You know exactly what I mean. That constant hum in the back of your head — the shopping list tangled up with the accountant’s email, Tuesday’s appointment overlapping Wednesday’s meeting, your niece’s birthday that you very nearly forgot. You are never quite where you are. Not on holiday, not in the shower, not with your eyes closed. Least of all with your eyes closed.
The brain that never switches off
The mental load is not a marketing concept dreamt up to sell wellness retreats. The French sociologist Monique Haicault described it as early as 1984: the invisible work of thinking of everything, for everyone, all the time. Planning, anticipating, keeping control — and never going into standby.
In the women who carry everyday life — and surveys confirm it: it is still, by a wide margin, women — the mind runs without a break. It can no longer tell a real emergency from a supposed one. Calling the babysitter back sets off the same level of alarm as finalising a funding application. The brain handles everything with the same intensity: no filter, no pause, no sorting.
We know the result: chronic fatigue, disrupted sleep, irritability, the feeling of running without ever catching up. But there is a less visible, deeper effect that nobody names: disconnection from the body.
The body on autopilot
When the brain runs constantly, the body switches to autopilot. It walks, sits, eats, sometimes makes love — but it is no longer inhabited. It carries out orders. It functions. It no longer feels.
This is not an illness. It is more a way of holding on: overwhelmed, your attention withdraws from the sensations that do not seem essential. Muscle tension is no longer perceived — it becomes the ordinary background noise. Physical pleasure shrinks to a brief relief. Touch loses its texture, its depth. The body exists, but as a tool. Not as a place to live in.
Most women do not even notice. They think it is normal. That “it’s just age”. That tiredness explains everything. Until the day something — a gesture, a touch, a forgotten sensation — reminds them what it means to be present in their own skin. And then the gap between the life they are living and the life they could be living becomes dizzying.
Why meditation is not enough
I know what you have been advised. Meditation. Yoga. Heart coherence breathing. Mindfulness apps. And I have no doubt that you have tried — sincerely.
But here is the problem: these practices ask the mind to calm the mind. It is like trying to settle an overexcited child by shouting “calm down!” at them. The mind, the very one that is overheating, is also the one called upon to meditate. It is asked to observe itself, to let go, to do nothing — all things it has long since unlearned.
The result: you are lying on your yoga mat, eyes closed, and your head is writing the shopping list. You have been meditating for seven minutes and you are thinking about Thursday’s report. You are doing box breathing and working out whether you have time to reach the dry cleaner’s before 6 pm.
This is not a failure. It is the wrong tool for the right problem.
Touch: a door the mind does not control
Touch comes in by another route. It asks nothing of the mind. It travels, among other paths, along the C-tactile fibres — nerve fibres specialised in slow, pleasant touch, whose signal reaches the insula, a region of the brain linked to emotion. No reasoning. No effort of will. No negotiation.
When a warm hand rests on your back with the right pressure, at the right speed, something happens beyond the reach of your will: the body shifts into rest. The heart slows. The breath deepens. Stress recedes: according to several studies, cortisol tends to fall during and after a massage.
And the mind — that exhausted conductor who refuses to lay down the baton — finally lets go. Not silenced by force. Made redundant by the body taking over.
That is why so many women with overactive minds say the same thing after a sensual massage: “I don’t know what happened. At some point, my head just switched off.” They did not decide it. Their body did it for them.
The woman who controls everything
There is a profile I know well. The one who manages. Who anticipates. Who forgets nothing. Who carries the household, the career, the children, the ageing parents, the friends in crisis — sometimes all at once.
This woman has a particular relationship with letting go: she cannot. Not for lack of willpower — because of the way her mind is built. Her brain has been wired for control for so long that letting go, even for ten minutes, sets off an alarm. What if something slips through my fingers while I’m not watching?
When this woman comes for a massage, she arrives with her head. She asks precise questions. She checks the frame. She needs to understand before she lets anything happen. And that is perfectly normal.
The massage does not ask her to “let go” as though it were an order. The Feeling Guarantee tells her that she keeps control until the very last moment. The opening conversation sets the rules. The limits are hers. And then — only then — the hands begin their work. Slowly. Patiently. Demanding nothing.
And at some point — sometimes after twenty minutes, sometimes after forty — the body understands what the head refused to hear: for the next few minutes, you have nothing to manage. Nothing to anticipate. Nothing to control. Someone else is at the helm — and all that person asks of you is one thing: to receive.
That moment, when it comes, feels like a free fall in slow motion. The body surrenders. The jaw unclenches. The shoulders drop by three centimetres. The breath changes register. And the mind, for the first time in months — perhaps in years — falls silent.
What you take back to the office the next day
Sensual massage is not an interlude cut off from the rest of your life. What it sets in motion does not stop at the door of the massage room.
The women who come back tell me surprising things. Not “I had a lovely time”. Rather: “The next day, in my nine o’clock meeting, I noticed I was breathing normally.” Or: “I slept seven hours straight for the first time in a year.” Or again: “I realised I’d been clenching my jaw sixteen hours a day.” This link between chronic stress, sleep and sensual massage lies, in fact, at the heart of what so many overstretched women experience.
Letting go, once the body has lived it — not thought it, not conceptualised it, lived it — leaves an imprint. The body remembers that it knows how. And that memory takes root, session after session, like a muscle being trained back into shape.
It is not a luxury. For a woman carrying the world on her shoulders, it is a necessity.
Your diary will understand
At Escale de Soie, between Aix-les-Bains and Chambéry, appointments are designed around busy diaries: lunch breaks, after work, Saturdays. You arrive with your head full. You leave with a body that has found its voice again.
If these lines speak to you, their natural continuation is touch, the key to women’s fulfilment — beyond the mental load alone.
A message to +33 7 43 54 47 87 — between two meetings, during a break, whenever suits you, and in English if you prefer. No commitment, no protocol. Just the first gesture of a woman who has decided that taking care of herself is no longer optional.