In the previous blog post I unpacked the first of the common beliefs that can make relaxing stressful, namely that relaxing is supposed to be easy. This week, I’m talking about the belief that relaxing is supposed to look a certain way.
Think about what you picture when you envision yourself relaxing? Do you have a specific set of activities that count as relaxing? And how do you picture yourself feeling while you are relaxing?
Most of us have a particular list of activities that we equate with relaxation. These vary from person to person, but often include things like watching TV, reading a book, having a drink with friends, hiking, walking, yoga, doing a puzzle (OK, you got me - this is really my personal list!) But the point is that most of us have a list of things that we think of as restful and that signal to our brain that we are transitioning from adulting to relaxation time. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with having some activities we love and cherish and look forward to. The problem becomes when our list gets too rigid and we close ourselves off to finding joy and space during the remainder of our day because we’ve created a false dichotomy between “strict relaxation time” and “strict work time.” And this is where we get into the emotional aspect of relaxation as well.
The second and trickier of the two beliefs that a lot of us have about relaxation is thinking that we need to be feeling a certain way while relaxing. We usually believe that relaxing needs to involve pleasure, fun, joy, and just general lack of negative emotions. I mean, makes sense right – how can something be relaxing if you are feeling terrible while doing it?
The problem with that belief is that it creates the unrealistic expectation that human beings can spend long periods of time in joyful bliss without any unmanaged thoughts or feelings coming up. As I mentioned in the prior post, human brains are always working overtime and coming up with a wide variety of thoughts, some of which are positive and some of which are not so great. And while sometimes we are able to not engage with the negative thoughts for a period of time, it’s unrealistic to think that we will frequently be able to have long and uninterrupted periods of calm and bliss. And when we set that as the expectation, we are taken aback whenever those unpleasant emotions come up, and we usually pile a bunch of guilt and shame on top of them, because we blame ourselves for “ruining our relaxation time” and for “being bad at resting.”
Suppressing our normal flow of thoughts and emotions is kind of like trying to control the weather, and being upset and ashamed when the weather inevitably changes. If, instead of blaming ourselves for having a normal flow of feelings, we learn to lean into the flow and work with it, our relationship to relaxation would shift tremendously. And it will also shift our view of the false dichotomy between relaxing and non-relaxing activities. Because sometimes the same activity can be really joyful and pleasurable when our nervous system isn’t reacting to a threat, or really unpleasant when we feel threatened or are trying to hide from something our brain perceives as dangerous.
For instance, watching TV can be super fun when we don’t feel threatened by anything, but can feel very unpleasant when we are trying to focus on a show while our brain thinks we are in grave danger (even if the danger is an email in our inbox that is creating a bunch of stressful thoughts about ourselves). On the flip side, a work project can be very stressful if we are freaked out that we may fail, but can feel super fun and even relaxing if we are not take the thoughts about us failing too seriously and are choosing to practice thinking what we love about the project instead.
So what this all boils down to is that, despite what we have learned to believe, relaxation doesn’t depend on 1) a specific set of activities or 2) a specific set of feelings. Relaxation comes from leaning into and accepting our normal flow of thoughts and feelings, rather than resisting them. That means, allowing and processing all emotions that come our way, not blaming ourselves for unpleasant feelings, allowing our negative thoughts about ourselves to exist but not immediately believing them, and reminding ourselves that our survival is not threatened by our unpleasant thoughts and feelings. All of that gets our nervous system back to a calmer state regardless of the activity we are engaged in, which is what relaxation is all about!
