Let’s do this and get it over with
is tension the price of effectiveness?
“Let’s do that and get it over with.”
That’s what my dad always said when we were growing up,
even when we were supposed to go on vacation or celebrate a birthday.
For a long time, that became my mantra too.
Everything was something to get through, even the things we were meant to enjoy.
Everything carried this tint of misery and struggle.
Imagine how tense you’d get if, God forbid, you had to “get over” a challenging life circumstance.
Now it’s a phrase my partner and I use jokingly, to remind ourselves: why are we in such a rush to get over life?
We’ve been conditioned to believe that tension is the price of effectiveness.
If it doesn’t feel hard in your body, it doesn’t “count.”
If you’re not clenching, you must not care.
If you’re not under pressure, you’re probably being lazy.
Or maybe you think focus is only possible through tension.
School taught us to perform on demand. Productivity culture taught us that worth equals output. And somewhere along the way, many of us learned to motivate ourselves with a mix of fear and force:
Tighten up
Push through
Override our bodily signals
Earn rest later
As a culture, we have so much resistance to ease. Sometimes if something comes easily and naturally, we don’t value it as much. So we resist it, as much as we resist ease.
No matter how much I meditated, ease still felt foreign to me until I started doing posture work and experienced what a more relaxed body actually feels like. Once I had that reference point, I could tell right away when I’d left it.
Our tendency to tense up isn’t just a mindset thing to change because it’s how our entire nervous system organizes itself to get something done. It’s a whole package:
breath gets shallow
eyes narrow and lock
attention tunnels
jaw grips
neck shortens
shoulders creep up
belly hardens
It’s how we create control. If you reduce your degrees of freedom by getting stiff, life feels more predictable. You might lose ease, but you gain the illusion of certainty.
One of my favorite native prayers has a sentence in it that says:
Come and guide me, teach me to fight, fight with no war.
May today you and I fight with no war….
💚 When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help:
Hire me for Live Experiences: immersive, interactive wellbeing events (virtual or in-person) that bring the body back into the conversation, helping your audience build mental + physical resilience through nervous system regulation, breathwork, and posture-focused practices.
Body Check-in: a 2-hour online session to assess your body’s current state, identify patterns and hidden imbalances (posture, breath, nervous system tone), and leave with a clear, personalized plan (plus 7 days of support after).
Discover Your Body’s Story (Free quiz): a 5-minute pause to understand what your body has been trying to tell you, especially if you feel “wired but drained,” stuck in a loop, or disconnected from your deeper embodied wisdom.
Thank you for joining me on the path of unconditioning,
––––––––––––––––––
Hedi Shah
––––––––––––––––––
👁️ Mindfulness Teacher & Bodyworker
🐉 Nervous system regulation, breathwork, and posture-focused strength training to target the cause of what keeps you stuck and in pain, not just symptoms.
📲 Website | Youtube | LinkedIn | Insight Timer