I Thought I Needed to Stretch. I Needed to Quit.

Tight hips suck. I used to walk around like I was warming up for hurdles, hoping my body would just chill out.

Anyway.

Before I quit my job, I had “tight hips.”

They hurt. They felt locked. Sometimes it was a dull ache, sometimes sharp. I filed it under the normal adult drawer: posture, aging, sitting too much, whatever.

I didn’t think much of it.

Then I quit.

My brain felt amazing almost immediately — light, happy, relieved. Like someone finally turned off a loud machine I didn’t realize was running.

But my body?

My body crashed.

For weeks I was exhausted in a way I hadn’t been before. Not sick. Not depressed. Just bone-level tired. Like everything I’d been holding together finally got permission to fall apart.

And then — quietly, without effort — my hip pain disappeared.

No stretching routine.
No mobility protocol.
No fix.

Just… gone.

That’s when I started thinking the mind/body connection is less mystical and more like systems behavior: you can’t run a process at 90% CPU forever without heat showing up somewhere.

This wasn’t a “sitting too much” problem

Most hip pain advice is mechanical: tight hip flexors, bad posture, ergonomics, inactivity.

But that story never fit.

I had a standing desk.
I moved constantly.
I wasn’t sedentary — I was vigilant.

So I stopped asking what position my body was in and started asking:

What state is my body living in?

Layer 1: Stress physiology, not posture

I don’t think my hips were tight because I needed to stretch more.

I think they were tight because I was stressed all the time.

Not “panic attack” stressed. More like: low-grade bracing. Always slightly on. Always ready. Never fully downshifting.

And your hips are basically your body’s support beam. If you live in brace mode, it makes sense that’s where the tension camps out.

Layer 2: Why my body picked hips as the symptom

Here’s the important part: I noticed the hip pain.

What I didn’t notice was global exhaustion.

Hip pain fit a story I already believed: “normal wear.” It was localized, containable, and didn’t require me to change anything.

Exhaustion would’ve been inconvenient. It would’ve demanded rest, boundaries, or a slower pace — things my life at the time didn’t really allow.

So my system did something efficient:

It expressed stress in a way that didn’t threaten the whole setup.

The signal wasn’t missing.
It was translated into something manageable.

I didn’t ignore my body.
I explained it away.

Layer 3: Why I crashed after I quit

When I quit, my brain relaxed immediately.

My body didn’t celebrate. It collapsed.

For weeks I felt heavy, run down, depleted — like my system had stopped buffering stress and was now processing the backlog.

While I was working, my nervous system stayed elevated — sympathetic, activated, capable. That state suppresses fatigue signals. It keeps you moving.

When the stressor disappeared, the system downshifted.

Relief didn’t feel like rest.
It felt like payback.

And only after that passed did my body recalibrate.

That’s when the hip pain vanished.

Where somatic work fits (without making it a religion)

I don’t think you can stretch your way out of trauma.

But I do think the body flags misalignment before the mind is ready to admit it.

Somatic work isn’t magic. It’s access.

It helps you notice patterns of tension, arousal, and shutdown — and ask:

Why is my body doing this right now? What am I adapting to?

Used this way, it’s not curative. It’s diagnostic.

What I take from this

I didn’t fix my hips.

I changed my life.

My body had been cooperating with a level of pressure I didn’t want to sustain. When that pressure disappeared, it took time to catch up — first by resting, then by letting go.

The unsettling part isn’t that stress showed up physically.

It’s how easily I normalized it.

So now, when something feels “off,” I’m less interested in hacking the symptom and more interested in asking:

What am I calling “normal” that’s actually just adaptation?

Because I don’t think the body knows secrets.

I think it just tells the truth earlier — and quieter — than we’re used to listening for.

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