When You Don't Know Where to Turn / A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and Therapy

by Steven J. Bartlett

RELAXATION TRAINING
Primarily a coping strategy
to help people continue to function
in an environment of stress.

The pervasive phenomenon of stress is the hidden epidemic of the United States and other highly industrialized countries. It is associated with high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, strokes, ulcers, colitis, and a host of other physical conditions. And severe stress endured too long leads to emotional breakdown.

All physical materials can be loaded or stressed to a certain point beyond which they distort, snap, fracture, or break. Stress loads human beings physically as well as emotionally. Any change—whether for good or for ill—is a stressor. As human beings, we are not simple engineering materials that form simple cracks or breaks, and when stressful events are strong enough, we begin to crack or break in ways that are considerably more complex. Physical disease, emotional disorders, and mental illnesses are the cracks or breaks that occur in human "material."

Statistics show that common forms of severe stress do cause us to break. For example, compared with others the same age, ten times more people die during the year following the death of their husbands or wives. In the year after a divorce, ex-spouses have an illness rate twelve times higher than married people the same ages. In addition, chronic anger, anxiety, and depression appear to weaken the body's immune system, increasing the likelihood of serious disease.

Individuals do, of course, have different emotional breaking points, but we know that prolonged high levels of anxiety erode a person's psychological integration. What results is "nervous breakdown"—a term that is vague and means little more than a blown fuse due to emotional overload. The aftermath of such an overload may leave a person with depression, anxiety, and the inability to function "as usual" for a considerable period of time.

Relaxation training, along with the other therapies discussed in this chapter, is an antidote or prevention for human breakage brought about by excessive stress. The central belief on which relaxation training is based is that you cannot be tense and anxious if you are physically very relaxed.

There are two main approaches to relaxation training. (We have already briefly discussed them in Chapter 12 in connection with desensitization.) In both approaches you begin by reclining or lying down in a quiet room. Relaxation can then be achieved through tension and release or through suggestion. In the former, you tense a given muscle group, holding the tension for five to ten seconds, then release the tension and experience the relief from tension, or relaxation. In the latter, you consciously suggest to yourself that a group of muscles feels warm, heavy, very heavy, and relaxed, sinking into the recliner or bed or floor. Both approaches aim to achieve two things: to bring about deep, progressive muscular relaxation and to increase your sensitivity to the presence of tension in your body when it exists.

Relaxation training is a learned skill. If you practice it regularly—that is, daily, for at least several weeks—you can gain increased control over your major muscle groups—those of the arms, legs, shoulders, back, abdomen, neck, and face. You gradually learn to recognize even low levels of tension in these muscles so that the tension can be eliminated consciously.

Eventually, as you learn how to control physical relaxation, you are able to achieve deep relaxation in increasingly shorter periods of time. After regular practice over a period of months, many people, when they face a suddenly upsetting situation, can quickly offset their emotional and physical reactions to stress by inducing a calm and relaxed state in themselves. They are able to neutralize the stressor's potential for doing damage. If you can learn to do this, you have learned a skill in controlling your own life that is of great value. It is a survival skill that can help you protect yourself against being worn down by stressful events that otherwise eventually lead to learned habits of anxiety and tension. Once formed, these habits can be very difficult to get rid of.