How to Relieve Stress That Can be Crippling

Stress can literally be crippling which is why it's important to know how to relieve stress. Here are just three actual case experiences demonstrating how emotional stress can affect one's musculature in a crippling manner.

• On Joe's way driving back from California to NJ he learned that the IRS would be auditing him. By the time he reached NJ his hands were clenched on the steering wheel and his leg muscles were so tight that he required crutches to walk.

• Jim was married to a very jealous woman who demanded a lot of attention and felt that he was a mama's boy. Jim felt torn between his mother and his new wife and began experiencing eye twitches.

• Larry's father was a demeaning controlling man. He came home one day to find that Larry hadn't gotten around to straightening the garage as promised. He called Larry a "stupid shit," and Larry's stuttering which we had worked for two months to eliminate returned immediately.

• Tom's wife left him after six years of marriage. There were many things he wanted to say to her in hopes of changing her mind, but she wouldn't listen to him and he developed a lazy tongue resulting in speaking difficulties.

These examples demonstrate the power of stress over the body. In each case, an emotional stress led to excessive uncontrolled crippling muscle tension.

Stressors such as Joe's that can stand in the way of getting things done such as the IRS create tension in the legs. Stressors that affect one's self worth such as with Larry and Tom, create lazy tongue and or contribute to stuttering.

Stressors such as Jim's where he felt torn between his mother and wife create muscle twitching.

It's normal that with some of these reactions, such as with Joe's crippling reaction, doctors run tests for MS as the symptoms are very painful and serious. Barring any disease, the solution is to take back control of one's musculature.

This is done with a stress reliever exercise:
1. First by often dealing with self worth issues--learning how to build self worth in the midst of crisis.
2. Secondly to use specific stress management techniques for managing muscle tension.

a. Practice abdominal breath management techniques.

b. Selectively tense sequential groups of muscles daily keeping the rest of the body relaxed--takes approximately 20 minutes to do entire body as specified later in the stress coping exercise. Depending on severity of symptoms, this is done many times per day for the specific muscles affected.

c. Reminder each time that you tense/relax that you'd like to forget about it (it referring to the muscular reaction to stress)

The amazing thing was that Joe could walk absolutely normally for twenty minutes after he did the 20 minute tense/relax stress reliever exercise.

The coping with stress exercise goes like this.
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 should take approximately twenty minutes. For specific muscle groups the muscles groups are refined to include only the affected muscles. For instance cds are available for handling general muscle tension, neck and shoulder tension, and for stuttering which focuses on muscles of the mouth and tongue on my website.

Usually a combination approach of dealing with the life crisis plus muscle relaxation exercises over the course of two to three months is all that's required to gain a significant foot hold on the problem. And this is pretty good considering these problems often exits for years before starting this stress management technique.

Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified makes it easy to manage stress with muscle awareness training techniques. He is a is a prominent figure in the field of stress management and personal change. He is the author behind the best selling hypnosis self help cds and a specialist with panic attacks