The Lost Art Of Relaxation

Burnt out? Struggling to focus? Living on hyper-alert? You're not alone-in a post-pandemic world, our nervous systems are shot, and a booming industry is looking to cash in. JOANNA ELLNER explores the wellness buzzword of the moment and calls for a radical rethink of relaxation.

- JOANNA ELLNER

"Relax," she whispered, as she poured hot oil down my spine. I'd been waiting-no, clinging on by the fingernails-for this massage, after a particularly intense few months expanding my skincare line, Reome. "Relax." One word that, ostensibly, should have helped my tightly coiled body unfurl. And yet, nothing.

My fingers stayed crunched into a fist; my body, leaden; my mind, running a helpful ticker tape of the things I'd not yet done that day. Relaxed? I was anything but. Not because I didn't want to. I'd just forgotten how.

We've built entire industries around the art of relaxation.

We have all the wellness spas, crystals, heated blankets, sound baths, and Oura rings you could shake a (palo santo) stick at. But collectively, our nerves are more fried than ever. And women are disproportionately impacted. We continue to report higher stress levels, and are more likely to internalise anxiety, while men are more likely to disassociate. "Women are often the emotional containers for their family, too," says Nahid de Belgeonne, a somatic-movement practitioner and author of Soothe: The Book Your Nervous System Has Been Longing For Frankly, it's exhausting.

Could it be that, in the most advanced age in history, we have lost touch with that most primitive of human traits: The ability to wind down? TikTok thinks so. It has been hit with a tidal wave of bio-hacking clips, each offering a new and evermore accessible way to do away with external relaxation tools and hack directly into the motherboard-our nervous system -chiefly through resetting the 'rock-star' vagus nerve.