Three Reasons Your Body Always Feels Tense

Chronic tension is a common complaint people bring into somatic therapy - especially those with chronic pain. It feels like you can never relax, like you’re walking around like a clenched fist. There are many reasons why this might be so. In somatic therapy, we can work to determine if there’s a psycho-somatic component. Here are three reasons you might constantly feel tense or tight due to psychological or emotional reasons.

Why You’re Always Tense

You’re Prepared to Take Action

Bracing in the body often precedes a movement or action. Chronic bracing might mean your body is stuck in fight or flight mode.

You’re Reaching for Connection

Chronic tension patterns can also reflect unmet attachment needs. If your body learned that you had to amplify your desire to connection or co-regulation, it might adapt by tensing to move toward connection. This is similar to the section above, where the body is braced for action, but different than fight or flight because the body is seeking connection, rather than self-protection.

You’re Holding Yourself Up

If you learned that no one was there for you, your body may be tight because you don’t trust that anything or anyone is going to hold you up or catch your fall.

The Psychology Behind it

All of these underlying reasons for chronic tension stem from implicit memories – an adaptive function of the brain that allows you to recall how to respond in situations and navigate the world without deliberate conscious effort. Implicit memories are formed based on past experiences, often unconsciously, sometimes from traumatic experiences, including pre-verbal trauma experiences.

More specifically, these tension patterns are procedural memories – meaning they don’t just involve emotional learning, they also involve ‘how-to’ information, such as motor reflexes and habits.

How Somatic Therapy Can Help

Inside somatic therapy, we can open a dialogue with your body to better understand the function underneath the tension. This comes from learning how to track emotions, thoughts, sensations, and behavioral impulses in your body, as well as learning how to link neural pathways that are disconnected due to stress or trauma.

Once we understand the function of these patterns, we can begin to explore what kind of resources your body needs in order to feel safe enough to try new patterns. This might involve movement, mindfulness, or therapeutic touch to help your body feel safer, more stable, or be able to take in the support underneath you or from other people.

One of the modalities I’m trained in, NeuroAffective Touch, can be especially helpful for people with chronic tension. Therapeutic touch can help the body gain more awareness of the ground underneath you, the gravity holding you to earth, and the edges of your body to create a sense of containment in your own tissues. 

Exercise Example

As an experiment, I’ll share with you one of my favorite exercises to use with clients. This is especially great because it’s one that you can do on your own, outside of session. I call it the inchy pinchy hug.

To do this exercise, just take one hand to your opposite shoulder and squeeze it. From there squeeze and release all the way down your arm, one inch at a time. Think of it like hugging every section of your arm. 

When you get to your wrist, continue on to your hand. You can even squeeze each one of your fingers, even each segment of your fingers. 

As a bonus, notice if there are other areas of your body that might like a squeeze - your head, face, jaw, hips, or feet, for instance.

Notice if your body found this exercise pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Notice if your body feels more able to settle into gravity, your chair, or bed (wherever you are, essentially)

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

If your body loved this, you’re a great candidate for NeuroAffective Touch. If not, that might mean this just wasn’t the right exercise for you. In a one-on-one therapy session, we can explore other exercises together.

I’ve witnessed these kinds of therapies help people who have been in talk therapy for years, even those who have seen countless physical therapists, only to continue feeling unwell.

I offer a free 20-minute consultation to get to answer any questions you have before committing to your first session. Schedule a time that works for you. If you don’t see anything, feel free to email me raina@roottorisesomatics.com.

Schedule a free 20-minute consultation