators and dig deeper to find extra strength and energy when fighting and in conflict. It is thanks to this that, when threatened, we can run faster, breathe deeper and get a sudden burst of energy from the release of adrenaline. However, in today’s society there are no predators we must run from or daily conflicts that we must physically fight in, and instead we have bills, jobs and deadlines that force us to work from this state of heightened stress and sensitivity.
So, why when we leave our jobs, pay our bills and meet our deadlines do we still feel stressed out and unable to actually relax. This is because the key to actual relaxation and restoration is in the switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system state, and your breath is the main key to enter this state.
The parasympathetic nervous system is your rest-and-digest function, where the body has a chance to heal, rebalance and recover itself from the stress overload of the sympathetic response. In this mode, we experience quieter and more focused minds, improved digestion and our natural ability to self-regulate and balance our bodies. This is the way to truly exit that survival, stressed-out pattern and enter the calm, focused and clear state that we can rebalance our minds and bodies in.
So How Do We Change This?
Now, your breath is the key to changing these states and this is how it works.
On inhale, you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and on exhale you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. So, to activate the parasympathetic state we need to increase our exhalation so that the parasympathetic nervous system is more stimulated and can become dominant. The Vagus nerve is a key element of the parasympathetic nervous system, and it controls almost all our autonomic functions, such as digestion, breathing and heart rate. When the sympathetic nervous system is dominant, this Vagus nerve has what is described as low vagal tone meaning it is less active, and so we can experience this with poor digestion (indigestion and heart burn), fast breathing rates, shallow chest breathing, high heart rate and high blood pressure. When we extend our exhale, triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, the Vagus nerve has high vagal tone, and we allow the opposite so the body can begin to digest optimally, breathe deeper and slower, and slow our heart rate.
Through entering this state with extended exhalation, we can restore balance and order to our body’s autonomic functions, where we can start to process the overload caused by high sympathetic activation.
How Can We Help at Ganesha Retreats?
At Ganesha Retreats, we hold SOMA Breath sessions, nature-based mindfulness retreats and reiki healing, which are all facilitating of entering parasympathetic state to allow this rebalancing of the body’s systems and functions. SOMA Breath uses rhythmic breathing and doubled-exhalation patterns to trigger parasympathetic state whilst harmonising the body’s natural biorhythms. Now, you can function from a state of calm, focus and clarity physiologically. This is not a state that you can think your way into, it is a state you must induce through action (breathing). Additionally, nature has its own beautiful way of harmonising the body and reducing cortisol (stress) levels even without breathwork. When coupled together, the results are even more profound, and you can allow your body to do its best regulating work in the most effective setting. Reiki healing also has a relaxing effect on the nervous system which is a secondary byproduct of balancing the body’s energy systems and so it, too, offers the same return to a restorative physiological state.
In this way, we aim to help anyone who is struggling with stress, anxiety, mental burnout, overthinking, depression and more. Everyone deserves the opportunity to find peace within themselves and to enter this restorative, healing state so their body can do its utmost to order the overload caused by chronic sympathetic nervous system activation. If this resonates, the next step is not to try harder, but to experience regulation directly. You can explore our current sessions and retreats below.
