At some point in the last ten years, I realized I no longer know how to relax. I don’t mean in the cute, candlelit, bubble-bath sense. I mean in the deep, biological, parasympathetic-nervous-system sense. The kind of relaxation that makes your shoulders drop three inches and lets you blink like you’re not guarding state secrets.
Instead, I live in a permanent state of fight-or-flight, minus the actual fighting or fleeing. Mostly, I’m just sitting in a chair, clenching. My phone pings, my shoulders rise. An email comes in, and my stomach drops like I’ve been pushed off a cliff. Someone clears their throat behind me in line at CVS, and I instinctively plan for quarantine.
This, apparently, is the modern condition. We are all running from lions that don’t exist, or usually don’t exist. And the worst part is that no one questions it. We wear our stress like a smartwatch: always on, always tracking, always slightly smug about it. “Oh, I’ve just been so slammed,” we say, as if being overwhelmed were a status symbol.
But there’s something sinister about this constant sympathetic over-stimulation; a term that sounds like a very niche adult film but is, in fact, the medical name for “your body thinks it’s under attack 24/7.”
The sympathetic nervous system is designed for survival. It helps you sprint from bears and hoist cars off toddlers. It’s not supposed to help you scroll through Instagram or attend Zoom meetings. Yet here we are; sprinting and hoisting and hyperventilating our way through group texts and quarterly check-ins.
At this point, even my resting heart rate needs a nap.
I tried yoga, but found myself clenching through the child’s pose and mentally drafting emails while attempting to “breathe into my hips,” a command that has never once made anatomical sense to me. I downloaded a meditation app, but each session felt like speed dating with my own self-loathing. “Welcome,” the voice said warmly, “to Day One of your mindfulness journey.” By minute three, I was thinking about whether I had eggs at home and if my voice sounds weird on voicemail.
All this anxiety is supposed to keep us alive, but for what, exactly? So we can spend longer being anxious? We’re preserving life like it’s a jar of jam we’re never going to eat.
I envy my dog, who lives entirely in the parasympathetic zone. She eats, naps, barks at the mailman (a brief adrenaline spike, followed by another nap), then eats again. She doesn’t ruminate. She doesn’t scroll. She has never once worried that someone misunderstood her tone in a text message. She just is.
Meanwhile, I pace the kitchen like a civil war widow waiting for news from the front, except the front is the Comcast bill and my inbox, and the war is just my brain against itself.
The truth is, we’ve forgotten how to sit still without bracing for disaster. We don’t trust calm. We treat peace like it’s suspicious. And the more we live this way, the further we drift from ourselves. Our real selves, I mean, not the curated persona we upload to the internet or the slightly peppier version we bring to job interviews.
We’re always surviving, never savoring. And the worst part is, we do it so automatically that we don’t even notice. We go to a park, but instead of smelling the roses, we photograph them. We go to a concert and film it for people who aren’t there, while we, who are there, aren’t really.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped living life and started managing it, like an overbooked hotel with poor lighting and one working elevator.
So maybe the real rebellion is not quitting your job to become a goat herder in the Pyrenees or deleting all social media and buying a flip phone. Maybe the real rebellion is pausing. Breathing. Sitting down and doing absolutely nothing; not because you earned it, but because you exist and that’s enough.
Maybe we don’t need more productivity hacks or green juice. Maybe we just need to stop pretending we’re being chased all the time. There’s no lion. There’s just a flower. Smell it, for goodness’ sake. Then maybe sit down and unclench your jaw.
I tried it the other day. Ten minutes on a park bench, phone off, eyes up. I saw a squirrel and felt, if only for a moment, that I was not being hunted. It was glorious. And then, of course, I checked my phone.
But still. Ten minutes. It’s a start.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.