Briefly
Some tension never came from lifting anything. Shoulders that sit higher than the job needs. A jaw already set at breakfast. Breath that stops short of the bottom of the ribs.
That is a body braced for something. Bracing is normal and useful, and it is meant to be brief. The trouble starts when it never gets a clean release, season after season, and readiness becomes the resting position.
A pattern of holding is not evidence that something in you is broken. It is a record of what your body has been through.
What follows is the evidence for that, what it does and does not mean, and what can be worked with.
Why does a body brace before anything has happened?
There is a kind of tension that never came from lifting anything. Shoulders that sit a centimetre higher than the job requires. A jaw already set at seven in the morning. Breath that stops somewhere short of the bottom of the ribs. Nothing is happening. The body is ready anyway.
That readiness has been caught in the laboratory. Ronald Luijcks and colleagues wired 64 adults for surface EMG and told them an unpleasant electrical stimulus was coming. Activity in both left and right trapezius climbed significantly above baseline during the waiting phase, before the stimulus was delivered at all (PLOS ONE, 2014). The muscle was not responding to something. It was anticipating it.
The reason sits deep in the architecture. Writing on the defence cascade in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Kasia Kozlowska and colleagues describe arousal as the first step of the sequence: sympathetic tone and skeletal muscle activation rise together, in one movement. Further along, freezing appears as flight-or-fight put on hold: high muscle tone with no movement at all. Muscle tone is not a by-product of the threat response. It is one of the ways that response gets written.
What turns a response into a pattern?
A defensive contraction is meant to be brief: mobilise, act, stand down. The trouble arrives with repetition: responses mounted again and again, in seasons rather than moments, with no clean release between them.
Bruce McEwen spent a career naming that arithmetic. In his 2017 review of chronic stress, the Rockefeller neuroscientist set out the paradox: the same mediators that protect the body in the short run inflict wear when they are chronically over-used. The failure is rarely in mounting a response. It is in standing one down.
Muscle behaves the same way. Paul Hodges and Kylie Tucker at the University of Queensland proposed that pain and threat do not simply switch muscles on or off; the nervous system redistributes activity within and between muscles, altering how a region moves and how stiff it is (PAIN, 2011). The adaptation carries a short-term benefit and a potential long-term cost. It protects, and then it persists.
The persistence shows in something as ordinary as a forward bend. At full flexion the long muscles of the back normally fall silent, the load handed to ligament and bone. That handover, the flexion-relaxation phenomenon, is frequently missing in people with chronic back pain. In a 2024 study by Tianwei Zhang and colleagues in Berlin, 52.6% of the chronic low back pain group showed an altered pattern: muscles that should have gone quiet stayed switched on. A guard still on duty, long after the thing it was guarding against.
Does an accumulated life really show up in the body?
This is where the evidence widens from the laboratory to the population, and where it needs handling with real care.
The founding work is the Adverse Childhood Experiences study: Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda and colleagues surveyed 9,508 adults and found a graded relationship between the number of adverse categories reported and adult disease risk (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998).
For the body specifically, the strongest synthesis is recent. André Bussières, Jan Hartvigsen and colleagues pooled 85 studies and 826,452 participants and found adverse childhood experiences associated with higher odds of reporting chronic painful conditions in adulthood: adjusted odds ratio 1.53 overall, rising with exposure from 1.29 at a single experience to 1.95 at four or more (European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2023). Those figures describe risk across very large groups, not a forecast for any one person.
That caveat deserves saying twice. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University puts it plainly: an ACE score cannot accurately predict how any one individual will fare, offering only a general sense of increased risk at population level. Odds of 1.95 mean a great many people with four or more such experiences never develop chronic pain, and a great many with none do. A high count is not a diagnosis, a verdict or a prophecy.
It is also not a fault. Harvard’s framing of toxic stress turns on the absence of buffering: prolonged activation of a child’s stress response without a supportive adult relationship to steady it. What a body carried says something about the conditions it grew in, and nothing about the worth of the person carrying it.
Is a tension pattern a fault, or a record?
Bessel van der Kolk gave this territory its phrase. Writing in Harvard Review of Psychiatry in 1994, he argued that experience which fails to be organised into ordinary narrative memory may be held instead at a somatosensory level, as image and physical sensation rather than as story. That is an interpretive frame rather than a settled physiology, and it is best held as one.
Alongside it sits harder ground. Kara Hannibal and Mark Bishop, writing in Physical Therapy in 2014, set out the psychoneuroendocrine version: a prolonged or exaggerated stress response may perpetuate cortisol dysfunction, widespread inflammation and pain.
