TL;DR:
Medically reviewed by Kandace Licciardi, MD, Medical Director, Amen Clinics
How do you respond to an unexpected hour of free time in your day? Are you able to kick your feet up and read a great book for pleasure, listen to music that makes you happy, or just let your mind wander?
Or do you feel antsy about “wasting time” and throw some clothes in the washing machine, start organizing your closets, or feel guilty about not being productive?
There’s nothing wrong with you if you identify with the latter scenario. It’s simply an indicator that your brain has trouble relaxing.
There are likely good reasons why you can’t relax. A host of common issues inside the brain might be to blame for keeping your mind spinning.
For example, some people’s brains struggle without the quick dopamine hits that external stimulation generates. Relaxation can additionally be challenging for people whose brain’s emotional systems are on overdrive from anxiety and/or depression.
Other people may struggle to calm their nervous system due to the effects of past emotional trauma and anxiety. All that late night doomscrolling so many of us do is a culprit as well. And, ironically, some people’s brains can’t relax because they are stressing too much about relaxing!
Whatever the case may be, the good news is that there are effective methods that help to balance the brain naturally making relaxation possible. They may include deep breathing, meditation, nutritional supplements, high-protein foods, cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, and more.
Here’s more about what drives overactive brain anxiety, as well as effective strategies to successfully relax your mind.
Here’s a deeper look at the five most common brain patterns that make relaxation challenging.
There are brain-based reasons you can't relax. If you have overactivity in the brain’s emotional centers, you may stay busy in order to distract yourself from your anxious or negative thoughts or feelings of hopelessness.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced by your brain and a major player in motivating life-affirming behavior. For example, it gets released when you take a bite of delicious food, when you have sex, after you exercise, and, importantly, when you have positive social interactions.
Evolutionarily, it rewards you for beneficial behaviors and motivates you to repeat them. Thus, dopamine is part of your brain’s reward and pleasure centers. However, the fast pace of modern life and our pleasure-seeking culture is negatively impacting the brain’s reward system.
For example, social media provides opportunities to connect with loads of people, novelty, notifications, likes, and comments—all designed to exploit your brain’s reward loop by releasing dopamine so that you stay logged in and coming back for more.
Unfortunately, when your brain is releasing a near-constant and overwhelming stream of dopamine, the pleasure centers get exhausted, and it responds by making an adjustment and decreasing dopamine transmission.
As Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation Dr. Annie Lembke explains in a Stanford Medicine News article, the brain decreases dopamine transmission to below normal baseline levels, ultimately creating a chronic dopamine-deficit state. That makes pleasure difficult to experience. Your brain won’t relax and you may have restless mind symptoms as your brain is hungry for more exciting stimulation.
Similarly, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), also called attention deficit disorder (ADD), commonly have low levels of dopamine. An individual with ADHD tends to get easily bored with quiet and a lack of outside stimulation as their brains crave novelty, excitement, and even conflict.
Big thrills — whether they come from bungee jumping, taking a spontaneous road trip, or starting an argument — boost dopamine in the brain.
Our brain-imaging work at Amen Clinics shows that adult ADHD is also associated with abnormal brain activity. Amen Clinics uses a brain-imaging technology called SPECT that measures blood flow and activity in the brain. It shows areas of the brain with:
People with ADHD typically have lower levels of activity and blood flow in an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). ADHD is associated with altered dopamine and norepinephrine signaling in brain networks involving the prefrontal cortex, which plays a key role in attention, impulse control, and executive function. Because of this, ADHD adults often seek ways to stimulate the brain and trigger the release of dopamine.
Try a dopamine detox and/or limit your social media use to 15-minute increments once or twice day. Engage in more in-person contact. Boost dopamine in healthier ways to reduce the need to seek excitement or conflict. You can increase the neurotransmitter naturally by eating a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet and taking nutritional supplements like green tea, rhodiola, and ginseng.
Related: 9 Naturals Ways to Balance Dopamine in the Brain
Some people have overactivity in the emotional and fear centers of the brain, which can make relaxation difficult.
The overactivity can stem from any number of causes. Emotional trauma is associated with dysregulation of the brain’s emotional centers, research has found. It’s also strongly linked to conditions like ADHD, reports the American Psychological Association. Additionally, chronic pain, and even chronic stress can play a role in its development too, researchers have noted.
When the brain’s emotional centers, anxiety centers, and fear centers are overactive, it can be associated with clinical depression and anxiety disorders. On SPECT scans, this brain pattern involves excessive activity in the following areas:
If you have overactivity in these brain regions, you may stay busy in order to distract yourself from your anxious or negative thoughts or feelings of hopelessness. When the world calms down around you, it’s as if those worries and depressed moods come into sharper focus.
To calm your emotional brain, practice mental hygiene by challenging the automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) that creep into your mind and prevent relaxation. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help to combat ANTs too.
Supplements that calm the emotional and fear centers of the brain include saffron, omega-3 fatty acids, and GABA. Bright light therapy and the scent of lavender may also help.
Any situation that your brain interprets as demanding or potentially threatening, whether physical or psychological, can activate the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and its associated “fight-or-flight” response.
Threats like a car coming at you while you’re driving, or a barking dog chasing you will activate the SNS and the fight-or-flight stress response, which immediately quickens your heart rate and heightens your response ability with the release or neurohormones like cortisol and epinephrine to help you fight off the threat or get out of harm’s way.
Generally, after the threat passes, your body returns to homeostasis again by activating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), known as the relaxation response, which counterbalances the SNS and helps you calm down after a heart-pounding incident.
