Where Your Body Stores Tension Says a Lot About Your Emotional Health
Your physical health may be more intimately tied to your emotional health than you think. Read on to discover what the tension in your neck, shoulders, hips or back may mean.
When you’re feeling tense and stressed, you may find certain areas are achy, sore, or downright painful. And whether it’s our shoulders, neck, hips, or lower back, it’s often personal — and reoccurring. We start to know our areas of tension like we recognize freckles and birthmarks that dot our body and can even sense it before it truly takes hold.
Tension can be physically uncomfortable, like a weight that constantly contracts our muscles. But what if this collection of stress in the body was about more than just a knot of muscular tension? What if your body’s stress was also tied to your deepest feelings? Experts contend that the places where we hold tension are directly linked to certain repressed emotions – and sussing out where you’re holding tension could hold the key to releasing it once and for all.
Related: When putting together a plan to address your tension, it’s important to consider how proper nutrition supports your stress response.1 Read our most popular deep dives on nutritional powerhouses like the best greens powders, what makes chlorella a superfood, the incredible benefits of wheatgrass, and learn what can spirulina can do for you.
What is Tension in the Body?
Tension is the result of muscles that remain contracted in the body for long periods of time. These places of tension can often cause “knots,” also known as myofascial trigger points, within the muscle tissue. Over time, these knots can cause pain that’s either tender to the touch or constantly radiates.
“Knots are build-ups of lactic acid in the body from over-contracting your muscles,” says Darragh Simon, owner of Trinity Wellness and a licensed massage therapist with over two decades of experience. “You may not realize that you’re contracting your muscles, but your shoulders are creeping up toward your ears and you’re clinching your jaw and when the muscles are tense, blood can’t flow freely to the area.”
Hyper-tensed muscles are caused by mental stress, physical exertion, and bad posture. And lack of blood flow to these places of tension in the body can make matters worse.
The most common place for muscular knots to form is is the trapezius: the triangular muscle that moves from the neck to the shoulders and upper back. Other places of tension often occur in the neck, hips, shoulders, and lower back.
“When you’re stressed, you may also hold tension in the weakest part of your body,” says Simon. “So, for example, if a part of the body has experienced physical trauma, then that’s a place that may experience tension first.”
How Tension in the Body is Tied to Emotional Health
According to Sean Grover, a psychotherapist and author, “stress is a state of psychic tension.”
According to Grover, we’ve long understood the link between body tension and mental stress, evident in age-old phrases like “you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
What’s less-known – and less-understood? That where we hold stress in the body can actually say a lot about which deep-seated emotions we’re repressing.
Neck and Shoulders
Tension in the shoulders is tied to feeling weighted down or burdened by too many responsibilities, says Grover. And for Simon, women more commonly hold stress in their shoulders because they are often balancing the weight of being master multitaskers: working while remaining the primary caregiver in a family.
While the balance is shifting in many homes, Simon says her practice still reflects this phenomenon. If you want to dive deeper, read this article on the reasons your shoulder tension and emotions are so connected.
Hips
The hips are often a place where we hold repressed sexual energy and tension. Tight hips can also symbolize rigidity or inflexibility, says Grover.
If you want to learn more about what your tight hips are telling you, read this article on the remarkable link between tight hips and your emotions.
Lower Back
Grover says that lower back tension is among the most common issues he sees in his practice, associated, he says, with repressed anger. Patients may feel anger toward their boss or their spouse that shows up in the form of lower back pain.
Simon says that lower back pain is also linked to the root chakra, a yogic term for one of the seven spinning centers of energy in the body. The root chakra is tied to fears of your basic survival and needs of food, sleep, shelter, and safety.
How to Address Tension in the Body
While deep and soft tissue massage are a great place to start in terms of breaking up tension, for some, it’s not enough.
“Sometimes it’s just a pill that doesn’t address a larger problem,” says Simon. “Many issues may require a more emotional component.”
Simon is a fan of craniosacral therapy because it provides somatic emotional release in addition to a deep release of fascia.2 With light touch, the practitioner realigns the cerebral fluid to bathe the nervous system and restore balance to the entire body. Simon also recommends Reiki, energy work that can help the body to heal its own energy blockages.
According to Grover, addressing both mental tension and the physical tension it causes takes a three-pronged approach. Therapy, he says, is a good place to start, because it allows you to “exercise your psyche.” He also recommends cardio exercise for thirty minutes at least three times per week. (Cardio has been proven time and time again to vastly reduce anxiety and depression (read, Here’s How to Get The Most Out of Your Cardio Workout.)3 Grover also says that yoga or some form of deep stretching is important to help you break open emotions that are held deep in the body.
Related on Organic Authority
5 Best Dietitian Approved Collagen Supplements, & Powders
Here’s Why We’re Partial to Marine Collagen
Diet Culture is Toxic, According to Dr. Will Cole, Shame Has No Place In Your Diet
The 3 Breathing Techniques That’ll Take Your Yoga Practice to New Heights
Sources
1.https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/stress-and-health/#:~:text=A%20balanced%20diet%20can%20support,help%20to%20regulate%20cortisol%20levels.
2. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/17677-craniosacral-therapy
3. https://adaa.org/living-with-anxiety/managing-anxiety/exercise-stress-and-anxiety
