Five: Relaxation Training

Many people who suffer with anxiety believe strongly that the anxiety happens without rhyme or reason, arising from an unconscious source.  Anxious feelings seem to flood through the mind even when there is no anxiety-causing stimulus.  This belief fosters the hopeless idea that anxiety cannot be controlled, and creates more anxiety. This idea is false.  Relaxation training addresses unconscious anxiety on an unconscious level.

There is a reason why anxiety sneaks up on you.  It’s all about triggers.  Elements of a stressful event can be retained in memory.  These elements can act as triggers to cause anxious feelings later, although there is no present threat.  For example, if a child gets separated from a parent accidentally, in a public place, the noise of a crowd may become associated with the fear the child experiences.  The noise of a crowd may become a trigger that causes the adult who experienced this event as a child to feel automatic panic or intense anxiety.  The adult may be watching a movie, hear the noise of a crowd scene that reminds her of this long past event unconsciously, and feel extremely, inexplicably anxious.  The trigger causes the response.

To deal with anxiety triggers, we do not have to remember the details of long past frightful events.  We can train ourselves to relax on command, mentally, to quell physical tension.  Once muscle tension is lessened or eliminated, the feelings of dread will pass. 

There are varying methods of relaxation training to try.  One involves purposefully tightening, then relaxing muscle groups: facial muscles, arms, abdomen, etc.  The mental part of this training is to imagine stressful things – dental work, public speaking, as the physical relaxation is going on.  As the muscles are tensed then released, a word, such as ‘calm,’ is repeated mentally.  This becomes the conditioned command.  The association of the forced relaxation with usually stressful events serves to weaken the stress response in the body, and then in the mind. 

With relaxation, the anxiety does not escalate once it is triggered.  Escalation of anxiety is driven by additional catastrophic thoughts and the bodily tension that can cause sweating, and rapid heart beat.  The sufferer takes control by aborting the escalating stress with a concerted effort to physically relax by intoning the command word mentally to herself.

As with training of any kind, expertise is not attained over night.  Practice and faith in the technique are necessary.  We train to use computer software; we train for a marathon.  We should train to prevent anxiety attacks.  It’s worth the discipline, and is very empowering.   

As we think, so it shall be.

Happiness