The Hidden Science Behind Why You Can't Relax

Have you ever tried meditation, breathwork, or have you got any ice bath and you just notice that your body and your brain just doesn't switch off? Relaxation isn't something you do. It's something that your brain and nervous system allow. If your system has learned that safety equals stillness, then you relax. But if your system has learned that safety equals movement, control, work, then stillness might feel unsafe to you. Today I'm going to show you the neuroscience of why your brain resists calms and what you can do about it. Relaxation is governed by prediction, not willpower. Your brain is constantly trying to predict what's happening inside your body and also what's happening outside of your environment and trying to create a match between those two things. So it's trying to determine how safe and how familiar is your environment. If those predictions mean danger or stress, your nervous system will not downshift. The body is in a state of reflection of predicted survival needs, not your logical desire to rest. So that time at night when you're trying to calm down, your brain is overthinking. It's ruminating. Well, that is your nervous system and your brain still trying to scan for fret, still trying to problem solve so that you can actually feel safe. However, the issue is often this is an escape, and this is a reason of our nervous system continuing in the same pattern. Typically, what happens during a normal stress response is that there's a stressor. The sympathetic nervous activity increases, parasympathetic nervous activity decreases, and then we have a upshift in arousal following the stressor. However, what typically happens is that the stressful nervous system comes back down and the relaxation nervous system comes back up. It sometimes even compensates to make you feel as if you are recovered. However, in times of chronic stress, the brain learns. It learns that threats are going to continue to happen based off old patterns or based off a significant trauma. And this leads to hypervigilance. That hypervigilance means a constant state of sympathetic bias. Your inability to relax is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of calibration. In this state, many people interpret sensations inaccurately. Essentially, in our body, we have a system of interoception, the internal state of our body and how aware we of that. This is the information that's coming from our spinal cord or our vagus nerve up to the brain. And our brain is trying to interpret these bodily signals. If someone's learned that a certain sensation equals vulnerability. Iv in stillness, they notice the heart beating in their chest, or they notice that their breath starts to slow and they start to feel a little bit of air hunger. Of course, the brain is then going to amplify that signal into the frontal cortex via what we call the insula and the acc. And those parts of the brain are interpreting that as a threat. And therefore we're going to feel stressed, we're going to feel anxious. So for some people, the sensations of slowing down might mean heavy chest, soft belly, coil to mind. However, this might feel wrong because they're not familiar with it. Picture this. You're a type A person. You've always been achieving, you've always been pushing, and all of a sudden you get sick and you spend time in bed rest. That bed rest might feel as if you're on edge consistently. This is because your brain is anticipating that you're going to wake up in the morning, go for your heavy workout, has your ice bath, do your wim hof breathing, whatever it is, have your coffee, then going to work all day. And then when you're going to get back, you're going to still continue to sit with your family, you're going to try to do some personal development, maybe even go to the gym again. That has become the prediction. Now, all of a sudden you're laying in bed sick and you're feeling anxious and you're feeling nervous. But perhaps this is actually just your nervous system saying that it's time to reprogram the system, because this has consequences not just to your psyche, but to your physiology in general. Now, breathing patterns themselves, they reinforce these predictive loops. In fact, the body signals are informing our mind, informing our brain, of what should be happening. So, for example, if someone is chronically over breathing, this does two things. Number one, elevated respiratory rate. That elevated respiratory rate continues to secrete more neuroadrenaline from a part of our brain called the locus coeruleus. That then activates the sympathetic nervous system, which then keeps the arousal high. However, chronic over breathing can also lead to a reduction in CO2 levels. This lowers vagal tone and this keeps this parasympathetic activity low and therefore keeps the system on alert. The brain interprets this low of CO2 as symptoms. Sometimes that's tingling, tightness, dizziness, it can be twitching in the fingers, it can actually even ingrain behavioral patterns. I've had an individual who was struggling with burnout and he came to me because he was feeling stressed and overwhelmed and started to notice some issues in his breathing. When I put him on a capnography device which measured his carbon dioxide levels, his Carbon dioxide levels were 30 millimeters per mercury. They typically should be at 35 to 45. So he was low in his CO2 levels. Now, when we tried to get him to pay attention to slow endings, breathing down, and to start to bring in titrate CO2 levels back up to normal range again, what we do in biofeedback, breathing retraining, he noticed that he continually felt the urge to twitch. His legs started to shake, his hands started to move, and in fact, he felt so anxious with this that he said he couldn't feel like he could sit still and pay attention to what he was doing with his breathing. So when I asked this person to get up and walk around, his CO2 levels normalized. In fact, the energy cost and the production of CO2 and the change in breathing has now matched him to make his CO2 levels normal. So he felt as if he was content. This person constantly feels as they have to be doing something. This person constantly feels that they have to be doing hard exercise. This is a behavioral trap, a feedback loop that often is involved with the breathing. When they're under threat and the body is believing it. That threat is stillness. So here's some ideas. Many relaxation tics can actually reinforce feeling like you're trying to control, which is actually just reinforce the behavioral pattern that you're trying to do anyway. So when you try to relax, you engage these networks of control. Someone might actually teach you to start to slow your breathing down. This is typically linked as top down control, top down regulation. However, if you're sitting there and paying attention to your breath and you're trying to calm this via force, then you might be doing the opposite of what you actually want to happen, when really what you want to happen here is just some form of surrender, acceptance. Acceptance for what is not trying to control the breathing, not trying to do anything other than just becoming an observer. This is what we call meditation. However, if we feel as if we can't do this and we have to control then, then obviously what we're going to start to be concerned about is the anxiety that comes up. So there's a couple of things that you can do here. First of all, our nervous system entrains to internal and external environments. And so if we don't feel safe on the internal, what we want to do is change the external. For example, you might choose a bedroom where you feel safe. You might choose a time where you have your family members downstairs or you have your family members around. You might decide that you want to lock the door, turn the lights down, put some scented candles on and put some calm music. You might even want to read a book or a bit of watch a little bit of comedy in that environment. Once you create a pattern of a safe environment, a calm, relaxing environment, maybe that takes a week, two weeks, and just sitting in that space and just being mindful of keeping yourself reading and entertained, eventually your nervous system is going to entrain that this space is safe. And what you can then do is you can bring in your meditation, you can bring in your breathing practices. But a place to start probably wouldn't be something like cadence breathing or slowish breathing or whatever it be. It'll be simply just trying to just observe your breath, trying to allow your breath exhale, just to surrender to it naturally, leaving the body and just noticing on your inhale there's just a natural spark that wants to take an inhale. And when that happens, just allowing it to happen and just building some trust that you can breathe all alone without having to control, without having to act, without having to do something. This is the art of being rather than doing. And when we start to learn to be able to disengage from our breath, we then have choice. And this is the choice between I'm attached to doing something and therefore having to still be in control, or I'm having the choice of consciously deciding that I want to slow my breath, that I want to feel my internal sensations, that I want to relate to these micro movements in my body. And this stillness over time, this gradual exposure is going to teach your nervous system that you can be calm, that you can be safe. It's going to teach that sympathetic tone to come back down and parasympathetic tone to act back on. You're teaching your body to relax. You're teaching your body that it's finally okay to be rather than do so. Next time you can't relax, remember it's not about discipline, it's about your brain protecting yourself. Because it's the only way that it knows. So if you want to dig a little bit deeper into how breathing saves your nervous system, then you can join my community. Or just simply watch the next video on this channel. Check out the link below and check out the school of Breath Science Community. And of course like subscribe and follow for more.