What both point toward is a reframe. A pattern of holding is not evidence that something in you is broken. It is evidence that something in you worked. Guarding is competence. Bracing is intelligence under load. The pattern in your shoulders is accurate, to a moment that has passed. Symptoms are feedback: the body communicating rather than malfunctioning.
Reading that as a defect gets the story backwards, and it adds shame to a body already carrying plenty. A record is not a fault. It is information about what has been carried, and for how long.
What can be worked with, and what belongs elsewhere?
Here is the line, drawn plainly.
Dr Ari is a Chiropractor, not a psychologist. They do not work with your story. Where an experience is still difficult, intrusive, distressing, shaping your days, that work belongs with the person whose story it is and, where wanted, with a psychologist or your GP. The healthdirect guidance is that distressing thoughts and symptoms persisting more than two to three weeks after a traumatic event warrant a conversation with your GP, who can refer on to a psychologist, counsellor or psychiatrist; the Better Health Channel in Victoria sets a similar mark at three to four weeks.
Psychological therapies have their own substantial research base. That research concerns a different intervention, delivered by a different profession and studied in different populations; it says nothing about Chiropractic care, and no equivalent claim is made here for Chiropractic care.
What a Chiropractor attends to is narrower, and physical: the pattern of tone, posture and guarding a body is holding right now. No hands resolve, release, process or reverse a history. Gentle Nervous System Adjustments are a physical input to a physical state, nothing larger. That honesty is not a limitation on the work. It is the condition of doing it well.
How does Diskin Life approach the tension a life leaves behind?
At the Centre in Fitzroy, a body carrying years of holding is not read as a body that has gone wrong. Three readings are taken, and no one of them is left to speak on its own.
The first reading is yours. What you notice, where the holding lives, what it costs you, and what you would do with the room it takes up, is the reading no measure supplies. A finding means little until it is set against a life someone is trying to lead.
The second is measurement. The Life Assessment brings careful baseline testing plus seven extraordinary measures to a single question: how is this nervous system actually running, as distinct from how it is described or how it feels on a good day.
The third is what Dr Ari observes and records over time, what changes across a course of care and what does not, read through more than forty years and 25,000+ clients.
Care itself is gentle Nervous System Adjustments: light, precise contacts that cue the nervous system rather than forcing it, with the body doing the work. The 3 Pulse Integration Process, Life Assessment, Life Upgrade and Life Momentum: is interdependent, each strengthening the others rather than following from the last. Everyone begins with a free, no-obligation Discovery Session: a conversation with Dr Ari, and nothing else happens at that visit.
What this cannot show
The evidence here supports a way of understanding a body. It does not support a claim about changing a history.
No study shows that a Chiropractic adjustment alters trauma outcomes. That evidence does not exist, and nothing above should be read as implying it does.
The adversity literature carries a serious caveat: most of it is retrospective, asking adults to recall childhood decades later. Jessie Baldwin, Andrea Danese and colleagues found in JAMA Psychiatry (2019) that prospective and retrospective measures of childhood adversity agree poorly, identifying substantially different groups of people, so associations built on recall need holding loosely. And every odds ratio quoted here describes groups, never an individual.
The muscle evidence is real and modest. Group differences in surface EMG are reliably detected; surface EMG remains a limited individual measure, and findings vary between studies. Whether an altered flexion-relaxation pattern helps cause persistent pain or follows from it is unsettled, and the arrow very likely runs both ways.
The anticipation experiment demonstrates minutes, not decades. Nothing in it establishes that a particular experience is what is holding a particular shoulder today.
Tension also has many origins with nothing to do with life history: thyroid conditions, inflammatory disease, medication effects, sleep disorders, mechanical overload. Persistent pain or distress deserves a proper conversation with your GP.
What can be said honestly: guarding is measurable, accumulated load is associated with more of it across populations, and the reframe from fault to record takes shame out of the picture.
What to hold on to
Bracing is anticipatory. Trapezius activity rises above baseline while a person waits for an unpleasant stimulus, before anything arrives.
Muscle tone is part of the threat response, not a side effect. Arousal raises sympathetic tone and skeletal muscle activation together.
Patterns form through repetition without release. Protective adaptations carry a short-term benefit and a long-term cost, and can outlast what they were protecting against.
Accumulated adversity shows up at population scale with a dose-like gradient, and those odds describe large groups, never an individual’s fate. A high count is not a diagnosis or a prophecy.
A tension pattern is a record of what worked, not evidence of something broken. Symptoms are feedback.
The story belongs with you and, where wanted, with a psychologist or GP. What a Chiropractor attends to is the physical pattern the story left behind.
General information only, not a diagnosis or personal health advice. If pain or distress is persistent, please also speak with your GP.