Chronic Stress: Why You Can’t Just Relax and What Actually Helps

Understanding the pattern

Chronic Stress is one of the experiences people most commonly bring to Becca’s work. It is rarely what it appears on the surface — the presenting pattern is almost always protecting something deeper: an old wound, a learned belief, a nervous system that never got the signal that it was safe to be otherwise.

The path forward is not through managing the symptom more skillfully. It is through understanding what the pattern is protecting, and addressing that with the right combination of somatic work, emotional processing, and — where appropriate — conscious plant medicine.

The emotional root

In Becca’s work, every persistent emotional pattern has a root. Finding that root — and working with it at the level of the body, not just the mind — is what makes lasting change possible. Read more about how Becca works →

Three things support this: breathwork and somatic practices that work directly with the nervous system; neuroscience-informed emotional processing; and, where relevant, conscious plant medicine to access deeper layers of the emotional landscape. Read the science →

What the research shows

The evidence base for somatic and experiential approaches to emotional healing has grown substantially over the last decade. Body-based practices — including breathwork, somatic experiencing, and movement-based approaches — show consistent effects on emotional regulation, nervous system tone, and the resolution of persistent emotional patterns.[1]

Where plant medicine is relevant, psilocybin has demonstrated rapid and lasting effects on emotional processing, self-referential thought, and the resolution of difficult emotional patterns.[2] Explore the plant medicine research →

“The most important thing to understand about any persistent pattern is this: it made sense once. It developed for a reason. The work is not to fight it — it is to understand it well enough that it no longer needs to run.”
— Becca Williams

How Becca works with this

Sessions work with this at the root level: somatic, experiential, and integrative. The approach is non-pathologising and non-clinical — it works with the whole person, not a diagnosis. See how sessions work →

Integration

Change becomes lasting through integration — the ongoing process of bringing insight into embodied, relational, and daily life. Sessions provide the ongoing container for this work →

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Sources

1. Fincham, G. W. et al. (2023). Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 432.
   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-27247-y
2. Li, L-J. et al. (2024). Psilocybin for major depressive disorder: a systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1416420.
   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1416420