Tension · The journal
Tension in a nutshell.
Tension is the real problem — not defiance, not dominance. And you are the way out.
Nearly every "behaviour problem" is really a tension problem. A horse that braces, rushes, shuts down or explodes is not being defiant — it is a nervous system asking for a way down that it cannot find on its own.
Tension is a mismatch: a gap between what the horse's current foundation can support and what is being asked of it. Close the gap and the behaviour resolves itself. This is the short version of how.
1The principle
Tension shows up in two situations: when a horse is asked for more than its current foundation can carry, or when the environment overloads its nervous system. Either way the system tips into its "up" state, and the horse looks for relief — bracing, rushing, spooking, or switching off.
Here is the part most training misses: a stressed horse is not seeking a treat. It is seeking a way down. When you become the reliable source of that down-regulation — the one who brings the arousal back to a place the horse can think — you become the motivation itself, ahead of food and ahead of force.
2The science underneath
The autonomic nervous system has two branches: the sympathetic ("up" — mobilise) and the parasympathetic ("down" — recover). In Stephen Porges' polyvagal framework, a sympathetically dominant horse cannot learn flexibly or behave adaptively; cortisol and adrenaline narrow focus and blunt memory. Get the arousal down and the thinking brain comes back online.
Learning theory adds the other half: horses learn primarily through pressure and release, which mirrors how they naturally yield and give ground in a herd. The timing of the release is what signals learning. And the most powerful release of all is not the physical one — it is returning the nervous system to safety. Food cannot reach that need when a horse is over threshold.
3Why food and force both miss
Food recruits Panksepp's SEEKING system — appetitive arousal. In a horse that is already tense, that adds arousal on top of arousal, producing mugging, frustration and a busy, working-for-the-treat state rather than genuine settlement.
Force adds sympathetic load directly. It suppresses the behaviour while leaving the tension underneath intact — and that tension resurfaces somewhere else, later.
Down-regulation is the only one of the three that addresses the actual problem: it resolves the tension rather than bribing over it or overriding it.
4In practice
- Read the system, not the symptom. A training gap and a regulation gap look similar but need different answers. Ask which one you are actually looking at.
- Work below threshold, where thinking is still possible. Approach-and-retreat, done deliberately, loads and unloads tension in doses the horse can process.
- Release early and soft. Let go at the first flicker of softening — the beginning of a try — not the finished effort. Reward the intention, and let the horse complete the down-regulation on its own; that early release sets off a cascade of relaxation.
- Be the predictable variable. When the horse can reliably predict that you bring the tension down, you stop being another pressure and become the way out.
5What to watch for
Tension rising
- High head, hard eye
- Short, shallow breath
- Bracing, quick feet
- Clamped or swishing tail
- Tight ears and jaw
- Displacement, irritability
The release window
- The eye softens
- The head drops a fraction
- A breath releases
- The smallest pause or yield
- The ears soften
Release here.
Full release
- An audible exhale
- Licking and chewing
- A yawn
- Weight settling
- Willingness to stand
The horse's own follow-through.
6How horses let tension go
Horses have their own machinery for coming down. Give them room to use it:
- Lowering the head below the withers triggers a direct physiological shift toward "down".
- Chewing and salivation in the right context — the mechanism, not the anticipation of food.
- Optic flow — movement across the visual field, the horse's version of the calm a person finds on a walk.
- The physiological sigh and other spontaneous resets.
7Common mistakes
- Reading tension as defiance — and adding pressure to it.
- Waiting for the finished effort before releasing, instead of rewarding the onset.
- Drilling the manoeuvre when the real issue is regulation.
- Missing the release window because your attention is on the task, not the nervous system.
- Using food to paper over tension that needs resolving.
The unifying principle
We don't make horses comply.
We make ourselves the way out.
When safety runs through you, motivation becomes something the horse seeks rather than something you have to supply. That is not a training trick. It is simply how a nervous system works.
References
- McGreevy, P., Christensen, J.W., König von Borstel, U. & McLean, A.N. (2018). Equitation Science, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
- McLean, A.N. (2005). The positive aspects of correct negative reinforcement. Anthrozoös, 18(3), 245–254.
- McLean, A.N. & Christensen, J.W. (2017). Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 190, 18–27.
- Panksepp, J. (2011). Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(9), 1791–1804.
- Panksepp, J. & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind. W.W. Norton.
- Porges, S.W. (2009). Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76(Suppl 2), S86–S90.
- Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton.
- Rietmann, T.R., Stuart, A.E.A., Bernasconi, P., Stauffacher, M., Auer, J.A. & Weishaupt, M.A. (2004). Assessment of mental stress in warmblood horses: heart rate variability in comparison to heart rate and selected behavioural parameters. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 88(1–2), 121–136.
- Scopa, C., Contalbrigo, L., Greco, A., Lanatà, A., Scilingo, E.P. & Baragli, P. (2019). Emotional transfer in human–horse interaction: new perspectives on equine assisted interventions. Animals, 9(12), 1030.