But the SNS can get activated by other triggers too, including the following:
When the nervous system is healthy, the SNS and PNS work in concert to help manage stress. Chronic stress or prolonged trauma, however, can interfere with the body’s relaxation mechanism.
Unfortunately, researchers have noted that modern living is rife with environmental pressures, such as:
These lead to states of chronic stress and a SNS that can’t turn off. Additionally, when adverse childhood experiences — such as physical, sexual, or emotional trauma are severe or prolonged — it can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adulthood. In basic terms, the SNS gets stuck on, making you feel restless, anxious, panicky, hyper-aroused, hypervigilant, or sleepless.
On SPECT scans, a diamond pattern of overactivity is commonly seen in trauma survivors. If you have the diamond brain pattern, you may not be able to shake off those feelings even when you try to relax. Yet, too often people with this underlying brain pattern get misdiagnosed or don’t respond to standard mental health treatments.
Related: Emotional Trauma and the Diamond Pattern
Getting a brain scan can be a critical step in determining if past trauma has left a lasting impact on your brain and nervous system. With this information, you’re more likely to get an effective treatment plan that works.
If the SNS is stuck on, calm it with meditation, prayer, hypnosis, guided imagery, diaphragmatic breathing, and calming supplements, such as GABA, magnesium, or L-theanine. For PTSD, therapeutic interventions such as EMDR may be helpful.
When relaxation feels like it’s just another task on your to-do list, it can be counterproductive.
Forcing yourself to relax can make you become more anxious, and you may worry more about how well or efficiently you are actually able to relax. Clinicians call this being “stresslaxed.”
If you’re stresslaxed, you might be checking your heartrate monitor every few seconds as you engage in deep breathing or meditation to see if your level is going down. This may actually increase feelings of anxiousness.
If you throw in a perfectionistic attitude, it can really backfire. Indeed, when researchers studied perfectionism in the workplace, instead of increasing productivity and achievement, they found a net detrimental effect on both the employees and the organizations.
Perfectionism creates an unrealistic expectation of an idealized relaxation session, often with certain activities or outcomes. Ideals, of course, can never be met. Failure and disappointment follow. All of this can keep real relaxation at bay. Worse, it can even trigger anxiety and stress!
If this sounds like you, don’t make relaxation a chore. Rid yourself of expectations and just breathe, take a walk, or meditate without any goals or agenda. And remember, self-care isn’t one size fits all. Try a variety of activities and hobbies to see what works for you.
Related: How Chronic Stress Rewires Your Brain and What To Do About It
If you’re hooked on watching or reading the news, you’re basically feeding your brain a steady diet of disturbing deaths, disasters, and divisive politics. You’re flooding your mind with toxic thoughts that activate the brain’s fear circuits, making you feel chronically anxious and afraid.
Indeed, a Harvard Medical School report detailed how doomscrolling (scrolling through negative news reports on social media) is associated with sleeplessness, anxiety, and the activation of the fight-or-flight stress response.
When you’re constantly on edge, and your brain is seeking out the next impending disaster around the corner, it’s very hard to relax.
Limit your media consumption, especially doomscrolling before bed! Instead, subscribe to news outlets, such as the Good News Network, that specialize in highlighting the positive things that are happening in our world. Meditate and use creative visualization to create more calm in your mind.
Your daily habits are what make a difference in supporting your brain to relax. Here’s a suggested daily plan. Don’t worry if you can’t stick to it exactly. Let it serve as a guide and do your best to begin incorporating these habits into your daily life.
Rinse and repeat!
Sometimes difficulty relaxing is more than just a bad habit — it’s linked to specific brain activity patterns. At Amen Clinics, we use brain SPECT imaging to measure blood flow and activity, revealing if your emotional, anxiety, or fear centers are working in overdrive. This may explain why you might feel restless, tense, or unable to “switch off” even during downtime.
Once we identify the brain patterns linked to your symptoms, we create a personalized plan to support balanced brain activity levels and help calm the nervous system. This may include targeted nutritional supplements, lifestyle changes, evidence-based therapies like EMDR or cognitive behavioral therapy, and brain-based relaxation techniques.
Yes. Many people find that with the right brain health strategies — such as breathing exercises, dopamine-balancing nutrition, meditation, and reframing negative thoughts — they can reset their nervous system and promote lasting relaxation. Amen Clinics’ brain-based, whole body approach is designed to help you build these skills while addressing any underlying brain activity issues.
Anxiety, ADHD, and other mental health conditions can’t wait. At Amen Clinics, we provide personalized, science-backed treatment plans designed to target the root causes of your symptoms. Our 360-approach includes brain SPECT imaging, clinical evaluations, innovative therapeutic techniques, medications (when necessary), and holistic lifestyle recommendations to promote the health of your brain, body, and mind. Speak to a specialist today at 888-288-9834 or visit our contact page here.
About the Reviewer
Kandace Licciardi, MD, Medical Director, Amen Clinics
Dr. Kandace Licciardi is a double board-certified psychiatrist in adult and forensic psychiatry and serves as Medical Director of Amen Clinics. She takes a comprehensive, whole-person approach to care, integrating evidence-based psychiatric treatment with lifestyle, social, and wellness factors. Dr. Licciardi has extensive experience treating depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, and borderline personality disorder, with special expertise in early psychosis intervention. She completed her psychiatry residency at Maimonides Medical Center and her forensic psychiatry fellowship at New York University.
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