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Why You Can't Switch Off | And How to Teach Your Brain to Relax Again · Moving Minds Forward

• 0:10
  Gary Johannes: People aren't broken, and it's almost never too late to change. I know that, because I've lived it. I left school at 14 with no qualifications, one of nine kids, joined the RAF at 16, and then left and went into sales, ran bars, nightclubs and restaurants. Not exactly the typical route into mental health. But in my late forties, I met a hippotherapist, and everything I thought I knew about myself turned out to be more flexible than I thought.
• 0:45
  I retrained and started inspired to change. Later, I took on an MSc in Psychology and neuroscience of mental health at King's College in London, and graduated at 60. This podcast is everything that comes out of all of that. I'm Gary Johannes, Solution Focused Hypoth, founder of Inspire two Change, and I train other hypnotists through CPHT. One condition.
• 1:15
  What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps? Let's get into it. So, relaxation.
• 1:24
  And this one's a little different. Because relaxation isn't a condition. It's not something that's wrong with you, It's the opposite. It's a thing that puts things right. Here's why I want to give it a whole episode.
• 1:41
  If you listened to any of the other podcasts, stress, anxiety, phobias, procrastination, you'll have heard me come back every single time to the same idea. Deep relaxation, calming the nervous system, letting the thinking brain come back online. It's the quiet engine underneath all of it. So this is the episode where we stop and look at the engine directly, what relaxation actually is, why so many of us can't seem to do it, and why it's a skill you can rebuild, not a switch you're supposed to be able to flick. If this is your first time here, hit subscribe wherever you're listening, One topic at a time.
• 2:32
  The same honest lens. Now let's get into it. So what is relaxation, really? Let's clear something up first, because most people have the wrong picture of it. Relaxation isn't collapsing on the sofa with the telly on and your phone in your hand.
• 2:51
  It isn't a glass of wine to take the edge off. Those things might feel like rest, but often the mind is still running, the body is still braced, and the alarm is still humming away in the background. Real relaxation is something your body actually does. It's a physical shift, a change of gear in the nervous system, from alert to calm, from doing to recovering. And it isn't a luxury.
• 3:23
  It's maintenance. Just as you can't run on no sleep, you can't run on no recovery, relaxation is how the body clears the stress out and resets. Without it, the stress just piles up. Here's the part that catches people out: relaxation is a skill. Some people, it comes easily.
• 3:50
  For a lot of us, it doesn't. And if you've been running hot for months or years, the ability to switch off can quietly fade. The good news buried in that, a skill that faded can be rebuilt. You're not alone in this. If switching off feels almost impossible right now, you're in very good company.
• 4:15
  Around one in four people in The UK say they have no time to relax at all. Not that they're bad at it, but there's simply no room for it in the day. And when people do reach for something, it tends to be the simple stuff: Walking, gardening, reading, baking. In fact, more than seventy percent of people say that they walk because it helps them switch off. There's a clue in that, and we'll come back to it.
• 4:47
  The point for now is this. If you can't remember the last time you properly unwound, that isn't a personal failing. It's an incredible common place to be, and it makes complete sense once you understand what's happening underneath. So what's happening in the brain? You've got two systems running your inner state.
• 5:10
  They work like two pedals in a car. One is the accelerator, the fight or flight system. When your brain senses pressure, this fires. Cortisol and adrenaline goes up. Heart rate climbs.
• 5:28
  Breathing gets shallow, muscles tense, digestion slows down, everything gets ready for action. In the other episodes, this is the villain of the piece. The other is the break, the rest and recover system. When this comes on, the whole thing reverses. The heart rate slows, breathing deepens, the stress hormones drain away, blood flows back into your gut, into skin.
• 5:58
  Your muscles let go, and critically, the thinking part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, comes back online. That last bit matters more than anything. When you're stressed, the thinking brain goes quiet, and the alarm runs the show. That's why everything feels heavier and harder to solve. Relaxation is what hands control back to the sensible part of you.
• 6:26
  It isn't just a nice feeling, it's the state in which you can actually think clearly, decide well, and cope. So relaxation isn't doing nothing. It's your body doing something essential: pressing the brake and letting the whole system recover. So why is it so hard to switch off? If relaxation is this natural, why can't so many of us find it?
• 6:57
  The main reason is simple, and it's kind: your alarm system has learned to stay on. If you've been under sustained pressure, a demanding job, money worries, caring for someone, one thing straight into the next, the nervous system stops treating calm as safe. It decides the environment is a threat, and stays vigilant, on guard, even when nothing is actually wrong right now. It's not being awkward. It's trying to protect you.
• 7:34
  It's just misread the situation. Then, there's the cruel irony. The harder you try to force relaxation, the more it slips away. It's exactly like lying in bed telling yourself to fall asleep. The effort itself keeps you awake.
• 7:53
  Relaxation can't be forced. It can only be allowed. A modern life doesn't help. If you work for yourself, or you're always reachable, the day never really ends. If your hobbies quietly have turned into the thing you feel you should do, the cakes for every birthday, the club that now eats into your weekend, the very things that used to restore you have become another source of pressure.
