Where your body stores stress

Pause for a second, right now. Where is your tongue? If it's pressed against the roof of your mouth, if your teeth are touching, if your shoulders are floating a few centimetres too high, you've just discovered something: your body is on guard. You didn't decide that. Nobody does.

Stress isn't an idea floating around in your head. It's a precise bodily program, inherited from a time when dangers had fangs: locked jaw, shoulders raised to protect the neck, hardened stomach, shortened breath. An aggressive email triggers exactly the same program as a predator. Except the email comes back every day, and the program never switches off anymore.

In the people I see, the map almost always runs through the same territories:

• The jaw: clenched by day, grinding by night. Your dentist notices before you do.
• The shoulders and neck: permanently hunched, as if under invisible rain.
• The stomach: knotted, hard, with the breath stuck above the diaphragm.
• The hands: half-closed fists, nails digging into the palms.

These contractions burn energy around the clock. That's why a day spent sitting can be as exhausting as a hike: the hike ends, but the office contraction follows you all the way to your pillow.

A muscle contracted by stress doesn't obey your will; it obeys your nervous system. To release it, you have to change the signal upstream, and the most direct lever is still the breath: a slow, extended exhale tells the brain the alert is over, and the muscles finally get permission to come down. And let me reassure you in passing: between two sessions, I check my own jaw, and I often find it clenched. Nobody is immune.

Three times a day: unclench your teeth and leave a space between your molars, let your tongue drop from the roof of your mouth, raise your shoulders exaggeratedly towards your ears then let them fall all at once, place a hand on your belly and breathe out slowly, twice. Repeated every day, this inspection teaches your body a way back. If the tension persists despite everything, medical advice is still worthwhile. And to release whole layers of tension you don't even know exist, two hours of guided breathing do what the single minute can't: that's the work of the NeuroSens method.