Why You Can’t Relax
On unprocessed emotion, incomplete responses, and a framework to help.
The thumbnail said Why you Can’t Relax and I clicked. Catchy. But mainly because it’s from one of my YouTube guilty pleasures, Chase Hughes, a behavioural science expert, among many other things.
The entire lecture is buried under really dramatic and stressful (ironic) music, so I copied the transcript, whittled out most of the money metaphors (stressful) and highlighted what I think are his core ideas. Which are really good.
What follows is a summary of his framework: what happens when emotional responses don't complete, what that does to the body over time, and what actually helps.
This one is for anyone who’s “doing the work”, or helping others do theirs.
Stored as state, not memory
He starts with this: every intense emotion that didn’t get to complete itself, grief, rage, sadness, anxiety you had to smile through, went somewhere. It didn’t dissolve. It got stored.
One of the most useful distinctions he makes is that unprocessed emotion is not stored as memory so much as state. That means when something resurfaces, you are not necessarily remembering the original event. You may be re-entering the physiological state that never got to finish.
I like this because it explains why processing does not always require remembering. In breathwork, memories sometimes come forward, but they do not need to. The body can process what is there without the whole thing turning into a dramatic excavation of the past.
The response needs to complete
When something threatening or emotionally significant happens, the nervous system mobilises a response: fight, flight, freeze. We all know this.
That might look like fighting back, running, crying, reaching for help, or shutting down, whatever the body needs to do to protect itself. If that response can complete, and complete is the whole point here, the charge may dissipate and the system can return towards baseline. But if the body moves into a fight, flight, freeze, or collapse sequence and cannot finish it, that activation can remain unresolved.
I loved this because we hear so much about nervous system regulation, but not nearly as much about what it means for a nervous system response to complete.
The Consequences
Before he gets to the solutions, he lays out what unresolved emotion does to the system when a response does not complete.
The nervous system becomes easier to trigger, while your capacity to stay calm, think clearly and keep perspective drops. You become more reactive, less reflective, more impulsive and less patient. These are useful things to observe in yourself, and also useful for recognising what may be sitting underneath certain behaviours in others.
Cortisol stays chronically elevated, which can of course affect sleep, immunity, memory, inflammation, digestion…the whole shebang.
The body also responds physically, contributing to things like visceral fat storage and accelerated ageing. We don’t need that.
And it does not stay contained to the body. This is the worst consequence. Unprocessed emotion starts organising other parts of life around itself, including habits, relationships, work patterns and identity, until management of the state starts to look like personality.
Coping
Coping behaviours are not weakness, they are strategy. So obviously alcohol and drugs, but also scrolling, overworking, performing, hiding (my personal favourite), overextending in relationships, being the most helpful person in the room and so on. All of these can be ways of managing feelings that feel too much to sit with.
The problem is not that they do not work. The problem is that they do work, but they do not resolve anything.
The First Principle: Perspective
Even though he doesn’t call it this, I’m calling it the first principle because he describes perspective as the “active ingredient” inside everything that actually moves unprocessed emotion.
Perspective is not optimism or positive mindset. He means a literal shift in vantage point. The new perspective you get when you move from being fully inside something to viewing it from another angle, so you can literally see it differently.
He lists the things he thinks are able to get this done: cognitive behavioural therapy, although he comments on how long this takes, somatic work, breathwork, psychedelics, he specifically mentions DMT, mushrooms, LSD and MDMA, meditation, Trauma Releasing Exercises, and the associated tremors.
I would add one thing from my own experience. Just as you do not need to remember the original event, you may not need to fully understand the perspective shift while it is happening. Sometimes it is enough to step outside your usual pattern, or to have an experience powerful enough to interrupt it. The interruption itself can create the shift.
So yes, the first principle is perspective shift. Get enough distance from the program to see that you are in one.
The Five Step Framework
The first move is to see the pattern.
This is not about digging up the past. It is about noticing the patterns you experience in the present.
Where do you react disproportionately. Which feelings do you avoid in predictable ways. Does rest feel uncomfortable, or even unsafe. Is there chronic tension in the body with no clear explanation…
You do not need to know where it started. You only need to be honest about how it is showing up now.
