The second defense for
managing stress is your musculature. Assuming you're a pro at abdominal
breathing, (the first defense to managing stress) your next goal is to
next become aware of how your muscles respond to the effects of stress.
Whenever, your unconscious mind perceives a
threatening situation it prepares you to fight or run. Now for the irony:
It really doesn't have to be a life-threatening situation, but instead
whenever your ego, family, financial, or social status is threatened,
your body prepares to fight or run. Example,
you are at a party and the subject is automobiles. You own a Chevrolet
and like it very much, but someone makes a comment about Fords being far
superior to Chevys and you either defend your choice of auto with your
own opinion or you say little or nothing.
What just happened? Your ego was threatened. If you
didn't own a Chevy it would have been a non-event. But since you own a
Chevy, we'd find
that your breathing became shallower, muscles tightened in your jaw and
or forehead, sweat gland activity increased... This means your body was
partially prepared to fight or run from the situation. However,
if you couldn't actually feel the change, a Biofeedback instrument could
be used to quantify the changes in the indices of stress.
But neither fighting nor
running is an appropriate reaction to this kind of stress, but none the
less you're body is activated to do so. Typical muscular reactions are
as basic as those learned during childhood with bracing of the
shoulders, clenching the jaw, gritting teeth... They are still with you
today.
Every day the effects of stress bring new challenges
to our egos. In time these reactions often become magnified and often
times becomes the norm resulting in head, neck, backache, or TMJ.
Awareness is the first step to change,
i.e. awareness that you have reacted
to stress. Next is to engage the first defense against stress by
consciously shifting to abdominal breathing and secondly to release
muscle tension throughout your body.
However, it's often difficult to tell the difference
between relaxed vs. tense muscles.
In fact the purpose of using biofeedback instruments is to quantify the
difference between a tense and relaxed muscle. And part of the normal
training is to use a conditioning muscular awareness exercise.
Practice the following once each day:
a. Slowly tense a particular group of muscles keeping
the rest of your body relaxed.
b. Cause it to become tense and hold that tension for
a few seconds.
c. Slowly let the tension go as you breathe deeply.
d. Remind yourself that you prefer the relaxed feeling
over the tense feeling.
A muscle sequence would go like this:
Make a fist with your right hand.
Then a fist with your left hand.
Push you right hand into the arm of the chair to tense
you forearm and upper arm.
Repeat for the left arm.
Lift your shoulders high to tense them leaving your
arms just hanging loose.
Push you head into the back of a chair to tense the
neck.
Scrunch your facial muscles.
Tense your forehead.
Arch your back.
Take a Deep Breadth and hold it to tense your chest.
Push out with your abdomen.
Tense your buttocks.
Tense your right and then left leg.
Tense your right and then left foot.
This is a general relaxation that
will
take approximately twenty minutes. If for some reason you can not tell
the difference in feeling between muscles that you tighten and the same
muscles when you relax them, the next step would be to seek professional
biofeedback training.
See the resource box for Cds to handle
general muscle tension, neck and shoulder tension, stuttering/lazy
tongue, abdominal breathing, childbirth conditioning, and painless
dentistry.