From Depression to Contentment - A Self-Therapy Guide

3	Relaxation and Meditation

As we have seen, a relaxed body and a clear, peaceful mind are necessary for good sleep. They’re also excellent tools in their own right, and they feel good. They are physical pain relievers, make us cope better with the stresses of life, and are essential tools for the next step beyond merely relieving depression: they assist us to becoming better than “normal.” Also, stress interferes with digestion, raises blood pressure, and shuts down the immune system. Regular relaxation and meditation are essential holidays from the craziness of “normal” living. In addition, learning to relax specific muscle groups is useful when exercising.

Muscular Relaxation

There are many methods for learning to relax your body. Most of them derive from the work of Edmund Jacobson, an early 20th century physiologist. Here is the version I have used and taught for many years. This is a two-stage process. Learning the technique takes about two weeks of daily practice. At first, a session lasts 15 to 20 minutes. Later on, you can speed up, but why hurry, since the exercises feel pleasant and do you good?

At the end of the two weeks, you’ll also have created a tool for yourself that can relax your whole body with a single thought.

Learning stage

Choose your environment carefully while learning. Once you have an established skill, you can relax your body in almost any set of circumstances. But at first, make sure you’ll be undisturbed, and as free from pain and discomfort (full bladder, hunger, cold, heat etc.) as possible. If you wish, you can play relaxing music to mask distracting noises.

Get comfortable. A reclining chair that supports the back of the head is good. Lying on a firm but soft surface like a carpeted floor is the best, unless you have difficulty with lying flat, or with getting up afterward. A bed tends to be too soft during this learning stage. Many people find that small cushions under the knees and head increase comfort. Your body temperature will drop during relaxation, so wear loose, warm clothes and perhaps cover up with a rug.

You’ll need to memorize the order of exercises. You can record them, or have someone else read them for you the first few times.

Each exercise involves the following:

• Take a comfortably deep breath and hold it. Unless it causes pain, breathe so your abdomen rises and falls rather than only your chest.

• While holding the breath, tighten the relevant muscle group. Concentrate on what muscular tension there feels like.

• As you breathe out, say “LET GO” (or a keyword/phrase of your choice) within your mind. Relax the tension in the relevant muscle group, and concentrate on what it feels like now. Compare it to the previous feeling of having it tight.

Do each muscle group twice. If you notice tension anywhere you’ve already relaxed, go back and “let go” again. There are 16 groups. This means that during a session, you will relax muscles and associate this with breathing out and saying “let go” 32 or more times.

As far as possible, concentrate all your attention on the current exercise, on the sensations within this muscle group. If any thoughts or external distractions intrude, allow them, but just ignore them.

Here are the muscle groups I use, and instructions for tensing and relaxing each:

• Left hand and lower arm: Make a fist, like squeezing a lemon. To relax, open the hand and let everything flop. Your fingers become limp, uncooked sausages.

• Right hand and lower arm: same with the right hand.

• Left upper arm: Leave your lower arm where it is, relaxed if possible. Bulge out the muscles of your upper arm like a male model or bodybuilder (or Popeye after eating spinach). When it’s relaxed, feel how heavy your lower arm becomes.

• Right upper arm.

• Left lower leg: Tighten the calf muscles by pointing your toes like a ballerina, but be careful not to get a cramp. When it’s relaxed, feel how soft and warm the leg and foot have become.

• Right lower leg.

• Left upper leg: Straighten the leg, actually trying to bend the knee the wrong way, while pulling your foot back so it forms an acute angle with the leg. Feel the powerful muscles of your thigh bunch up. Relaxing will make your lower leg feel very heavy.

• Right upper leg.

Arms and legs are the easiest, so I use them to warm up. The face is the most complex, and therefore most difficult. It comes next.

• Eyes, forehead and scalp can be tensed and relaxed together, or separately. To tense the eye muscles, focus close, looking at a fly on your nose. To tense the muscles in forehead, temples and scalp, use an exaggeratedly angry frown: pulling the brows down and corrugating them. Relaxing the eye muscles involves looking at infinity: the mast of a ship on the horizon. For the other bits, imagine a wave of smoothness starting just above the eyes, and sweeping back right over the top. This exercise involves two lots of headache muscles, so it’s good to practice it.

• Cheeks and nose. To tension, make an exaggerated “bad smell” grimace, flaring your nostrils. It looks ridiculous, but so what? Then, as you breathe out, feel your cheeks go smooth and soft. These muscles are involved in “sinus headaches.”

• Mouth region. Press your tongue hard against the roof of the mouth. At the same time, stretch your lips into an ear-to-ear frog grin. Relaxed, the tongue is in the middle of the mouth. The lips touch, but the lower jaw hangs loose.

• Neck. Pull your head in like a turtle. Don’t push your shoulders up, but shorten the neck. Particularly, feel the tension at the back. As you relax, your head will become heavy and floppy. Move it slightly around, then rest it against the headrest or cushion.

• Chest. You know how models pose for glamor photos? Put them up like that. Relaxing, feel the softness of the pectoralis muscles.

• Abdomen. Make it rock hard. When it smooths out, feel your insides relax, too.

• Back. If you are sitting, try to push the back off the chair. If lying, try to make a hole in the floor with your body. Push with all your back, from the shoulders to the hip. When you’ve relaxed it all, you may feel residual tension in some part, because the back is very complex, being responsible for balance. Repeat this exercise until there are no “steel cables” anywhere.

• Buttocks and pelvic floor. Ladies, imagine you have to pass water, and must stop mid-stream. Cut it off. Gentlemen, this doesn’t work for us. Cut off the back end instead.

If any step hurts, skip it.

Having done all this, stay there a little longer. Keep breathing, nice and slow and deep. With each exhalation, think at a different part of your body, and let go of any residual tension.

This set of exercises will have significantly lowered your blood pressure, so don’t stand up immediately. First, move head, arms and legs around a little.

Using the Skill

As you continue your practice, you’ll find that you can relax larger and larger chunks of your body, for example both your arms together, and your entire torso. By the end of two weeks, breathing out and thinking “Let go!” will relax all your body instantly.

You now have a stress-management tool for the rest of your life. Any time you want to reduce anxiety, control anger or worry, all you need to do is to breathe deeply, and think “Let go!” as you breathe out.

At first, use it only in mild situations such as annoyance at being put on hold on the telephone. As you become more practiced, you can use the tool in more challenging situations, like waiting for a possibly painful medical procedure, or for a job interview.

The tool is useless once strong emotion grips you. You need to remember to use it at the early stages. If you try and it fails, you weaken it, but that’s not a great drama: you can re-learn it in a few pleasant sessions.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is a matter of concentration, of attending, rather than of relaxation. It has become very fashionable over the past forty years or so. It has an ancient history in eastern cultures, but is also part of the western tradition, by different names.

Dr. Ian Ellis-Jones has explained this perfectly at https://tinyurl.com/bobrich03. It means simply accepting what is, focusing on the present moment, doing any activity with full concentration on it.