Vaginismus? Stop Working, Start Playing
For a lot of people navigating vaginismus and hitting plateaus, effort is not the problem. The research has been done. The providers have been seen. The practices are consistent. And yet something isn't shifting. The default response to that kind of stagnation might be to try harder and be more disciplined. But what if the trying harder is part of what's keeping things stuck?
Perfectionism and diligence are convincing disguises. They look like dedication and taking your healing seriously. And in some ways, they are. But it's also a nervous system state — one that prioritizes evaluation over exploration, correct over curious, safe over new. And a nervous system locked in evaluation mode doesn't have a lot of room left over for change.
Play might be the thing it's missing.
The Perfectionistic Healing Loop
There's a particular irony in how the nervous system learns. It builds patterns through repetition — efficient, automatic grooves that become the path of least resistance. In yoga philosophy we call these samskaras. These patterns are enormously useful in everyday life. They are also why chronic pelvic tension can become self-perpetuating. The body learns this is what we do here, and keeps doing it, even when the original reason for the patterns has long since passed.
The problem isn't just the pattern itself. It's that effortful, goal-oriented approaches to breaking it can inadvertently reinforce it. When healing becomes another domain for achievement — something to optimize, track, and perform correctly — the nervous system stays in the same vigilant, self-monitoring state that characterized the problem in the first place. You're working hard, but you're working hard inside the same loop.
Breaking a pattern doesn't usually happen through more of the same. It happens when the nervous system encounters something genuinely different and novel enough to interrupt the automatic response before it completes. Play, almost by definition, is that something different. It's purposeless. It's imperfect by design. It has no correct answer to evaluate yourself against. And that, it turns out, may be exactly why it works.
Play Is a Performance Enhancer
If the word "play" is throwing you off, let’s dig into what I mean.
Dr. Kelly Starrett, physical therapist and co-founder of The Ready State, made the case for play as a fundamental performance variable in a recent episode of the Rich Roll Podcast titled Play Is the Miracle Drug. His argument: wellness culture has become fixated on optimization at the expense of the fundamentals, and one of the most underrated fundamentals is play. The brain, he notes, consistently chooses safety over performance — and play may be one of the most direct ways to provide that safety, which then makes genuine performance possible.
The research backs this up. A 2020 study published in Thinking Skills and Creativity found that exposure to improvisational play promoted divergent thinking, greater tolerance for uncertainty, and improved psychological wellbeing. Participants didn't just feel better — they became more flexible thinkers and more confident in navigating situations without a clear right answer. The mechanism is worth noting: improv works in part because it removes the possibility of performing correctly. When there's no correct, the inner critic loses its job description. And when the inner critic goes quiet, the nervous system has room to explore rather than evaluate.
For high-achieving, goal-oriented people, this can feel counterintuitive to the point of being offensive. Play feels like a detour from the real work. But the evidence suggests it may actually be the real work — not instead of diligence, but as the condition that makes diligence useful.
Play, the Nervous System, and Breaking the Pattern
According to Dr. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory, the nervous system operates across a spectrum of states. At one end is the ventral vagal state — sometimes described as "safe and social" — where we feel connected, curious, and open to new experience. At the other end are the protective states: sympathetic activation (fight or flight) and dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze, collapse, disconnect). Play tends to live in ventral vagal territory. It signals to the nervous system: nothing critical is at stake here. We can afford to explore.
That signal matters more than it might seem. Genuine novelty and learning require a felt sense of safety. When the body is preoccupied with protection — or with performing healing correctly — the range of available responses narrows. Play begins to widen that range, not by forcing a shift, but by demonstrating that a shift is possible.
This is where somatic practitioner Kimberly Ann Johnson's TIMES framework becomes a useful tool. In her book Call of the Wild, Johnson describes TIMES — Thought, Image, Movement, Emotion, Sensation — as a method for tuning into what the body is actually doing rather than overriding it with analysis. The practice has two steps. First, you can use TIMES to map your typical response to a trigger: what thoughts arise? What images or impulses? Where does movement want to happen in the body, and where does it shut down? What emotion shows up, and what physical sensations accompany it? This mapping builds a picture of your habitual pattern. According to Johnson, we typically have 1-2 responses that consistently emerge when triggered.
The second step is the disruption: when that trigger arises again, you use what you've noticed to consciously choose a different response — not by suppressing the original one, but by introducing something new into the sequence before it completes automatically. If your typical response is losing yourself in a thought loop, can you shift your attention to something beautiful in the room, or start shaking and dancing to shift the energy? Play supports this process. When you've spent time in low-stakes, exploratory states, you have more options available when a high-stakes moment arrives. You've given the nervous system somewhere else to go.
Why This Matters for Vaginismus
Vaginismus and perfectionism may have more in common than they first appear to. Research has begun to map the psychological terrain of vaginismus, and what it finds is worth pausing on.
A 2022 case-control study published in Middle East Current Psychiatry found that women with vaginismus showed a distinctive personality pattern compared to controls — one that included perfectionism alongside rigidity, mood swings, dramatization, and impulsivity. The presence of two or more of these traits together was significantly more frequent among women with vaginismus (p < 0.001), leading the researchers to describe something they called a potential "vaginismus personality." It's worth noting that this was a small pilot study, and the nature of the relationship — whether these traits precede vaginismus, develop alongside it, or are shaped by the experience of having it — remains an open question. But the association is notable, and it aligns with what many people navigating this condition describe: a tendency toward high standards, self-monitoring, and difficulty tolerating imperfection or uncertainty.
This makes a certain kind of physiological sense. Both perfectionism and pelvic floor tension involve a nervous system oriented toward evaluation and control. When the body is constantly being assessed — am I doing this right, is this working, am I making progress — it stays in a kind of low-grade vigilance that doesn't leave much room for the exploratory, relaxed states where change tends to happen.
In yogic philosophy, Svadhisthana — the second chakra, located in the pelvic region — governs flow, sensation, pleasure, and aliveness. The animating energy of Svadhisthana is Shakti: not effortful or goal-oriented, but fluid and generative. When the pelvis is held in chronic tension, that quality of Shakti tends to go quiet — not because it's gone, but because the system is busy with something it considers more urgent.
Play is one of the more direct invitations back. Not through force, not through yet another correct technique, but through the simple act of letting something be purposeless for a few minutes. Doodle something ugly. Dance to one song with no agenda. Cook without a recipe. Lie on the floor and notice what your body wants to do next. The goal — and this is important — is not to regulate your nervous system. It's to be genuinely unproductive for a few minutes, and see what the body does when it's no longer being graded.
If you want to layer in the TIMES check-in, try it as a brief before-and-after: what's present before you play, and what's present after? The difference between those two snapshots can be surprisingly informative. And if play feels genuinely inaccessible — if unstructured, imperfect time produces real anxiety — that's useful information about where your nervous system is currently living.
If what you're reading here resonates — if some part of you recognizes the perfectionistic healing loop — Nervous System Skills for Vaginismus was built with exactly that in mind. It's not about adding more to your plate. It's about understanding the underlying patterns driving your nervous system's responses, and building the capacity for something different to become possible. You've probably already tried doing it right. This is an invitation to try something else.