National Relaxation Day is, this coming weekend, August 15th, which seems like a good excuse to ask a deceptively simple question:
Do you actually know how to relax?
Have you ever gone for a massage and been so tense that the massage therapist asks, “Why are you so tense?” Maybe you didn’t even realize you were that tense until they asked you. The funny thing about tension is that when you’ve been carrying it around long enough, it doesn’t necessarily feel like tension anymore.
It just feels normal.
Most of us know what we mean when we say we’re going to do something relaxing. We watch television. Scroll through our phones. Play a game. Read. Shop. Have a drink. Go on vacation. Many of these have one thing in common: a focus on the external world.
Some of those things may genuinely help us relax, as sometimes looking away from a stressor for a little while can help. But it doesn’t necessarily help when you have to face that stressor again. Perhaps true relaxation that builds resilience requires something opposite from these external pursuits.
Are You Relaxing—or Distracting Yourself?
There is a difference between getting relief from stress and actually entering a more relaxed state. The distinction has become increasingly interesting to me in my work as a therapist. I’ve watched people begin to recognize that some of the things they reach for when they’re stressed can actually leave them more stimulated. A screen can temporarily take your mind off whatever is bothering you while simultaneously giving your brain an entirely new stream of information to process, at times having the opposite effect from what you intended.
You may no longer be thinking about the thing that stressed you out, and that temporary relief can feel good. But do you ever stop to ask, “What’s happening in my body right now?” What’s happening in your jaw, your neck, your shoulders? Do you notice the effects of your breathing patterns? Does your mind feel more full or less full? Louder or quieter? Is there more “space” inside you? Or do you simply want the next thing?
This isn’t an argument that television, phones, games, or other distractions are bad. Sometimes distraction is useful, especially if you feel like a raw nerve. The problem tends to arise when that is the only strategy you have to relax because at some point, your inner cup will become too full and the steam will come out one way or another. Sometimes we need to go deeper and take a different approach in order to truly relax.
“You Need to Relax”
Have you ever noticed how irritating it can be when someone tells you to relax? Perhaps that’s about more than simply not liking being told what to do. Some part of us may intuitively understand: Just saying it doesn’t make it happen.
“Relax.” “Calm down.” “Don’t worry.” “Go to sleep.”
These are instructions directed toward states that aren’t particularly responsive to commands. Perhaps the instruction is coming from the wrong person and being directed toward the wrong part of you—your mind rather than your body, the part that needs to relax.
Someone else telling your thinking mind to relax rarely has the effect they want it to have anyway. These instructions may work better when they come from ourselves, to ourselves.
Despite this, the irritation you experience when someone tells you to relax may also be telling you that they’re right. So perhaps the self-caring thing to do is not reject the message simply because it irritated you, but to find a quiet corner for a time-out so your body can discover how.
Relaxation Is a State, Not an Activity
So perhaps relaxation isn’t best defined by what you’re doing. Instead, perhaps it’s about noticing what is happening inside you and learning how to use your breath as a kind of pressure-release valve.
Your autonomic nervous system is continually helping your body respond to changing demands. Stress and perceived threat can mobilize us for action, while parasympathetic processes support settling, restoration and recovery. Robert Sapolsky explores the consequences of prolonged human stress beautifully in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Unlike a zebra responding to an immediate predator, human beings can generate and sustain stress responses through memory, anticipation, relationships, work, uncertainty and thoughts about things that haven’t even happened yet.
Our bodies participate in all of it, and that brings us back to that massage table. You may not consciously be thinking, I’m under threat, but your jaw might have something to say about that—along with your neck, your shoulders and the pace of your breathing.
What Happens When You Stop Running From Tension?
Our natural response to discomfort is often to get away from it. Something uncomfortable arises internally and our attention moves somewhere else. Sometimes that’s exactly what we need in the immediate moment to get through something.
A problem can arise when we don’t return later to be with that charge.
If distraction becomes our primary means of regulating ourselves, we don’t get much opportunity to discover a way to provide not just temporary relaxation, but relief from stress in a deeper, somatic way. This is where my understanding of how to relax intersects with somatic work. Instead of immediately asking, why am I tense?
