Letting Go of Mental and Emotional Tension Through Self-Leadership

Mental and emotional tension causes stress and physical strain, and drops your quality of life. Unfortunately, due to a lack of intrapersonal education, living with constant stress and pressure has become a lifestyle for many professionals.

Let’s observe how to change it.

As we pointed out in one of our earlier blogs, multiple reports have indicated high levels of stress and burnout. One of those, the 2025 UK Burnout Report, stated that 91% of respondents experienced high or extreme stress in the past year.

A proactive mental wellness approach needs to become workplace-wide. Also, pauses for relaxation and training your mind need to become valued.

Training your mind by learning intrapersonal skills for stress reduction and burnout prevention can make a huge difference.

Our 10-year journey demonstrates that relaxing your mind and learning intrapersonal skills are important for restoring acceptable employee engagement levels around 70% (see Gallup 2025 study image below where the current world average level is just 21%).

Long hours, constant connectivity, low ability to say ‘No’ and relax, as well as rising expectations, gradually tighten the inner tensions until stress, fatigue, or burnout emerge.

While external stressors matter, experience and research consistently show that tension is sustained by failure to manage our reactivity in our inner world. This is where self-leadership becomes essential.
 

Self-leadership is based on intrapersonal skills

Self-leadership is your ability to lead your thoughts, imagination, emotions, physical body, and behaviors consciously rather than operating on subconscious autopilot.

When intrapersonal skills are weak, mental and emotional tension accumulates unnoticed. You may push through fatigue, ignore growing stress signals, or rely on mental willpower by using force without relaxing and taking needed breaks.

Inner tensions lead over time to faded focus, inner irritability, low self-leadership, poor sleep, eating irregularity, etc. When stress and tension become chronic, and relaxation is missing, you are on a path to burnout.
 

Letting go or neutralizing inner tension is the opposite of suppressing emotions or “thinking positively” while negative thoughts still run in the background. Inner freedom starts from awareness and obtaining good intrapersonal regulation.

Mental tension originates from constant overthinking, and emotional tension from unresolved emotional reactions. Both cause constant internal pressure and reduce your ability to perform as your mind is busy with your inner turmoil.

As we have explained in several earlier blogs, intrapersonal skills help you to recognize such unhealthy inner patterns, pause, and consciously choose calm responses. This shift alone can significantly reduce stress levels and restore mental clarity. When you know how to keep your mind, work patterns become more sustainable.

Reality: Most people ignore pauses!

The truth is, a calm, well-regulated mind makes better decisions, communicates more clearly, and adapts faster to change. Teams led by individuals with strong intrapersonal skills experience fewer interpersonal conflicts and see higher trust and greater engagement levels.

However, many people discover that self-leadership in theory isn’t the same as being calm and applying intrapersonal skills adequately.

When you feel helpless, and your mind is racing at the office, at home, and even at night, your body becomes tense as your emotional and mental turmoil makes you reactive under pressure. This means your nervous system may need some external support.

Just as physical training sometimes requires equipment, mental training can benefit from supportive tools that help you relax. You can learn intrapersonal skills easily when you are calm, but when you are irritated, you work and learn poorly. Irritation and tension need softening.

This is where forward-thinking wellness and neurotechnology companies like Luxsanat (www.luxsanat.com) come in. Luxsanat operates at the intersection of neuroscience, mental resilience, and practical wellbeing, focusing on tools and experiences that help people regulate their nervous systems, recover from stress, and build sustainable inner balance in high-pressure environments.

Within Luxsanat’s portfolio, technologies such as NeuroVIZR can play an easing role. It is a wearable light and sound therapy device that guides brain states through audiovisual stimulation.
 

Physiotherapist Saskia Alusalu (in the picture above) tried NeuroVIZR and found it relaxing under certain conditions. 

You use NeuroVIZR with your eyes closed, so it is suitable for relaxation rooms. When you lie or sit in a relaxing position, the device delivers carefully designed light and sound patterns that help the brain shift into calmer, more balanced states. Sessions run automatically, making the experience accessible even for those who struggle with meditation or traditional relaxation practices.

Early research suggests that wearable neuro devices can increase blood flow to the brain and increase levels of neurotransmitters. Using it may support reducing worry, anxiety, insomnia, cognitive impairment, improve memory, and reduce even some symptoms of ADHD, depression, or PTSD, as well as alleviate pain. In practical terms, this is due to slowing down the racing mind.

We should never rely only on external devices. Smartphones, computers, and devices like NeuroVIZR can support our lives and work when used purposefully. In the context of work tensions, stopping the fast path to burnout by interrupting usual thought and emotional patterns and relaxing for a while can be transformative.

When your brain is given pause from inner reactivity, it allows you to relax. NeuroVIZR is suitable for a relaxation room in the offices. Professionals feeling under high pressure and stress can use it to unwind during the pauses. The calming clarity emerges when mental noise subsides.

We recommend intrapersonal skills training that should follow. As many NeuroVIZR users have asked what comes next, the answer is clear: When your mind becomes calmer, you need to train it.

Best of both worlds

Devices like NeuroVIZR can help people, but without intrapersonal skills, you end up back on the old track. Removing mental and emotional charge temporarily is great; learning how to come over it permanently is better.

A calm mind and brain are needed for using awareness and sensing deliberately at will; this is what gives you a conscious choice.

It’s important to emphasize that no external device can replace personal responsibility and healthy inner patterns; they support it.

Training intrapersonal skills and securing mental wellness proactively requires the intention of HR and business leaders. Using self-leadership skills with open eyes is what brings about a shift in the work patterns and quality.

Using different external tools, like NeuroVIZR, can lower the mental burden barrier by helping your nervous system experience calm states more easily. Once your mind becomes calm, learning and using new skills becomes easy.

The goal should be your power to use your intrapersonal skills 24/7 independently, as skills are always with you, even when device batteries are depleted, or you are out on the fieldwork.

Conclusion

In today’s workplaces, preventing burnout is a must if you desire to keep your talent.

Organizations with exhausted and stressed minds eventually pay the price in disengagement, errors, and leader and employee burnout, which lead in turn to employee turnover. Supporting employees in learning how to let go of tension is the key.

Offering tools that make this process more accessible is both humane and strategic. We see that it is worth exploring devices like NeuroVIZR (use the code WELLNESSORBIT to get 10% off) for relaxation, and then let your staff use mental wellness trainings. This combination can make things easier for you and your team.

Ultimately, knowing how to neutralize your mental and emotional tension is about reclaiming inner peace. Strong intrapersonal skills are the foundation of self-leadership, which allows you to create a foundation for resilience, clarity, and sustainable success. A calm mind is your most reliable asset you can bring to your work and your life.
 

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This blog post is written by Kaur Lass and shared in partnership with Luxanat