Why Doesn't Rest Feel Like Rest Anymore?
On oxytocin, the long hug, and why none of us were meant to calm down alone.
It is Sunday evening, and she has done everything right. She slept in, she said no to brunch, she watched four episodes of something she won't remember by Wednesday, and she poured the second glass of wine at the exact moment the first one stopped working. And still, when she gets into bed, her jaw is tight and her shoulders are somewhere up near her ears. "I rested," she tells herself. "So why am I still this tired?"
Many of the women I sit with know this Sunday, and so do I.
We have been told that tired means we need to stop. So we stop, we lie still, and we wait for the body to catch up. But there is a kind of tired that stillness does not touch. It is the tired of carrying everything alone. It lives under the to do list, under the "I'm fine", under the polite "hm-mm" at dinner. No amount of sofa fixes it, because what it wants is not more rest. It wants warmth.
The world asks us to run on adrenaline, to do more, answer faster and achieve without ever stopping. But a woman's body moves in rhythm and in cycles, and it was never meant to live under pressure that doesn't end. We are made for connection, for give and take, and for seasons, and oxytocin is one of the ways the body finds its way back to them.
There is a hormone for this, and it has a lovely name. Oxytocin is made deep in the brain, in a small place called the hypothalamus, and a little gland at the base of the brain sends it out into the body. It rises when we feel close, touched and safe. It is there when a mother holds her baby, when two friends laugh until they cry, and when someone puts a warm hand on our back and leaves it there.
The science around it says a few simple things, and I love that they are simple.
In 2000, the psychologist Shelley Taylor and her team at UCLA noticed that most of the research on stress had been done on men. When they looked at women, they saw another answer to stress besides fight or flight, and they called it tend and befriend. When life gets heavy, many of us reach for our children, our sisters and our friends. Taylor's team suggested that oxytocin, working together with female hormones like estrogen, is part of why that reaching calms us down.
Five years later, researchers at the University of North Carolina asked women how often their partners hugged them and then measured their blood. The women who were hugged more often had higher oxytocin, lower blood pressure and a slower heart rate. It was a small study, and it shows a link rather than a cause. In 2022, a team at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany put couples through a stressful task and found that women who shared a hug with their partner released less cortisol, the stress hormone. The men did not show the same effect.
None of this is magic, and none of it says a hug will fix a hard life. What it says is quieter. Our bodies are listening for safety all the time, and very often safety arrives through other people.
This is where so many of us get stuck. We were raised to be good at coping. Our mothers coped, and our grandmothers coped harder. Many of us learned that a strong woman does not need anyone, that asking for a hug is a little embarrassing, and that the grown up way to calm down is alone, with a bath, a candle and a podcast about being more productive. We grew up watching Carrie Bradshaw type alone at two in the morning, wondering about love with nobody in the room, and we called that independence.
But the body never read that script. It still calms down the way it always has, in contact: skin, voice, eyes and the warmth of a hand. When we take all of that out of our days and keep all the pressure in, the body stays braced. We call it burnout, or bad sleep, or just a busy season. Sometimes it is simply a body that has not been held in a long time.
We were never meant to calm down alone.
So what do we do with this on a Tuesday? Not a new routine. Small doses of warmth, taken often, the way we drink water.
A warm hand on the belly and one on the chest, for ten slow breaths through the nose. A cup of cacao or tea that we drink sitting down, with both hands around it, instead of carrying it from room to room. Bare feet on the earth or the sand for one whole minute. A voice note to a friend that says nothing more than "I was thinking of you". A long hug with someone we trust, held past the polite part, until something in the chest lets go. And when we can, an hour sitting with other women, with nothing to fix and nothing to prove.
Nothing on that list is new. Our grandmothers knew most of it, and our bodies knew all of it before we had the words. That is the point. The answer is rarely more information. It is remembering.
Tonight, before the phone and before the wine, try one thing. Put one hand low on your belly and one on your chest, and feel the warmth of your own palms. Breathe slowly through your nose and let each out breath be a little longer than the in breath. Stay for ten breaths, and notice whether your shoulders move, even a little.
The body knows first. It has been waiting for us to notice that rest and warmth are not the same thing, and that we are allowed to need both.
Who in your life makes your body feel safe, and when did you last let them close?
If something in you said yes while you read this, the Signal Quiz is a gentle place to start. It takes a few minutes and shows you which pattern your body is running right now.
https://pauladelaselva.com/signal-quiz
Con cariño,
Paula