Why Trying to Relax Makes You Tense
What I learned about panic from a bamboo sword, and why “just let go” is the worst advice ever given
I was fourteen, and my mind went white.
Kendo has a team format. Five fighters a side, sent out in fixed order — vanguard, second, middle, vice-captain, and last, the taishō (大将), the captain. Three wins takes the match. I was the captain. Fourteen and the captain, which sounds like an honour and is in fact a particular kind of exposure: when the score reaches two-all, the whole thing lands on you. Your teammates are finished. They are kneeling at the edge of the floor, watching. Whatever happens now is what happened to all of them.
That is roughly how the semi-finals always went, because by the semi-finals the teams are evenly matched and it comes down to the captains.
And standing there — Kobe city championships, the prefectural tournament, it hardly mattered which — I would begin to think things that had never once entered my head in ten years of practice.
What if I lose.
I have to score first.
That was all it took. Two sentences, then a rising static, then nothing. No plan. No body. A white room where a fourteen-year-old used to be. And a boy from another school, who was not thinking anything at all, would step in and hit me.
The word for what was happening
There is a term for this. Itsuki (居着き). It means, roughly, to settle in — to stick, to take up residence. It names the moment the mind fastens onto something — the opponent’s blade, a point just lost, an outcome badly wanted — and the body, obedient, stops. The feet die. Weight sinks into the floor. You become, for a fraction of a second, a statue with a plan.
In kendo this is not treated as nerves, or as a bad day. It is one of the three classical openings, the moments a trained opponent is taught to strike into. And what makes it so hard to escape is its shape:
The bracing is the vulnerability. They are not two things.
I did not freeze despite wanting to win. I froze because I wanted to win. The wanting was the mechanism. My determination not to lose was the precise instrument by which I lost.
You know this feeling. You have simply never had a word for it, and the absence of the word has made it feel like a personal defect rather than a mechanism.
The same trap, in your bedroom
Let me be careful, because I am about to sound like I am against something I am not against.
If you burn incense and something in your shoulders drops — good. If an app has given you twenty minutes a day that belong to nobody else, that is real, and I would not take it from you. Clean sheets are a pleasure. Nobody should surrender a pleasure on my account.
My worry is narrower. It is about what preparation does.
Preparation creates a goal. A goal creates an obligation. And obligation is a form of tension — which means the apparatus you built to relax you is, structurally, made of the thing you were escaping.
Watch how ordinary sleep is. You have done it every night since infancy, without instruction, without equipment. Then one night you have a flight at six, and you think: I have to sleep now. And sleep, which has never once required your cooperation, stands up and leaves the room.
Nothing changed. It simply became a task.
We do this to meditation constantly, and almost nobody notices. We take an ordinary human capacity — sitting still, letting the mind settle — and build an appointment around it. A cushion, a timer, a slot in the calendar. And having built the appointment, we have quietly converted stillness into a performance with a standard, and hired a small auditor at the back of the skull whose only job is to ask: is it working yet? am I doing this right?
The auditor is the tension. The auditor was hired by the preparation.
The laboratory agrees with the dojo
I am not a psychologist. But psychology arrived here too, from the opposite direction.
In the late 1980s an American social psychologist, Daniel Wegner, began studying what happens when people try to control their own minds — work that became known as ironic process theory, or the “white bear problem,” after the experiment in which subjects told not to think of a white bear could think of very little else.
His explanation is itsuki rewritten as cognitive science. Try to suppress a thought or produce a state, and you start two processes. One is effortful, and looks for distractions. The other runs automatically underneath, checking whether the unwanted thing is happening — and to check, it must keep the unwanted thing loaded and ready. Under stress or fatigue, the monitor wins.
His lab followed the logic exactly where you’d expect. People who tried to relax under cognitive load showed higher physiological arousal than people who didn’t try. People instructed to fall asleep quickly took longer.
Trying to relax is a measurable way of not relaxing.
A patrolman in Kobe with a bamboo sword, and a psychologist with a skin-conductance meter, describing the same trap.
What kendo refuses to tell you
Here is where the real cultural difference lies, and it is not where people usually put it.
Kendo has an old and precise account of the mind under pressure: the shikai (四戒), the four afflictions — surprise, fear, doubt, confusion (驚・懼・疑・惑). Let any of them in and you stall. A skilled opponent will deliberately induce them in you, because a mind with a hook in it is a body standing still. The tradition is not naive about interior states. It has been mapping them for centuries.
But notice what it never does.
It never tells you to feel calm.
Nowhere in that vocabulary is there an instruction that says be at peace, or stay present, or let it go. It tells you where to put your feet. Where to look. How to breathe, where to keep your weight, how to hold the sword. It tells you, endlessly, to repeat the form. And about how you ought to feel while doing it, it maintains a complete silence.
