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Ever hear yourself say that line? Ever thought it was a passing feeling but then realized it’s been going on for months now, even years?
It’s amazing what long-term stress can do to you. Here is a small list that comes nowhere near to being complete: muscular tension, insomnia, irritability, mental and physical fatigue, headaches, migraines, cold sores, increased chance of developing heart disease, lowered immune functioning and so more colds, flu, and autoimmune disorders.
What’s the standard reply when you tell people you’re stressed out? They say, ‘Relax. Take it easy. Chill out.’ Have you ever tried to follow that advice only to find you had no idea ‘how’ to even begin to relax? Then wondered if it involved something that included the couch and tv? Sure the couch and tv can offer a sense of relaxation, but can they reduce that muscular tension that got you through the day but is now causing you great pain?
As a kinesiologist I often see people who want to relax their tight shoulders, necks, and backs, but who don’t know how to. Now if I told those people to Relax! no such thing would occur. Many of us have lost the ability to relax and for some unfortunate reason the How to Operate Your Body Handbook wasn’t given out when we were born.
Here’s a fascinating fact that would probably have been featured in that Handbook. If your muscles are held in a tightly contracted state, such as when your neck and shoulders feel like rock, you’ll find that even when you drop off to sleep these muscles DO NOT relax if your nervous system has come to accept this tightness as its ‘default’ position. This means that even sleep will not release your body from a habitual state of muscle tension. And if sleep can’t do it, the couch and tv won’t be able to, either.
So, what’s a stressed out person to do? There are a huge variety of relaxation methods that run the gamut from physical activities, to mental methods such as meditation, to breathing exercises, to leisure activities. You’ve probably tried a few already.
But if you want to get right down to learning how to release your tight muscles, the key concept involves nothing more than learning how to contract and relax your muscles. That’s it. If you can contract a muscle you can relax a muscle.
The body is an incredibly complex and amazing system of nerves, bones, joints, muscles, and tissues. Joints operate due to a combined effort from muscles and tendons surrounding the joint, along with nerves. Consider the lower back, which is a painful problem area for many. If you arch your lower back you are achieving this position by tightening your back muscles and relaxing your abdominal muscles. Now if you flatten your back, you are relaxing your back muscles and tightening your abdominal muscles. By simply going through this full range of motion a few times, you can help release tight muscles of the back and abdomen.
Just how does muscle tightness lead to pain and fatigue over time? Try this. Tighten your bicep muscle as if to show off your Popeye arm bulge. Now hold that pose for five minutes, okay, now, try holding it tight for an hour, now how about staying in that position for the whole day, and…ow! Pain.
Unfortunately, the results of muscle tightness are not usually as obvious as the above bicep example. We often don’t realize what’s going on, only that we’re in pain. That’s why this relaxation method is so effective. Just by going through a full range of motion a number of times with mental awareness of the feel of the muscles, you can make the profound realization that you are holding certain areas of the body in a state of extreme tightness. And with that realization comes the other, that you can learn how to release those tight areas, as well.
This technique is not new. Moshe Feldenkrais discovered the muscle contraction/release method, around 1942, and used it to develop an entire system of body awareness exercises that have since helped many people learn how to relax their muscles from head to toe. His system continues to be refined over the years and has been given a variety of new names by practitioners as they further develop Feldenkrais’ work. Somatics is such a system and is the one I’ve learned. I use Somatics, to some degree, in all the classes I teach. I’ve found this system incredibly helpful when instructing people in How to Relax!
Photo Credit: Julia Freeman-Woolpert
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