A short YouTube video by James Laughlin explaining how chronic bodily tension reflects nervous system dysregulation. The speaker describes 'freeze' held in the musculoskeletal system, explains that relaxing the body sends safety signals to the brain, and contrasts sympathetic vs parasympathetic activity—arguing imbalance (too much sympathetic activation) is common and observable in clients.
If you are holding tension in your body, that's that flight or freeze. The freeze is in your musculoskeletal system. You're holding this tension. You are sending signals to your brain to keep you in a stress state. As soon as you relax your body, you are sending signals to your brain, hey, everything is all right. And this is just simple stuff that people can do in real time. And we hold a lot of tension, man. With the clients I'm working with, you can see it. They're just sitting there holding this tension. You say, hey, just. Just relax your jaw and your shoulders. And they go, oh, what's that all about? Didn't even know they were doing it. Yeah, well, that's a sign of nervous system dysregulation. Spending too much time in that sympathetic part of your nervous system, which we need. Again, the sympathetic's good or bad, and the parasympathetic is not good or bad. It's just that it can get imbalanced, just like we have musculoskeletal balance, cardiovascular imbalance, nervous system imbalance. There's imbalance in all of these body systems.
