I Know Everything About Stress. So Why Can’t I Bloody Relax?
At 6am this morning, I got up to meditate.
This was supposed to be the peaceful part of my day. The part before work started, before anyone needed anything from me, before the questions began. Before I had properly entered the world.
Just me, my meditation cushion, and an hour to be still.
Except I wasn’t still.
I’d barely closed my eyes before my brain had opened the first item on today’s list. Not gently. Not as a passing thought. But as an actual task, sitting there waiting for me to process it.
I noticed it happening and tried to bring myself back. To the breath. To the present moment. To literally anywhere except my to-do list.
Relax, Ams.
So I put Joe Dispenza on. I wanted to get out of my head, to connect with something bigger, to enter the quantum field, become present and see what came up for me in the silence.
I wanted to feel nothing.
No body. No one. No thing. No time.
Unfortunately, I was feeling extremely 3D.
I had things to do. Things I wanted to write. Ageless. The stories. Instagram. Which story should I post first? Should I finish the blog? What do I need to do today?
And somewhere in the middle of attempting to become nobody, nowhere, in no time whatsoever, I’d already checked my WHOOP.
HRV: 50.
Recovery: yellow.
I was annoyed. Actually annoyed. At WHOOP. As though WHOOP had personally woken up that morning and decided to ruin my day.
Fifty? Really?
I meditate. I exercise. I’ve studied sleep, stress and recovery. Surely we can do better than fifty?
So now, without consciously deciding to do it, my meditation had acquired another objective.
Get the HRV up.
Which, when I write it down, does seem to rather defeat the entire purpose of meditation.
I tried to get into heart coherence. Was I there? Didn’t feel like it. Perhaps I needed to breathe differently. Maybe I wasn’t letting go enough.
Stop thinking, Ams.
Which, of course, made me think about the fact that I was thinking. Which made me think about the thinking. Which spiralled into thinking about whether I was thinking about thinking correctly.
Then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be forcing anything. I needed to surrender. To flow. To trust. To let whatever needed to come, come.
So naturally I started asking my spirit guides to tell me which Instagram post I should publish first.
Honestly.
Even my spirit guides aren’t safe from my project-management skills. Apparently the universe now has deliverables.
And somewhere around this point — maybe twenty minutes in, maybe forty — I saw it.
Not because I’d achieved some extraordinary meditative state. Quite the opposite.
I was sitting there trying to relax, trying to surrender, trying to improve my HRV, trying to connect to something bigger than myself, trying to work out what to post and trying very hard not to try.
I had somehow turned surrender into another thing I needed to achieve.
And I know better. That’s the annoying part.
I’ve studied sleep, stress and recovery. I understand how stress and recovery can show up in the body. I know that a single HRV number doesn’t tell me everything about how I’m doing, and I know that a yellow recovery isn’t some sort of personal judgement on whether I’ve been a good girl and done all the right things.
And yet I could see the pattern so clearly it was almost laughable: the chasing, the checking, the measuring, the trying harder to fix the very thing that might actually need me to stop trying quite so hard.
And still, I was doing it.
Because underneath all of that, something else was moving in me.
I want to move.
I can feel it. Not anxiety, not restlessness, but a kind of pull. A forward motion that wants to happen.
I want to write. I want to publish these stories. I want to build Ageless. I want to stop hiding behind the preparation and the planning and the waiting for everything to be perfect before I actually put myself out there.
There’s a part of me that’s almost running towards it. The part that says, Come on, Ams. Let’s go. There’s so much more I want to do.
And then there’s another part.
The one that shows up when it’s actually time to do the thing. When writing becomes publishing. When thinking becomes being seen.
She’s not running.
She’s frozen.
I know her now. I’m still figuring out exactly what she’s frightened of. But I know she’s there, and I know she’s real.
And there I am, somewhere between the two of them. One foot on the accelerator. One foot on the brake. Wondering why I’m not moving.
This is the bit I’m only beginning to understand.
I used to think that once you understood a pattern, you stopped doing it. You go to therapy. You meditate. You journal. You read the books. You do the courses. You find the belief. You rewire it.
DELETED.
Done.
Apparently nobody sent my nervous system the memo.
Because I can see exactly what I’m doing now and still do it. I can know that I don’t need to chase and find myself chasing anyway. I can understand recovery and still want a better recovery score. I can believe in flow while simultaneously wondering whether flow could perhaps hurry up a little.
I want to be seen. And I still freeze when it’s time to press publish.
That’s the contradiction I’m living in right now.
And perhaps that’s the part I didn’t understand when I first started doing all this work on myself.
I thought awareness would feel more definitive.
I thought there would be a point where you found the thing, understood where it came from, did the work and stopped doing it.
Maybe that’s why I’ve spent so much time searching. Therapy. Meditation. Journalling. Courses. Healing. Reading. Learning. Understanding.
There was always a little part of me waiting for the moment when something would finally click and I would think, There. That’s it. That’s the thing. Now I’ve sorted it.
But I’m beginning to wonder whether change is much less dramatic than that.
Maybe it isn’t the moment when you suddenly stop doing the thing you’ve done for years.
Maybe it’s the much quieter moment when you catch yourself doing it again.
Oh.
There I am.
Again.
Not with another enormous analysis of why.
Not immediately trying to fix myself.
Just noticing.
Because perhaps there is something important in that tiny gap between noticing the old response and automatically following it.
I’m only beginning to understand what that means for me.
Which brings me back to this morning.
I didn’t receive the enormous spiritual download I was hoping for. My HRV didn’t magically shoot into the 80s. I didn’t float out of meditation having transcended my physical body with the perfect Instagram content strategy delivered directly from the quantum field.
I opened my eyes.
Looked at the clock.
7:45am.
Nearly two hours. Two hours spent trying incredibly hard to relax.
And my first thought was simple:
I should have just stayed in bed.
Maybe tomorrow I will.
Although knowing me, I’ll probably set an alarm to make sure I relax properly.