When Relaxing Feels Impossible

Relaxation is sold as something simple - light a candle, press play on a soothing playlist, lower yourself into a hot bath and breathe deeply until your body melts. But when your mind is spiraling, your chest is tight, and it feels like the weight of everything has landed on you all at once, none of it hits the way it’s supposed to.

The truth is, there’s a massive difference between not knowing how to relax and knowing exactly what to do - but finding yourself completely unable to do it. The strategies are familiar, almost cliché, but they fall flat when your nervous system is shot and your entire body is bracing for something, even if you can’t name exactly what.

Stress doesn’t always show up in obvious ways. Sometimes it’s a slow unraveling - a breakup that leaves you disoriented, grief that arrives in unexpected waves, or the quiet erosion that happens when your job becomes a daily drain on your energy. And sometimes, it’s all of it at once - a full-blown emotional collapse that makes the idea of “self-care” feel like a cruel joke.

Start With Less - Not Calm, Just Less

When everything feels too loud, too heavy, too much, aiming for “calm” is often too high a bar. What you actually need is something smaller and far more attainable: a moment that feels slightly less suffocating, and a few deep breaths.

So start where you are. Not with enlightenment or tranquility, but with something like unclenching your jaw, rolling your shoulders back, or stepping outside just long enough to feel a shift in air. It’s not about solving anything or even feeling better - it’s about giving your body permission to ease up, just for a second.

Stress makes the world feel unmanageably large. The counter-move is to focus on something deliberately small - walking around the block, sitting still and staring at the ceiling, running your hands under warm water for no reason other than it feels good. These micro-movements might not seem like much, but they are proof that not everything has to be big and hard and heavy.

Redirect the Overthinking

Overthinking thrives in the space left behind by silence. And when you’re overwhelmed, that inner narrative - the one that rewrites every scenario, relives every mistake, imagines every worst-case outcome - gets louder, meaner, more persuasive.

The goal isn’t to silence your brain (because good luck with that), but to give it something else to do. Not something productive or impressive, just something that gently redirects your focus.

This could look like watching cleaning videos that are oddly satisfying, sorting through a junk drawer, replaying a mindless mobile game, or reorganizing your skincare shelf. None of it changes your situation, but it does offer a temporary pause from the internal chaos, which can be more valuable than it sounds.

Accept the Assist

There is zero shame in needing help - especially the soft kind. That might mean calling someone who doesn’t expect you to pretend everything’s fine, curling up with a hot drink that feels vaguely comforting, or taking a gentle supplement that helps your body slow the hell down.

CBD (I like CBDistillery for mine), magnesium, adaptogens, herbal teas, warm showers in total darkness - whatever form that help takes, the goal is never to fix everything in one go. The goal is simply to breathe a little easier, even for five minutes, and remind your system that not every moment has to be a full-blown emergency.

Relief, even in fragments, matters.

Guilt Isn’t a Requirement

One of the cruelest tricks stress plays is convincing you that you’re weak for not being able to “just relax.” That if you were stronger, more grounded, more together, you’d be able to handle this better. But struggling to unwind doesn’t mean you’re broken; it means you’re a human being living through something hard.

This isn’t a weakness to fix. It’s a reality to soften.

So let go of the guilt. Let go of the pressure to be okay. And instead, offer yourself small, quiet kindnesses - not solutions, not tasks, just space to exist without judgment. Give yourself permission to not have the answers, and to take comfort in whatever small, temporary relief you can find.

Sometimes, that’s the most radical thing you can do.