Over the years, I’ve heard countless metaphors for stress and human experience that reference the body. I’m under pressure. I’m carrying too much. I ned to ride this out.  I’m overstretched. I’m running on empty. It makes my blood boil. There’s never enough time to catch my breath. I check my personality at the door and prepare for battle. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

We usually hear these as figures of speech, giving us imagery to enhance meaning. This article explores something different: how our metaphors about stress in the body can reveal how human experience and the way we think are inextricably body-based.

The Usual View of Stress and Performance

Achievement in life and work is often treated as a mental game. We talk about mindset, focus, motivation and resilience, as if thinking is the main door to getting ahead and the body simply carries our brain around. In this view, the body is where stress shows up afterwards: tight shoulders, poor sleep, an upset stomach. Something to manage once the real work of thinking is done.

Stress language fits neatly into this picture as a colourful description. When a colleague says they are carrying the weight of the world, we hear that they are wrestling with weighty dilemmas. We may offer support with the problem, but we rarely ask how they put the weight down and release tension if stress is ongoing.

We think with a body

The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson have spent decades studying how people talk about abstract ideas. In Metaphors We Live By and later Philosophy in the Flesh, they argue that we understand our experience through our body. We grasp an idea. A person is warm or cold. We can have a heavy heart. An argument is hard to follow.

Their explanation is that these connections form early in life, when two experiences repeatedly happen together. A child is held and feels warm, so affection and safety become warmth. Carrying something heavy is effortful, so difficulty becomes weight. Being upright and active goes with feeling well, so happiness is up and sadness is down.

Johnson also described recurring bodily patterns that shape thought: balance, force, containment and moving along a path. These are experiences every body has, every day. In this view, our thinking and meaning-making is built on our physical experience rather than sitting above it.

The language of stress

Apply this to stress, and it’s obvious how it draws on those same bodily experiences:

• Weight and force: under pressure, carrying too much, weighed down, pushed to the limit, at breaking point
• Balance: off-balance, juggling, keeping it all together, keeping me on my toes
• Containment: bursting, boiling over, can’t contain it, can’t get it out of my head
• Movement: stuck, going nowhere, running out of road, can’t keep up

These phrases are not unique to English. The linguist Zoltán Kövecses found anger described as heat or pressure building inside the body across languages as different as English, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese and Zulu. The details vary with culture, but the core is consistent. We share these phrases because we share bodily experiences.

When the metaphor may be literal

Lakoff and Johnson’s argument is about where our concepts come from: past bodily experience. I want to go a step further. When someone says they are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, they may also be describing what their body is doing right now.

There is good evidence for this in several places:

Shoulders. The upper trapezius, the muscle that lifts the shoulders, is among the most responsive muscles to mental stress. In laboratory studies, its activity rises during mental arithmetic, puzzles and memory tasks, with fewer moments of relaxation, even though no physical load is involved. “Weight on my shoulders” may be a fairly accurate report.

Jaw. Under mental stress, the jaw-closing muscles become more active and the teeth touch more often. In one study, the rise in jaw muscle activity tracked how helpless people felt. Gritting your teeth may be exactly what you are doing.

Back. Research from William Marras’s spine laboratory found that under psychosocial pressure, people brace by tightening the muscles of the trunk against each other, which raises the load on the spine. A later study found that being troubled by conflicting thoughts increased loading on the neck and lower back. The body appears to brace around internal conflict too.

Gut. Acute stress consistently slows stomach emptying and speeds up activity lower in the gut, and can make gut sensations more noticeable. A knot in the stomach and a gut reaction is a reasonable description.

Eyes and neck. Under rising arousal, attention narrows towards what seems most urgent. The eyes and neck work as a coordinated system, so a narrowed, fixed gaze tends to come with a held, braced neck. Tunnel vision and keeping your head down describe this closely.

Not every metaphor maps onto a measurable physical state, and some famous studies claiming they do have not held up. Secrets do not reliably make hills look steeper, and recalling exclusion does not reliably make a room feel colder. The strongest evidence is for muscles, breathing and the gut. But enough of the language is literal to be worth taking seriously.

What we hold back

A particular group of phrases describes responses we start and then stop:

• Biting my tongue: saying nothing in a meeting when you disagree
• Keeping a lid on it: staying composed with a difficult client or manager
• A lump in my throat: holding emotion in during a hard conversation
• Holding back: not raising a concern or asking for help
• On the edge of my seat: waiting for a decision, an email or a result

Work asks for this kind of restraint all the time, and often rightly so. But each phrase describes the body restraining an action: a closed jaw, a tight throat, a held breath, a body poised to move that stays still. Body-based approaches to psychology have long suggested that responses which start and are cut short or have to be suppressed can stay held as physical tension. Whether or not that explanation is complete, the language points to something many people recognise: the repercussions of stress can be long-lasting in our bodies and minds.

The language of recovery

The way we talk about recovery is just as physical. We need to recharge, refuel, catch our breath, unwind, let go, put our feet up, get back on our feet, find our balance, take a weight off, cool off, calm down

These phrases describe restoring a physical resource and returning the body to an upright, balanced, unbraced state. Yet recovery is often treated as optional, something to fit in once the real work is done. Our own words suggest otherwise: they describe performance as running on a body that needs refilling.

What this means for performance

If thinking is built on bodily experience, and the body is continually shaping what reaches the brain, then the state of the body is part of how well we think. A braced, breath-holding, narrowly focused body tends to produce braced, urgent, narrowly focused thinking. Mindset and strategy work still has value, but it rests on the state you are thinking from.

This is why, in my experience, capable people rarely need more help thinking. They need help recognising and regulating their state, so they can reach their best thinking when they ned it. For the physiology behind this, see Why the Body Leads and How Chronic Stress Affects Decision-Making.

Try this: listen to the metaphor, then check the body

The next time you describe your stress, to yourself or someone else, take your own words literally for a moment.

1. Notice the phrase. Under pressure? Carrying too much? Holding it together?
2. Look for it in your body. Where is the pressure, the weight, the holding? Check your shoulders, jaw, breath, stomach and the back of your neck.
3. Adjust what you find. Gently mobilise your shoulders. Massage and unclench your jaw. Reset your breathing. Let your eyes move slowly around the room, and your head follow, widening your gaze.
4. Notice what changes. Does the situation look any different from a slightly less braced body?

The problem may still be there. The aim is to meet it from a body that gives your thinking more room.

Close

We already have a detailed vocabulary for how stress and recovery feel in the body. We use it every day and mostly ignore what it says. Taking it seriously gives us an earlier, simpler way to notice when demand is outpacing recovery, often before performance slips.

Listen to the metaphor, then check the body.

Further reading: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh; Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body.

Sources:

• Wijsman et al., Trapezius muscle EMG as predictor of mental stress
• Tsai et al., Human masticatory muscle activity and jaw position under experimental stress
• Ruf et al., Stress-induced changes in the functional EMG activity of the masticatory muscles
• Marras et al., The impact of mental processing and pacing on spine loading, Spine 2002
• Ohio State University, Cognitive dissonance increases spine loading in the neck and low back
• Evidence for stress-induced alterations in gastrointestinal motility and sensitivity, Digestive Diseases
• Is threat the only modulator of attentional selectivity? Redefining the Easterbrook hypothesis
• Khan et al., Differential influence of attention on gaze and head movements, Journal of Neurophysiology
• Pecher et al., The burden of secrecy? No effect on hill slant estimation and beanbag throwing
• Cold and Lonely replication attempt
• Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling