Quieting Inner Chatter and Dimming Inner Visions – Which Muscles to Relax

Edmund Jacobson gave us Progressive Relaxation to calm our minds through quieting our muscles. In his life-long process of refining Progressive Relaxation he found a profound, rapid, and easy way for getting control of two disturbing activities that we all have: inner chatter and troubling inner visions.  These two processes keep us up at night, locks us in negative ruminations, and blasting ourselves with visions of past events or worries about the future. If we can get free or at least reduce their influence, our stress levels will plunge and we will naturally move into rest and into positivity.

How to Quiet Inner Chatter

When we chat to ourselves in our heads, we actually use many of the same muscles we use to speak out loud. Talking is so well practiced that we tighten throat, tongue, and facial ways that  are unconscious until we learn to spot their movement. Try this: take a minute or more to completely relax your jaw and your tongue. Really relax them. Now introduce some strong thoughts. If you take enough time relaxing the tongue, engaging inner chatter, relaxing, etc. it will become apparent that Jacobson was onto something. Next try relaxing the tongue and then bring in milder thoughts. This is more subtle, but small movement or tightness can be felt on a portion of the tongue.

Jacobson found he could quiet the mind by reversing the brain-muscle process. If he could get muscles to quiet (relax), this would cause the brain to notice and would respond by quieting. So, when being bugged by pesky inner critics or endless self-chatter, rather than engaging with that chatter to try to get it be quiet, go through the following relaxation process. Quiet muscles will lead to a quiet(er) mind.

1. Relax your tongue; relax your lips; relax your jaw; relax the front of your throat outside and work your way inside; relax the muscles that link your throat down to the top of your chest. Repeat the process as many times as you can to quiet the mind. Once you get to a good quiet condition, enjoy and rest.

2. Repeat this whole process several times until you find inner chatter has decreased or even disappeared.

3. Do keep some awareness on your tongue. Tension in your tongue will give you the first clue that inner chatter is starting to creep back in.

How to Dim Troubling Inner Visions

Using the same, reverse brain-muscle relationship process, when troubled by too many or disturbing visualizations, do this:

1. Relax the muscles of your forehead; relax the muscles around your eyes including your eyelids; relax the muscles of your eyes.

2. Repeat this whole process several times until you find your inner visions have decreased or even disappeared.

+  +  +  +  +  +  +

Practice, practice, practice this very simple but powerful technique so it is always available to you when you need it. Especially give it a try each night as you prepare for sleep. Also try for breaks at work.

Thank you, again, Dr. Edmund Jacobson.

Muscle Man, Edmund Jacobson

Edmund Jacobson devoted his life to muscles. This journey started when he was in a fire at the age of 10. He made it through the fire unscathed but he was marked deeply by it anyway. He observed previously calm adults switch into full emergency mode in seconds.  How was this possible, he wondered.  What was panic, anxiety, and courageous decisiveness in the midst of crisis?

As Jacobson moved through his schooling, eventually ending up as a professor, he didn’t find many answers to his questions about stress, tension, and emergency response. Early 20th century science just couldn’t provide this understanding so, he would have to do the research himself. He quickly ended up studying bodily reactions to stimuli and from there, muscles.  He carefully noted adults and children as the moved, sat, relaxed, and in sleep (he discovered rapid eye movement dream sleep decades before researchers who get all the credit for it picked up on it). When that wasn’t good enough, he persuaded Bell Telephone Labs to create very sensitive meters to detect small electrical movements in muscle fibers as low as a millionth of a volt.

All of this work did not lead Jacobson to his goal: the heart of emergency response as he had expected, but in the opposite direction, to the world of total relaxation.

In Pursuit of Scientific Relaxation

Applying what he had learned to himself and to some of his patients, he found he had discovered a method that allowed anyone, without any special hypnotic suggestion, medicine, or other external measures, to deeply relax at will. What a person had to do was learn about the brain-muscle relationship that is literally hard-wired into our bodies and take deliberate actions to shift what is happening within that relationship.

We all know that the brain can command certain muscles in the body to get us out of bed and keep us going until the end of the day. Of course, all manner of activities are done with the help of the muscles under brain control as we move throughout that day. That was well known. What Jacobson saw, was less observed: the muscles could command the brain.  When muscles are active, at some level of tension, messages are being sent to the brain that the muscle indeed is doing something. That something can be an action we are aware of, say brushing our teeth, or the action can be something we are not really aware of: clenching teeth, holding tight neck muscles, locking down forehead muscles, etc. Unconsciously producing and holding muscle tension is a perfect avenue for chronic stress to creep into the body.