As with all first steps, this is huge. So many of us have been masking, protecting, defending and coping for so long, it can be hard to see our own patterns.
The second move is to name what you do instead of feel.
Scrolling, overworking, performing, controlling, helping, withdrawing, procrastinating, self-medicating, staying busy. Whatever your version is, name it.
People ask me how I stopped scrolling. The first thing I did was tell people, and myself, that I had a scrolling addiction. I named it. Makes for great conversation by the way.
And no one is free of this. No one has cleared every unprocessed emotion and emerged fully resolved. Be dubious of the person who says, “I’ve done my work.” This is ongoing. Layers, degrees, perspective shifts, interruptions, releases. The difference is not whether you have patterns. It is whether you can see them and name them as they appear.
The third move is to let the body finish.
This is the most important move in the framework.
The emotions stored in the body are not memories, they are unfinished movements. The fight that could not happen. The escape that was not possible. The cry or scream that was held back. The collapse you never got to surrender to. The loving touch you did not receive at the most vulnerable moment. The body has been holding the shape of those incomplete responses ever since.
These things do not resolve through analysis alone. The body has to be allowed to complete.
That does not mean it has to complete in the same way it was interrupted. You do not need to literally scream or run. It more often looks like shaking, trembling, crying, making sound, non-linear movement or some other type of physical release.
But this cannot happen from inside overwhelm. There has to be enough stability to feel what is there without being swallowed by it.
My own Grinberg method practitioner is against screaming into a pillow, or anything else highly activating to the nervous system, because those intense actions can easily re-enact the old state rather than transform it. The goal is to stay present while observing and letting the body soften into it.
This is one of the most profound ways conscious connected breathwork can help the body heal. Anyone who has had a real breakthrough session will have experienced some form of completion. Often it comes in the form of catharsis or crying, but it can express in many ways. I have seen clients with bodily tremors, shakes, sounds, all of it, often immediately followed by states of profound lightness, bliss, or joy. It’s incredible that the breath can guide you there.
The fourth move is to stop overriding.
Stop immediately overriding what you are feeling when you feel something bad, hard, strong. This becomes much easier once you have already seen your patterns and named your strategies.
His suggestion here is very simple. When something arrives, pause. Let it register. You do not need to fully process it there and then, but you do need to stop cutting yourself off from it so quickly. Even 10 seconds is a big something.
Every time you override what you are feeling, you add to what is being stored. We do not want compounding.
The fifth move is to get a witness.
This is so important. I love that he spoke on this. It speaks to the art of holding space, and to why healing so rarely happens entirely on a solo journey.
A lot of our unprocessed emotion was experienced in isolation. You were alone with something that was too big for you. So it makes sense that the discharge process often needs another person present, the witness.
The witness is not a fixer or a reframer. Literally just someone to sit with you without interrupting your process, being there and keeping you safe.
When somebody is holding space for you without flinching and without fixing anything, they become like a little mirror, he says. In that mirror, you can finally see what has been moving through you without being consumed by it. It is the thing that most people needed when we were young and didn’t get. We needed to be seen and witnessed, and so we need it now to discharge what is still there.
This is another really beautiful aspect of 1:1 breathwork that I find so powerful. Not to interrupt, just to breathe alongside someone and witness them in their process.
What I appreciate about this framework is that he gives some gritty language to what many people are touching on inside the nervous system healing lexicon.
Here is the video link if you want the long, loud, money metaphors version.
He’s also confirming what I genuinely believe: that this is the core of the work most of us need to do right now, not to become better, but to become freer.
If you’re curious about exploring 1:1 breathwork as a way in and through, I’d love to hear from you.
Emily
xo
This is me!!! When my dad died I shut off a big part of me. I refused to cry at the funeral and I told a co-worker to spread the word at work that I did not want to talk about it and my siblings and I never discussed it. And there was certainly not any discussion with my mother as she was quite bitter and made it known when he left her for another woman that he left all of us, me in particular, at the same time.
I need 1:1 breath work!! 💙