For years I took this for gruffness — an old, emotionally illiterate way of teaching. I have come to think it is the most sophisticated thing about it.
Because an instruction about your inner state is an instruction that cannot be obeyed. Be calm installs a target, a monitor and a failure condition in a single breath. It is the shikai handed to you disguised as help. Whereas keep your left heel light is simply a thing you can do, or fail to do — checkable from outside, requiring no auditor at all.
The silence was not indifference to your mind. It was an understanding that the fastest way to ruin a state is to require it.
And nearly every wellness product on earth breaks this rule — be present, be mindful, release your tension, arrive in this moment — issuing commands about interiority as though interiority took commands.
It doesn’t. It never has.
“Just let go” is the same trap wearing a disguise
Now the obvious next move, the one you can feel coming, the one I very nearly made: so stop trying. Let go of your attachment to winning. Give up the desire to be calm.
I want to be blunt. That advice is worthless.
Not because it is false. Because it is another instruction about your inner state, standing one floor up, wearing a robe. Let go of the outcome is not something a fourteen-year-old with two-all on the scoreboard can do. It is not available at 1 a.m., and it is not available in the corridor while, on the other side of the door, people wait for you to speak. Saying it takes a second. Doing it is not on the menu.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been the captain.
So what actually worked?
Nothing I did. Something I noticed.
Across dozens of those matches, a pattern appeared that made no sense to me at the time. If I scored the first point, the panic lifted — naturally, I was ahead. But if I lost the first point, the panic also lifted. Nothing left to protect. Nothing to do but fight.
Which meant the panic had never been about what I stood to lose. That was identical either way. What froze me was the undecided — hovering over an open question, guarding something not yet gone. Settle the question, even badly, and my body came back.
And that gave me something I could actually use: the tension had always dissolved on its own. Every time. Without my help, without technique, without my surrendering anything. I had watched it happen so often that eventually I could not not believe it.
That is the whole thing. Not a state — a belief.
You cannot order yourself to be calm. But you can hold the thought: I am tense now, and it will loosen, because it always does.
Read those twice and feel the difference. The first is a command to a nervous system that takes no orders. The second is a sentence, and sentences you can simply say.
It asks nothing of your body. It does not require you to relax, or release, or surrender, or breathe correctly. It asks you to remember something you already have evidence for.
Where the calm was standing
You have had this, even if you’ve never called it anything.
You were so absorbed in the presentation that at some point you noticed you had stopped being afraid — and could not say when. Or the speech began, and as it began some part of you understood there was no way out but forward, and the terror that had loomed thirty seconds earlier was simply not in the room any more. Not defeated. Just gone.
Look at what happened there. The calm arrived while you were facing the other way. It did not come because you called it. It came because you stopped calling.
And look at where it had been. Not far. Never far. It had been standing directly beside you the entire time — and that vast distance you felt, between the tense self and the calm self, was manufactured wholly by the reaching.
The distance was the reaching. There was no distance.
This is the law of the thing, and it has one more application — the one I actually live by.
The doorway is already beside you
The kettle hasn’t boiled. You are standing in the kitchen with three unclaimed minutes. You did not schedule this. Stay there. Don’t call it anything.
You come round a corner and the trees have turned, and the light is doing something to them. You had somewhere to be. Stay a moment past the moment.
The river is moving under the bridge on your way home and you notice you have been watching it. You could keep watching it.
None of these were planned, and that is not incidental — it is the entire reason they work. No preparation, so no goal, so no obligation, so no auditor. Nobody checking whether it was working. Which is precisely why something loosened.
Stillness, like calm, cannot be walked toward. It can only be arrived beside.
And it already is beside you. It has been standing next to the kettle this whole time, waiting for you to stop insisting on the door you built.
Not a habit. A tic.
People will tell you to make this a habit. I have said it myself, and I would like to take it back.
A habit is something you build. It has a schedule and a streak and a small tyrannical sense of falling behind. It is preparation wearing a longer time horizon — and preparation, as we have established, is how the auditor gets hired.
What happened to me was not a habit. It was closer to a tic.
I did not construct it. I do not remember acquiring it. At some point I simply became a man who stops — who has, more than once, surfaced at the kitchen counter beside a cold kettle with no idea how long he had been standing there. It is not always convenient. I could not undo it now if I wanted to, and I stopped wanting to.
Ask me what it has done for me and I have nothing for you. No metric, no before-and-after. It became ordinary, and ordinary things do not report their effects; you would have to remove them to find out, and I cannot.
That is the honest end of this, and I would rather leave you there than somewhere more satisfying.
Do not build anything. Do not schedule anything. Do not try, tonight, to relax.
Just — next time you catch yourself already stopped, somewhere you did not plan to be: do not start moving again quite so quickly.
That is all. That is the whole practice.
Whatever it does, it will do without telling you.
This essay belongs to The By-Product Essays. Read all three here.
SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.