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Why forcing calm can increase tension
You are anxious, tense or overwhelmed, so you try to calm yourself down.
You take deep breaths. You tell yourself to relax. You try to let go of the tightness in your chest and the racing thoughts in your mind. Instead of calming down, you feel worse.
The tension increases. The anxiety spikes. You are now stressed about being stressed, and the whole thing spirals.
If this has happened to you, you have come up against one of the paradoxes of the nervous system: trying to force calm often creates more tension.
The harder you push, the more resistance you create
When you try to force yourself to relax, you are effectively fighting against what your nervous system is doing.
Your body is activated for a reason. It has detected something it perceives as a threat and is doing exactly what it is designed to do: preparing you to respond.
When you try to override that response by telling yourself to calm down, you create a conflict. One part of you is saying, There is danger while another is saying, No there is not. Stop reacting.
Your nervous system does not interpret that as reassurance. It simply registers more effort, more urgency and more tension.
The result is that you become more activated, not less.
You can not demand calm from a nervous system that is on alert
Your nervous system does not take orders from your conscious mind.
It responds to what it perceives. If it still perceives a threat, even when you consciously know there is not one, it will continue generating an alarm response until it has a reason to stand down.
Telling yourself to calm down is not that reason. It is simply more effort.
When you try to force calm, you& are adding another layer of pressure on top of the activation that is already there. Unsurprisingly, the whole system works harder rather than softer.
This is why breathing exercises sometimes backfire, why meditation can feel impossible when you are already anxious, and why just relax; is one of the least helpful things someone can say.
It is not that those tools do not work. It's that they rarely work when they are being used to override or suppress what your body is doing.
What actually helps
Instead of trying to force calm, it usually helps to stop fighting the activation.
That does not mean giving in to anxiety or letting it spiral. It means recognising that your body is responding in the way it believes it needs to, and working with that rather than against it.
Sometimes that means allowing the tension to be there while you get on with what you are doing.
Sometimes it means giving your nervous system different information through movement, grounding or a change of environment, rather than demanding it switch off.
Then, sometimes it means working with the subconscious to update the pattern that is triggering the response in the first place, so the alarm no longer keeps sounding automatically.
Hypnotherapy works at that deeper level. Not by forcing calm, but by giving the nervous system new experiences that allow it to recalibrate what actually warrants an alarm response.
The changes that last are not the ones you force. They are the ones your nervous system learns through experience, where calm becomes the natural state rather than something you have to work to maintain.
Trying less, not more
It feels counterintuitive, but often the way to reduce tension is to stop trying so hard to get rid of it.
Not because effort does not matter, but because forcing calm creates the very thing you are trying to escape.
When you stop fighting what your nervous system is doing and, where appropriate, address the underlying pattern that is causing it to react in the first place, the tension often eases on its own.
Not because you demanded it.
Because the system no longer has a reason to hold it.
Sound familiar?
If you have been trying everything to feel calmer and it has only left you feeling more frustrated, it may be time to take a different approach.
If you would like to know more about how hypnotherapy works, or whether it is likely to help in your situation, just get in touch. You can use the contact form on my website or email me directly, whatever is easiest.
There i;s no pressure, just a conversation about what has been going on for you and whether I can help.