I often begin somewhere much simpler:
What am I experiencing in my body right now? Maybe there is pressure or tightness in your shoulders or neck. Perhaps you feel hot, heavy, restless, notice a clenched jaw or become aware of shallow breathing. These can all be subtle signs of stress.
You don’t have to understand the sensation yet. You don’t even have to change it.
First, you have to notice it.
The Way Out May Not Always Be Away
One of the ideas that influenced the way I work with internal experience comes from meditation practices described in The Mind Illuminated: learning to distinguish an unpleasant sensation from our reaction to that sensation.
That distinction—and the fact that we have a capacity for self-reflection and self-influence—often gets lost under stress and pressure. Later, however, comes the rumination. What would it be like to stay out of the story and just “be with” that unpleasant sensation? What would it be like to stop running from the signal and turn toward it, remaining present with it without judgment? That doesn’t mean overwhelming ourselves or forcing ourselves to endure something intolerable. It means becoming curious about what is happening and discovering whether we can stay in contact with ourselves for another breath, and then another, just right here, right now.
This is one reason I use breath and body awareness in therapy—and to manage my own stress.
Learning to Relax by Attending to Yourself
Years ago, while studying holistic health at San Francisco State University, I was introduced to practices including autogenic training, visualization and other approaches to mind-body awareness. Over time, those ideas became integrated with my training and work as a therapist.
One of the things I teach people is remarkably simple: Attend to yourself.
Not analyze yourself. Not fix yourself.
Attend.
The breath gives us somewhere to begin. We can slow down and notice what’s happening in the body while using the breath as an anchor for attention. Breathing is one of the few body processes that happens automatically and can also be consciously influenced. Thus, it can become a bridge to our internal world—physically, but also mentally, emotionally and perhaps even spiritually. Something interesting can happen as we become more capable of tolerating sensation: we may become more capable of tolerating what emerges alongside it.
Can You Tolerate Not Knowing?
Internal sensations can be strange. They don’t always arrive with explanations. A tight chest doesn’t come with a little label explaining precisely why it’s there. That means body awareness also asks us to develop another capacity: Can I experience something without immediately knowing what it means?
That tolerance for the unknown can become a doorway. The body gives us a sensation. Attention allows us to remain with it by gently bringing our attention back to the breath, without judgment, when we notice we’ve wandered off.
Gradually, something that had been outside our awareness may become available to us. This is where somatic work begins to meet psychodynamic work. Instead of immediately explaining away our experience, we become curious about what may be underneath it.
Relaxation and the Process of Becoming
This also connects with psychologist Carl Rogers’ idea of becoming increasingly open to experience.
Being open to experience requires some capacity to tolerate the experience you’re opening yourself to. Somatic work can provide a bridge that helps us tolerate our inner experiences when we have experienced trauma, have reasons to be anxious, or perhaps our wiring is simply more sensitive than most, as can sometimes be the case for highly sensitive or neurodivergent people.
If your internal world feels overwhelming, frightening or foreign, shutting it out makes sense. So does distraction. Being defensive sometimes makes sense too.
These ways of being have been doing something for you.
The goal isn’t simply to rip those protections away. The work is to develop enough capacity that they aren’t always necessary anymore.
As we become better able to experience sensations, feelings, perceptions and thoughts without immediately becoming overwhelmed by them, we create more room for what Rogers described as the ongoing process of becoming.
There is more of ourselves available to us. And perhaps that’s one reason genuine relaxation can feel so spacious. We’re using less energy fighting ourselves.
Even if you’ve got it all going on in life and you only found yourself here because you were hoping for some late-summer tips on how to relax, I would still recommend experimenting with this process.
It might just take you to the next level.
Try It for Yourself
If this type of practice is available to you, please consult your doctor first if you have heart problems or other medical concerns that could make breath practices unsafe for you.
Sit back and allow your body to sink into the chair beneath you. If it’s comfortable, let your head rest back so you don’t have to work quite so hard to hold yourself up.
Close your eyes, or simply lower your gaze if you prefer, allowing your attention to move away from the outside world and toward your internal sensations.
Take a slow breath in through your nose. Then breathe out through your mouth, allowing the exhalation to become slightly slower and longer than the inhalation.
Begin noticing your body. Start with your feet and slowly work your attention upward toward your knees, hips and torso. Don’t change anything yet. Just notice.
Continue breathing.
