You have been holding your shoulders since 2019.
I do not know the exact year. But there is one. There is a moment your body decided that staying tense was the responsible thing to do, and it has been quietly billing you for that decision ever since, like a subscription you forgot you signed up for and cannot find the button to cancel.
Here is the part nobody mentions.
The tension is not responding to anything. There is no tiger. There has not been a tiger in a very long time. The deadline passed. The conversation ended. The thing you were braced for either happened or didn't, and either way it is over. But the bracing stayed, because your nervous system never got the memo, and your nervous system does not read memos. It reads threat, and it has decided, on your behalf, without asking, that the threat is permanent.
So you carry it. Into the meeting. Into the weekend. Into the vacation where your shoulders finally drop on day four, the day before you fly home, which is the body's idea of a cruel joke.
This is the strange thing about held tension. It feels like something you are doing. It is actually something you forgot to stop doing. Those are not the same. One is effort. The other is a habit wearing the costume of effort, and it has been collecting a paycheck under a false name for years.
You are not tense because today is hard.
You are tense because some Tuesday a long time ago was hard, and nobody ever told the muscle it could clock out.
One thing:
Right now, notice your shoulders. Do not fix them. Do not roll them back or breathe into them or do anything productive about it. Just notice where they are. That is all. The noticing is the whole thing.
Josh