Tension & Stress

Excess tension is a sign that your body and nervous system are out of balance. It can feel like you’re compressed or stretched or wound up in a tight ball. Many people have a strong sense of how tension and stress go hand in hand.

How tension becomes structural

The body’s stress response is a powerful and sophisticated way of meeting challenges. When a demand arises, like a difficult conversation, a deadline or sprinting for a bus, the nervous system activates, muscles tighten, breath shallows and attention narrows. This is appropriate. The problem comes when the demand doesn’t fully resolve or there are lots of things coming at you all at once. Your body doesn’t have the opportunity to properly unwind.

Over years the left-over tension settles into your body as structural tension. Your shoulders stay elevated. Your jaw doesn’t release fully overnight. Your breath remains shallow, even at rest. The muscles of your back and neck stay switched on and “guarded” and don’t ease with a normal night’s sleep or a weekend away. Your body has learned to be braced. That learning is held not in the mind, but in the spine and nervous system.

How we approach this

Working with tension and stress through the spine and nervous system is different to working with it through the mind. Mediation, breathwork and cognitive approaches are valuable, but they work top-down, attempting to manage a system that largely operates beneath conscious control.

Network Spinal works directly with your spine and nervous system where the tension and holding patterns are held. Gentle contacts help your body to recognise where it is holding on and to let go. Over time many patients find that their baseline level of tension shifts because their body has let go of patterns it no longer needs to maintain.

→ Stress & Anxiety – when stress shows up as more than tension

→ How Network Spinal works

What people notice

During a session many people feel themselves sinking into the table as well as taking deeper breaths. This is the nervous system beginning to relax its vigilance. Over time you notice less tension in your neck and shoulders, a feeling of physical ease and a sense of “coming home” into your body.

The body can learn to let go

Your first visit begins with a conversation about where the tension is, the key stresses you’ve experienced and what you’ve tried. No referral needed. First visits are available at lunchtimes throughout the week and some evenings.