Now bring your attention to your jaw, your neck and your shoulders.
Where are you holding yourself?
Allow your attention to settle on the area that feels tightest or most uncomfortable. Take another slow breath in.
Now use your imagination. Imagine—as if it really could—that the relaxation carried by your breath travels directly toward that place.
As you exhale, imagine some of the tension leaving with your breath. Or perhaps imagine the tension draining downward through your body and out through the bottoms of your feet.
Breathe in and notice. Breathe out and release.
If it feels comfortable, pause briefly at the top of the inhalation and notice the tiny movements in your body—the expansion across your back, the movement of your shoulders, the subtle shifting of muscles.
Your mind will wander. That’s just what minds do.
When you notice it, return to your breath. Try not to judge yourself. You may become more aware of tension before you become less tense.
Stay curious.
If the experience remains manageable, see what happens when you don’t immediately move away from it. Take another breath and another exhalation. Notice the micro-movements and notice what changes.
There is nothing you have to accomplish.
This is an exploration, not an evaluation.
And if the experience becomes uncomfortable, stay curious about what you’re noticing without forcing yourself beyond what feels manageable. When you’re ready, open your eyes, move your body in whatever way feels comfortable or naturally desirable, and bring your attention back to the room around you.
This lays some of the groundwork for what therapists can help you do in therapy. Relaxation isn’t necessarily the deep work itself. It can help prepare us for the deep work.
When we’re already overwhelmed by stress, anxiety or uncomfortable sensations in the body, we may not have much capacity left to explore what lies underneath them. Learning how to relax, attend to the body and remain present with internal sensations can help us build that capacity.
Over time, we may become more able to stay present when something uncomfortable, unfamiliar or not-yet-known begins to emerge. Rather than immediately needing to escape, explain or shut it down, there is a little more room to be curious.
That increased tolerance gives us a stronger foundation from which to explore the deeper layers of our experience—the feelings, memories, conflicts, associations and patterns that may be more difficult to approach when our system is already overwhelmed.
This is where I see somatic work laying the groundwork for deeper psychodynamic and relational work. The breath doesn’t uncover the unconscious for us. It can help us develop the internal steadiness and strength needed to explore what we might find there.
Often, even a simple practice like this can help us reset. But repeated practice can also build something more sustainable: our capacity to stay present with ourselves.
If you’re struggling to reset on your own, know you have stress coming up, or you’re trying to take yourself to the next level in business or life, I can help.
The Goal Isn’t to Need a Therapist Forever
That being said, there is an important difference between doing an exercise from a page and doing this kind of work with another person who is skilled at helping you become aware of yourself.
Subtle tension and holding patterns in the head, neck and shoulders can point toward how much stress we might be carrying; for others, the body may hold tension somewhere else. When I guide someone through an experience like this in therapy, I’m not simply reading instructions.
I’m attending to those subtle cues too—watching, noticing and adjusting the prompts I might give based on the shifts I’m seeing. It becomes a personally guided experience.
Sometimes when a person approaches an internal sensation, the tension increases, and I might notice that before they do. When you’re with someone you trust, the body may be able to surrender more easily to your own mind’s directions within that collaborative experience.
Another person can also sometimes help us remain in this self-noticing state of curiosity and compassion longer than we might on our own.
This truly isn’t easy if things have been building up in there for a while.
I cannot take the journey for you. But I can lend some courage while you brave the unknown—that dark void within—and I can hold up a light while you explore it.
Then, over time, something else should happen.
These practices build upon themselves. The more you practice attending to yourself, the more familiar the process can become.
You become increasingly able to do it for yourself.
That matters enormously to me.
My hope isn’t that someone becomes increasingly dependent upon me to regulate, understand or reassure them. I want the opposite. I want my clients to leave with the capacity to attend to themselves in a sustainable way.
Eventually, I hope to make myself increasingly obsolete in your life as these experiences build upon one another.
Not because you will never struggle again, but because when struggle comes, there is a stronger relationship waiting for you.
That’s your relationship with yourself.
So, Are You Actually Relaxing?
This National Relaxation Day, try taking the walk. Close your computer for a while and turn off as much outside noise as you reasonably can.
And just BE.
Close your eyes. If discomfort begins to arise, notice whether you can ride that wave for a little while and breathe.
