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Life is stressful, no doubt about that, with work, family and the world in general. People should learn to relax their body’s through muscle-relaxing techniques. These techniques teaches your body to relax at will and thus relieve you of stress.
Muscular tension accompanies psychological stress. The causes of the stress may differ, ranging from fear to worry to anger and frustration, but the muscular tension is always there. The muscle tone or tonus increases beyond the normally low level of contraction. Exercises designed to reduce muscular tension can have a therapeutic effect on one’s emotional state. The basic concept in all the various techniques for reducing stress through exercise is to reduce tension by depressing muscular activity and by degrees induce a state of relaxation. The exercises incidentally contribute to total fitness, but generally to a minor degree. Rhythmic exercises for the trunk help to reduce tension and build muscles. These exercises also contribute to improved circulation. Other types of muscle-relaxing exercises help to improve breathing. Regional Relaxation Muscle-relaxing exercises are effective in reducing tension because the mind can affect or control groups of muscles even though the causes of stress may not be reachable—or even recognizable. Learning to relax controllable muscles, the individual can attach first the muscular tension, then the psychological stress that undergirds it. “Uncontrollable tensions” thus come under the influence of the mind. The source of the stress may or may not be still at work; the exercise nonetheless relieves the symptoms that it has caused. For the purpose of relieving muscular tension, the person first concentrates on muscle regions or groups. Effort is then exerted to recognize voluntary muscle contractions. In one muscle group after another, the levels of voluntary contraction are progressively lowered. With practice, the subject’s perceptions of his own muscular state improve. Eventually, he can identify and eliminate any slightest degree of in voluntary muscle tension of any kind in any part of the body. Often, a kind of meditational relaxation takes place. The subject gradually and for short periods achieves a state of high concentration. Nagging life-problems are—briefly—forgotten. Tension-reducing exercises fall basically into a basic pattern. To a large extent, they take their cues from the model developed in 1929 by Dr. Edmund Jacobson. In this model, a formal training method for teaching a person to relax groups of muscles at will, the subject consciously alternates contracting with relaxing various muscle groups at maximum, half-strength, and very slight levels of intensity. Patterned methods of relaxing muscles should be practiced five or ten minutes a day. They can become part of an exercise program, or they can be completely separate. They do, after all, have their own rationale. These techniques will not only teach you to relax hardworked muscles but also help you cope with stress.
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