Recurring tension isn't your body failing. It's your body protecting you.
Clients often come to me because they have recurring tension patterns: a clenched jaw, tight shoulders, tight hips, or a lower back that refuses to relax no matter how much they stretch or massage it. Maybe that happens for you too.
Here's the possibility worth sitting with: the recurring tension patterns may be a sign that your body's baseline is in self-protect mode. It can't change those patterns by being manipulated because they are motor responses to a perceived threat your nervous system needs to keep you safe.
And if that's true, the stiffness that keeps showing up isn't an error. It's a survival strategy your body adopted for good reason and, most likely, has never been given the opportunity to fully come out of.
What happens the moment you're under threat
When your system registers danger (a near-miss in traffic, a hostile email, or a quieter signal you're never consciously aware of), a cascade fires that was built for short emergencies.
Within seconds, your sympathetic nervous system releases adrenaline. Your heart rate climbs. Blood shifts away from digestion and repair toward the big muscles, readying you to fight or run, or stay deadly still. All of it useful, when the threat is real and brief.
Within minutes, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (the HPA axis) releases cortisol, flooding your blood with fuel and sharpening focus while non-urgent maintenance pauses. A whole orchestra of hormones, all aimed at getting you to safety.
Meanwhile, your body organises itself around your joints, diaphragm, and spine so you can brace for impact. It's a smart, complex set of responses, and its priority list is revealing: your neck, your head, your heart, all those soft organs at the front of your body. Protect them!
Then the danger passes, in theory, and the system stands down. The parasympathetic branch engages, cortisol falls, tissues decompress, and you return to your ideal organic baseline. Safe. Out of danger.
The trouble starts when your body can't stand down.
Where the Patterns Come From
And that's where patterns come from. Instead of coming down and out of a threat response, the cycle doesn't complete and instead loops like a worn out old record.
Why on earth does that happen? Here are some possible reasons:
You weren't supported out of the threat response. When you go through something overwhelming, the kind of event we usually file under "traumatic", you may not have had anyone who could help you find your way back to biological safety. I think this is far more common than we admit. Add in the ordinary events too: medical procedures, whiplash, physical impacts. It means that your tissues stay organised around the event, and that organisation becomes so familiar it's just the way things are.
The danger didn't stop. Also common. Your body never got to deactivate, because whatever was happening kept happening, and so your system kept having to respond to danger over and over again. And these types of events may stem from a challenging childhood like parental neglect, or repeated 'violations' that may not seem like violations at all (like loving parents that overpowered your system with food, or stimulus that you didn't want), or you experienced violations that were unmistakably significant.
Daily demands keep stacking. You've got used to using your body in a predictable way that is constantly putting strain into your system. Physical labour that drives too much strain through your body, or eight hours at a screen, head forward, no awareness that you have a body below the neck. Habits that override hunger, fatigue, or the need for a break tend to start early and run deep. Your body never gets the space to come out of the strain.
Repetitive force. And some strains include adding force into your body: cyclists, cricketers, musicians, hairdressers, bricklayers. You might love how you are using your body, but force channelled in one direction for years shapes the tissue around it, and without coming out of that, the body gradually forgets its neutral design. One set of muscles stays switched on and never truly rests; another set loses its range. Either way, it feeds the same message: I can't just rest.
And let's be real, most people don't have one of these, they have a host of them. Some people grew up in households where living in a state of activation was simply the norm. And maybe your work is like that now, or you have to do lots of driving, or 'relax' by collapsing on the sofa. Your body is dynamic, it is always adapting to what you are experiencing. It needs the opportunity to come out of threat into safety and reorganise around healthy dynamics.
When the Cycle Doesn't Finish: Allostatic Load
All of these patterns accumulate. Which is why, when someone finally comes to see a practitioner about a shoulder that won't settle or a jaw that aches by mid-afternoon, what they're bringing isn't one problem. It's years of layered activation patterns that have become their normal. There's a word for that: allostatic load.
Researchers Bruce McEwen and Peter Gianaros have spent decades mapping what they call allostatic load: what happens when stress becomes chronic, unpredictable, or unresolved, and the body's stress machinery runs without recovery. Their model describes the cost accumulating in stages:
Strain. Stress hormones stay elevated. Sleep fragments. Baseline inflammation creeps upward.
Structural bracing. The body lays down supporting tissue along lines of chronic tension, so a temporary posture of defence edges toward becoming semi-permanent.
Exhaustion. The HPA axis wears down. Some people end up wired, unable to switch off even when exhausted. Others end up flat, running on fumes no amount of sleep seems to fix. Many oscillate between the two.
Allostatic overload. Decades of accumulated cost. The system conserves energy, holds its boundaries tight, and starts treating new demands, even "good" ones like hard exercise, as further threats. Your system is carrying too much, and any extra is just the last straw.
By this stage, being in protective mode isn't something you do anymore. It's where you live: room three and four, it's what your nervous system has learned to inhabit.
Why Willpower Isn't the Way Out
Many people at this stage try to override it, telling themselves to calm down, and they do everything they can to 'fix' the problem: diets, workouts, supplements, endless therapy, and visiting every bodyworker they can find.
But you can't boss your biology out of a state it entered for protective reasons. And as Perry Nickelston of Stop Chasing Pain often points out in his trainings, an overwhelmed system is easily overwhelmed, and that includes doing too many 'good' things to help your body.
Pushing harder just confirms the emergency. It creates friction between a self that says get over it and a biology that says this is not the moment. The part of your brain that believes willpower is the answer is not the part of your brain asking for safety.
Which brings us to the paradox worth sitting with: the pattern doesn't shift because you defeated it, or thought your way out of it. It releases because a cycle completes, and your body deactivates. And that completion happens when your brainstem registers enough safety, enough settling, that holding on stops making sense. Safety isn't something you can force. It's something your nervous system recognises and responds to.
The conditions where that recognition becomes possible are what the rest of this series explores.
For now, try this: sit quietly for sixty seconds and notice where you're holding right now. Jaw? Shoulders? Belly? Don't try to relax anything. Just witness it, as though you're meeting yourself for the first time, without judgment. What happens? Stay with it some more. That kind of awareness is a genuinely trainable skill, and it becomes a surprisingly powerful process when someone trained in this skill brings it to your body: your body tends to respond favourably.
If you're in Wellington, book in here. And if you're not, the next post in this series looks at why this kind of work can't be done entirely alone.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and self-exploration purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Sonia Ogier is a somatic practitioner, not a licensed medical doctor. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any medical conditions or health concerns.