And if that doesn’t work fully in this moment, get a massage and try again. Read a book instead of spending the evening in the quiet stress of your screens. Or simply enjoy a distraction for what it is: a distraction.
Then, when you finally decide to experiment with truly relaxing, try one more thing. Before reaching for whatever comes next, notice your jaw, your neck and shoulders, your breathing, your thoughts and whether there is a sense of urgency inside you.
Then ask:
Do I feel different now?
Can I try to move and speak from this more spacious, light, soft and quiet state that came from this experiment?
And if that massage therapist ever asks you again, “Why are you so tense?” maybe you don’t need to know why just yet.
Perhaps you can see the tension for what it is: a cue to pause.
Take a few slow breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, allowing the exhalation to become longer and slower than the inhalation.
Bring your attention toward the tension with compassion and kindness.
Repeat.
Happy National Relaxation Day!
Please share this far and wide. I have a feeling this experiment is worth repeating over and over again.
Warmly,
Amy Ratkovich LMFT 124308
Books & References
Some book links below are affiliate links. If you purchase through one of these links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
- Sapolsky, Robert M. — Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Sapolsky’s work provides much of the stress-physiology backdrop for this article: human beings can maintain physiological stress responses not only in response to immediate events, but through anticipation, memory, social experience and chronic psychological stress.
- Benson, Herbert, with Miriam Z. Klipper — The Relaxation Response Benson’s work helped establish the idea of a physiological “relaxation response” as a counterpart to stress-related activation. His research grew partly from studying physical manifestations of stress in cardiology patients and became foundational to the development of mind-body medicine.
- Yates, John (Culadasa), with Matthew Immergut and Jeremy Graves — The Mind Illuminated This meditation manual influenced my thinking about attention to internal experience, particularly the practice of observing bodily sensation and learning to distinguish the sensation itself from our reactions to it.
- van der Kolk, Bessel — The Body Keeps the Score This book helped popularize an embodied understanding of trauma and the importance of recognizing that psychological experience is also experienced through the body.
- Rogers, Carl R. — On Becoming a Person Rogers’ ideas about openness to experience and the ongoing “process of becoming” inform the relational side of this article. I am particularly interested in what becomes possible when we develop greater capacity to remain present with our own experience rather than automatically defending against it.
Research & Further Reading
- Fincham, G. W., Strauss, C., Montero-Marin, J., et al. (2023). “Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials.” Scientific Reports, 13, 432. Across 12 randomized controlled trials involving 785 adults, breathwork was associated with a statistically significant small-to-moderate reduction in self-reported stress compared with controls. The authors also found reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms, while cautioning that much of the research had a moderate risk of bias and that stronger studies are still needed. Read the study
- Fincham, G. W., Strauss, C., & Cavanagh, K. (2023). “Effect of coherent breathing on mental health and wellbeing: a randomised placebo-controlled trial.” Scientific Reports, 13, 22141. This randomized trial compared approximately 5.5 breaths per minute with a matched attention control over four weeks. It’s particularly relevant to the article because it tests deliberate slow breathing rather than treating “relaxation” as a vague concept. Read the study
- Price, C. J., & Hooven, C. (2018). “Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy.” Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798. This one is very close to your formulation. The authors describe interoceptive awareness as learning to identify, access and appraise internal bodily signals and propose that these capacities can improve physical and emotional awareness and emotion regulation. They specifically discuss the difficulty some people with stress or trauma can have attending to internal bodily experience and the value of scaffolding that capacity. Read the study
- Treves, I. N., et al. (2025). “A meta-analysis of the effects of mindfulness meditation training on self-reported interoception.” Scientific Reports. Across 29 randomized controlled trials with 2,191 participants, mindfulness interventions produced small-to-moderate improvements in self-reported interoception, with improvements related to reductions in psychological distress. This supports the part of your article concerned with deliberately developing the ability to notice and remain in contact with internal bodily experience. Read the study
- National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — “Coping with Traumatic Stress Reactions.” The VA recommends breathing exercises, muscle relaxation and meditation while also noting an important complication: focusing inward can initially increase distress for some people, particularly when attention lands on disturbing bodily sensations. Their recommendation to practice in manageable amounts fits nicely with the safety language in your exercise. Read the VA guidance
