RELAXATION TO COPE WITH STRESS: PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION

This is a three-stage approach to relaxation, focusing on the sources of anxiety, the muscle reactions under stressful or tense conditions, and the continuous practice of muscle-relaxation techniques to control those reactions. Here is the technique in detail:

Since a person generally has very little awareness of the sensation of relaxation, he is asked first to tense a set of muscles as hard as he can until he can feel real tension, even tenderness and pain in the muscles. Then he allows those muscles to relax, and tries to become aware of, to feel internally, the difference between tension and relaxation. For example, in some of the first exercises in Progressive Relaxation the patient is asked to hyper extend the wrist, i.e., to bend the hand so the back of the hand is aiming toward the top of the forearm. The muscles constricting the hand backward are tensed as much as the patient can, and are held until he feels the sensations of tension and even tenderness in the muscles of the upper side and about the middle of the forearm. Then the hand is flopped down to a loose, relaxed position. As a single exercise, this alternation between tensing and relaxing is practiced no more than about three times in a fifteen-minute period. A good share of the time is spent in trying to discriminate the feelings of tension and relaxation, i.e., the absence of tension. As practicing continues, the patient begins to discriminate more and more finely different degrees of tension and relaxation. The procedure is not hurried; each exercise with each set of muscles is practiced for perhaps two weeks, and only then does work begin with another set of muscles. Since the procedure goes progressively through all of the muscles in the body (hence its name), to accomplish the entire procedure requires considerable time, let alone persistence.

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