“Whatever the brain can’t handle, it puts into the mind. Whatever the mind can’t handle, it puts into the body.”
Have you ever gone through a stretch of weeks where your shoulders lived up around your ears, and you didn’t notice until someone pointed it out? Or had a stomach that tied itself in knots the night before something you’d been dreading? Maybe it’s a back that aches on the days when everything feels like too much, and you honestly couldn’t say which came first, the ache or the heaviness.
Come sit with me for a few minutes. I’d like to talk about those moments, and about how emotions affect the body, because there’s a line I come back to a lot in my work: whatever the brain can’t handle, it puts into the mind. And whatever the mind can’t handle, it sends back into the body.
What that line really means
Here’s how I picture it. Your brain takes in a lot every day: the conversation that stung, the news you didn’t expect, the thing you never had time to feel. When it’s more than you can process in the moment, it doesn’t delete any of it. It tucks it into the mind, the part of you that keeps your feelings, beliefs and automatic reactions, mostly out of sight. And when the mind is already carrying more than it can hold, the body picks up the rest.
So a feeling that never got to be felt can turn into something you feel in your jaw, your shoulders or your stomach. That’s a way of picturing it, and it matches something most of us have lived for ourselves: the emotion didn’t disappear, it just changed address.
Where are emotions stored in the body?
Emotions aren’t kept in one single spot, like files in a drawer, but many people notice them in the same places: a tight jaw, raised shoulders, a knot in the stomach, a heavy chest or an aching lower back. That’s the mind-body connection at its most ordinary.
There’s a very ordinary mechanism behind this. When you’re stressed or afraid, your muscles tense up, it’s one of the body’s first reflexes. The American Psychological Association describes how long-lasting stress keeps muscles in a near-constant state of guardedness, and links that tension to headaches and to pain in the lower back and arms, especially when the stress comes from work.
And it can become a loop. You feel a twinge, you get a little afraid of it, fear tightens the muscles, the tight muscles hurt more, and now there’s one more thing to worry about. The pain is real, and so is the stress feeding it.
Repressed emotions and pain nobody can explain
Some people live with pain in the back, an arm or a shoulder and can’t get an explanation. They go from appointment to appointment, search everywhere for something physical, and come away with nothing. If that’s you, I want to say two things.
First, your pain is real. Nobody gets to tell you you’re imagining it. Second, please see a doctor first, and again if it gets worse, changes, or wakes you at night. Ruling out a physical cause is the kindest thing you can do for yourself, and it’s the first step before anything else I could offer.
What I find fascinating is how much the way the brain reads a signal can matter. In a 2021 trial of 151 adults with long-lasting back pain not tied to an ongoing injury, people who learned to see their pain as coming from non-dangerous brain activity rather than tissue damage did remarkably well: 66% were pain-free or nearly pain-free afterwards, compared with 20% of those who got a placebo and 10% who got their usual care. The difference was still there a year later. It wasn’t hypnotherapy, and it was one study, but it shows how powerful it can be when we understand what a signal means.
Questions worth asking besides "how do I make it stop?"
We tend to chase the symptom: the tightness, the discomfort, the ache. I’d gently add a few other questions:
- What was happening in my life when this started?
- When does it get louder, and when does it quiet down?
- What am I holding in, or holding up?
- What would I say right now if I weren’t holding it back?
You don’t need to answer them perfectly. Sometimes just asking is where things begin to loosen.
Where hypnotherapy comes in
Your subconscious mind holds learned patterns, beliefs, old feelings and automatic responses. They shape how you think, feel and react, even when you’re not aware of them. When those patterns keep running beneath your awareness, the body often becomes part of how you experience them.
In a session, I guide you into a calm, focused state, and from there we work with the beliefs, emotional patterns and automatic reactions that keep you feeling stuck, and practice a calmer, healthier response. Relaxation alone is a big part of this, too: relaxation practices have been shown to reduce muscle tension.
Researchers have looked at this connection from the pain side, too. A 2014 meta-analysis found that hypnosis gave moderate benefit for chronic pain compared with standard care, and in a randomized trial of 100 veterans with chronic low back pain, people who learned self-hypnosis had a bigger drop in pain than a biofeedback comparison group, with more than half reporting a meaningful reduction that lasted at least six months. I mention it because it shows how much the mind shapes what the body feels, not because pain is something I treat.
I don’t treat pain or medical conditions, and I’ll always ask you to have a physical symptom checked by a doctor. What I can do is work with the stress, the beliefs and the habits of response around it, so your mind and body aren’t fighting each other.
How to release emotions stored in the body: a one-minute start
Let your jaw unclench. Drop your shoulders away from your ears. Take a slow breath in, and let the exhale be longer than the inhale. Then ask yourself, in plain words, “What am I feeling right now?” Give it a name, even a rough one like “worried” or “tired” or “too much.” A feeling that has a name often has a little less grip on the body.
One last thing
Your mind and your body aren’t two separate things. What affects one affects the other, which means the tight shoulders and the busy mind may be telling you the same story. Listening to both is a good place to begin.
If you’d like to talk about it, you’re welcome to request a free consult. And if your mind runs on overdrive at night, you might like How to Quiet Overthinking Before Bed. If you’re curious what a session feels like, there’s What Actually Happens in a Hypnotherapy Session.