• 8:23
  A phone full of other people's perfect lives, even your downtime, starts to feel like something you're failing at. None of that is a weakness. It's a nervous system stuck in the wrong gear, in a world that keeps its foot on the accelerator. So what's keeping it going? Here's where it becomes self maintaining.
• 8:46
  And understanding this is where it starts to loosen. First, the vigilance feeds itself. A brain that's decided the world is unsafe scans for problems, finds them, and stays switched on. The staying on becomes the normal setting. The body forgets what calm even feels like.
• 9:10
  Second, we reach for relief that isn't recovery: the scrolling, the wine, the box set, busyness. They take the edge off for a moment, but they don't press the brake. So the pressure keeps building quietly underneath. And we wonder why a whole weekend off left us just as wrung out. Third, and this one's sneaky, there's the guilt.
• 9:38
  A lot of people can't relax because some part of them believes they haven't earned it, that resting is lazy. They should be doing something useful. So even when they sit down, they don't actually let go. The body stays braced, waiting for the next job. And finally, the skill just fades.
• 10:03
  Relaxation is a pathway in the brain like any other. Stop using it, and it weakens, which is frustrating. But it's also the whole reason there's a way back. What weakened through disuse can be strengthened through practice. So what actually helps?
• 10:24
  The solution focused approach doesn't start by handing you a list of techniques to grind through. It starts with a question. What would it look like if you could switch off? Not a fortnight in the sun, just an ordinary evening where you sit down and the day lets go with you, where the inbox doesn't follow you into the kitchen, where you say yes to a walk, or a bath, or an early night, and you're properly there for it? What would you notice?
• 11:00
  What would the people around you notice? Getting clear on that gives the brain a direction to move towards. That's the whole engine of this work. Not running from tension, but moving towards calm. Then there's what happens in trance, and this is where hypnotherapy does something specific.
• 11:23
  The trance state is, in itself, deep and sustained relaxation. It's a bit like a daydream, restful and refreshing at the same time. Your body drops into that rest and recover gear. The stress response comes right down, and yet the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, stays engaged. So you're calm and clear at once.
• 11:50
  And here's why that's so powerful. The nervous system learns through repetition. Every time it experiences a truly calm state, that becomes a little more accessible. Do it often enough, and the baseline shifts. Calm stops being a place you have to fight your way to, and becomes somewhere your body knows how to get back to on its own.
• 12:18
  You're not just relaxing for an hour. You're teaching the system how to relax. Alongside that, the three pillars do a lot of the lifting. And you'll recognize them, because they run through everything we do. Positive interaction, Real connection with people who feel safe.
• 12:39
  Nothing calms the nervous system faster than good company. That's not soft advice. It's biology. Positive action. And here's that clue from earlier.
• 12:51
  Walking, yoga, gentle movement. It burns off the stress chemistry and shifts the body out of the brace state. That's why a walk clears your head when sitting and trying to relax simply won't. Positive thinking. Not forced cheerfulness, but deliberately noticing what's gone right.
• 13:14
  It gently widens the narrow, threat focused attention that pressure creates. And underneath all of it, as always, sleep. A rested brain finds calm far more easily than an exhausted one. Get sleep back, and everything else gets lighter. There's a toolkit too.
• 13:40
  Breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, a peaceful scene held in the mind, a favorite piece of music. All of them work by the same mechanism. They press the brake. You don't need all of them. You need one or two that fit your life, done often enough to matter.
• 14:04
  Before I close, one thing you can take away today, breathe out for longer than you breathe in. That's it. That's the whole thing. Because your out breath is directly wired to the brake. A longer, slower exhale is one of the fastest ways to tell your body it's safe to calm down.
• 14:28
  So try this. Breathe in gently for a count of about seven. Breathe out slow and unhurried for a count of about 11. The exact number doesn't matter. What matters is the out breath is longer.
• 14:46
  Do it for a minute or two. That's long enough to feel the gear change. Here's why it works: you can't argue your way into calm. You can't argue your way into calm. You've probably tried it.
• 15:02
  But you can breathe your way there, because the breath speaks to the nervous system directly, underneath the thinking. You're not forcing relaxation, nor inviting it. It's a language the body understands. Understands. One minute, longer out than in.
• 15:22
  That's where it turns around. If you've spent years believing you're just someone who can't switch off, I want to say this clearly. You're not broken, and you're not lazy. You're someone whose alarm system has been running too long, in a world that made it hard to even calm down. That's a pattern, and patterns can change.
• 15:48
  The system that learned to stay on high alert can absolutely learn to settle again. That's not wishful thinking. That's neuroscience. Understanding what's going on is where it starts. You've just done that, and quietly, that's a step forward.
• 16:10
  That's it for this one. If it was useful, subscribe, and you'll catch the next one. There's a lot more to come. And if switching off is something you'd like some help with, Inspire two Change has solution focused hypotherapists across The UK, in person and online. Everything's inspiredtothange.biz.
• 16:33
  Whenever you're ready, no rush. See you on the next one.