The antidote to stress isn't relaxation. It's play

“I’m not stressed!” I’d yell to my mum.

Whenever I was revising for exams or in difficult moments in my life, I’d get eczema on my hands.

It was horrible.

It was unsightly and itchy and it made me so self-conscious. I’d hide my hands, dreading if I had to do activities with other kids in case they noticed.

My mum took me to a food intolerance tester. We tried homeopathy, acupuncture, and avoided chemicals in cleaning products. But it didn’t go away.

“Maybe it’s the dog?” she said once.

I cried… it couldn’t be him! I refused to believe it.

And so the mystery continued. Eczema would pop up seemingly out of nowhere and then disappear for weeks or months and then I would be lulled into a state of forgetting.

Mum kept saying that it could be stress. That I was putting so much pressure on myself to succeed at school and that I should relax.

But I refused to believe it.

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I didn’t ‘feel’ stressed, I told myself…

But really, I didn’t want to ‘be’ stressed.

It felt like life or death, achieving in my exams. If I didn’t work hard at them, I would fail. I wouldn’t get into a good university, I wouldn’t get a good job, I wouldn’t earn lots of money. My life would amount to nothing compared to the stories of all the successful people I admired in the media.

No, I couldn’t relax about my exams.

My solution to being stressed? To tell myself I wasn’t. And to power through.

And funnily enough, this strategy seemed to work.

After college, it seemed like the worst of my eczema was behind me. It would pop up now and then but it wasn’t a big deal. I was used to it, I didn’t feel as self-conscious and I cared less.

And in the last five years, I’ve had such a focus on self-care that it seemed my stress levels had dropped away. I’ve been meditating daily, journalling, going on walks in nature, you name it. I have the tools and the awareness to better handle life’s challenges.

Or so I thought.

Because in the last few weeks, I’ve had more eczema than I’ve ever had in my life.

You see, this month I opened a new wellness venue called The Heart Space.

This venture has been unfolding like a gentle flower, full of synchronicities and flow.

It feels right. I’m doing what I love. And I’m excited.

And I’ve been consistent in my daily practices to ground myself throughout the process.

So I couldn’t understand as I watched eczema spread from my hands, up my arms, all the way across my torso.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I said to myself. “I’m not stressed!”

Oh, the power of denial.

To reject what is happening right in front of us.

To weave stories that obscure reality.

It’s amazing really, these blind spots that we just can’t see. These patterns that we repeat over and over.

Where do they come from?

Well, our mind is a storyteller.

And it’s so good at it that we believe our words over our direct experience.

Words cast spells.

Words are a limited way of defining something expansive.

Words have unique potency and provenance for each person and this bleeds through into our version of reality.

We start to look at the world through concepts rather than sensations.

As Krishnamurti put it, “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again”.

Everything becomes neatly labelled and categorised by the mind.

The unimaginably complex web of the world becomes a simple, binary system of ‘this’ and ‘that’. Right and wrong.

Our beliefs shape what we see. And we go to great lengths to defend this mind-based version of reality with extravagant stories.

But the body doesn’t lie.

And in my case, eczema was communicating something to me: I was stressed.

I was continuing to deny it because of my old stories, so the body had to make itself unignorably known.

And as I sat with my feelings, I realised the truth of it.

I could sense the adrenaline, the rushing blood and the thoughts. And the meditation, the breathwork, the walks in nature… all of it felt like a band-aid. These tools weren’t addressing the root.

See, stress relates to our perceived capacity to handle things.

We must respect the limits of our nervous system and not push too hard (which reflects our actual capacity).

But when there’s something we want to achieve and feel capable of handling, the solution to stress is not relaxation.

This can be soothing and self-regulating.

Bu the real antidote is play.

It’s something I stopped doing years ago because it felt childish and unimportant. I was so focused on achieving (even as a child) that I would do things out of a sense of purpose and meaning rather than joy.

But play is critical. It’s how we learn, create new connections, and have fun.

When we pick up the colouring pencils, build a train set, throw a tennis ball, for no purpose other than the sheer joy of it, we slow down and zoom out.

We re-open the creative, inquisitive parts of the brain. Our shutdown melts away and our ability to explore is regained, presenting new possibilities and a sense of spaciousness.

We create more capacity to handle things. And the very act of dropping what we’re doing to focus on play supports a new story that we can let go a little.

This journey over the last few weeks has put me back in touch with my inner child. The poor little boy suffering from stress, trying so hard, desperately wanting to play but acting so grown up.

I’m sorry that I had to put my body through so much to realise how out of touch I was.

But at least now I know.

Through direct experience, not through words.