The Stress-Pain Cycle
We all know stress feels bad. But what if I told you it doesn’t just live in your head or your calendar? It lives in your body.
Here’s the truth: your body responds to stress by tightening muscles, often before your conscious brain is even aware there’s a stressor. That’s biology. It’s your nervous system’s way of bracing, preparing, and protecting. And thank goodness for it. Without that mechanism, we’d all be dead.
But when that bracing becomes chronic - which it often does in our fast-paced, high-information, productivity-focused lives - tension doesn’t just create discomfort, it creates pain.
Here’s an abridged version of how stress ultimately creates all kinds of pain, both chronic and short-lived, explainable and mysterious:
Compressed structures → Tense muscles pull bones and joints out of ease, wearing down cartilage, pinching nerves, or irritating bursa. This lack of balance and alignment causes the system to have to organize in ways that can create further imbalance and more pain, thus creating an endless cycle.
Nerve interference → Your nervous system is the messaging superhighway for every organ in your body. Tension interrupts those messages. Think about the ripple effects of that.
Inflammation overload → Constant tension keeps stress hormones like cortisol running in the background. Over time, that “drip, drip, drip” of stress that Luisa sings about in Encanto adds fuel to the fire of pain, especially if you live with autoimmune conditions.
And honestly? That’s just scratching the surface. The ways stress shows up as pain in the body are countless.
Since pretty much every person in a body has to deal with stress, how do we counter its effects?
That’s where Clinical Somatic Movement comes in. Unlike exercise or stretching (both of which I love very much), this modality of Somatics works directly with your nervous system, the source of chronic tension, through slow, intentional movement. Practices like this can:
Teach your nervous system to release subconscious muscle contraction
Unwind fascial and stress patterns that have built up over years
Rebuild more workable movement pathways so your body has somewhere new to go
That’s right! Release is only part of the picture. Rebuilding with alignment is a vital piece of liberation. Without new ways of doing things, the old tension patterns creep right back in.
In a lot of ways, this movement practice does so much more than relieve you from pain. It helps manage stress, creates a grounding in your body, and shifts your system so it doesn’t have to live in a stress-pain cycle forever.
Stress isn’t always the cause of pain, and I’d like to point out that stress is always present when there is pain - so in many ways, they’re inseparable. They’re part of the same pattern. And you have the ability to change that pattern at any time.
If you’re curious about Clinical Somatic Movement, reach out to me, and I’d be delighted to hear about what you’re dealing with.