What would happen, Jacobson wondered, if a person who experienced long term stress learned to relax their muscles on a regular basis?  A person could do this sort of work at the end of the day to unwind (actually, un-tense).  There would be a double effect: unconscious muscle holding would be stopped and in turn, the mind would be quieted by the lack of muscle communications being sent to the brain from the muscles. Indeed, Jacobson found and proved, released muscles lead to a quieter brain and many people benefit from this work.  Jacobson had developed a scientifically based method (in contrast to hypnosis and other methods being practiced at the time), that could be reliably called upon to help people: reduce the experience of pain, get to sleep, and loosen the grip of stress. Jacobson called his program of scientific relaxation, Progressive Relaxation.

Today’s “progressive relaxation” is not Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation

The snag with Jacobson’s method was not any problem with the scientific validity of the process but the length of time Jacobson would spend with each patient. His full program involved, carefully teaching a patient to more and more fully release tension in muscle groups. Jacobson was serious about this learning and expected patients to spend at least one hour a week with him for up to a year!

Showing up at least once a week for a year is not everyone’s thing. Patients and professionals looked for something shorter and when they didn’t find it, they created it. Out of this press for time has come “progressive relaxation” that is fast but in most cases, not deeply effective in teaching people the differences between tension and full relaxation. Today’s approach still progresses through the major muscle groups but doesn’t spend much time on any of the them. Worse yet, those who are less informed, see “progressive relaxation” sort like using a punching bag to work out frustrations. They tell clients to tense a muscle group or a bunch of muscle groups, tense, hold and then release.  That’s it.  The person instructing the patient assumes the patient has just burned off some tension and is in the glow of relaxation.  I hear Jacobson spinning in his grave now.

Much of Jacobson’s approach is lost to our need to rush. The information is there in his many books but what is missing is taking the time to learn what he spent his life uncovering.  A great loss, indeed. Perhaps the gap is filled some what by the rapidly expanding interest in yoga, but that doesn’t quite catch all that Edmund Jacobson meant us to know. It is our intention to do our best to reintroduce the power and potential of the Muscle Man’s work here, in occasional posts, as this blog goes forward. The Muscle Man may be gone but Edmund Jacobson’s powerful scientific technique remains.

Put Your Mask On First – How to Truly Help Others and Your Self

For decades we have been instructed: In the event the cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will drop down.  Put your mask on first before trying to help children or others who need assistance with their masks.

Makes sense: stay conscious, stay helpful.

Outside of planes, we do the opposite of the mask yourself first policy. We put and keep ourselves in moderate to extreme lack of awareness and limited helpfulness by driving ourselves, way, way too much. Besides driving ourselves by doing too much, working too long, and keeping ourselves immersed in problems, we put ourselves absolutely last. We suffer from lack of oxygen, too. We lose our brains to overwork and over focus which spins off: anxiety, crabbiness, exhausted ideas coming from exhausted brains, and rote work produced by tired bodies.Putting our bodies and brains last, is exactly how we approach our lives. Gut your way through things, nose to the grindstone, keep on going.

How to Put Your Mask on First

We have to teach ourselves that one of the best ways to help people and to tackle our projects is to rest. Rest is not unrelated to productivity, creativity, and responsibility. Let me repeat that: rest is not unrelated to productivity, creativity, and responsibility. Rest and Recovery is one side of the coin with the other side showing Work and Fatigue. Our brains and bodies understand this, we’ve got to have both to be healthy or at least to remain alive. One coin, two sides.

Creativity and Rest and Recovery – One of the oldest approaches to creativity matches nose to the grindstone work to rest and recovery.  The first step is working hard to load up the brain with facts, figures, options, opinions, and whatever else is related to the problem or issue at hand. Once that load is up to eyeballs, the second crucial step is not more work followed by more work but….a walk in the park, a nap, play, listening to music, shopping, washing the dog, anything to disengage. We do whatever it takes to get out of our own way by “forgetting” our troubles/project. Percolating under the surface is part of our minds that takes all of the crammed in materials and does its sort of alchemy.  What happens when we get our nose off the grindstone? We get breakthroughs! Aha!  We get a creative boast from combining work with Rest and Recovery. (See: Creative Breakthroughs: Tapping the Power of the Unconscious Mind, Amazon link)

Learning and Sleep as Rest and Recovery - We have the vision drummed into our heads that if we aren’t working we are lazy, irresponsible, degenerate, and backsliding. Hogwash. Night-time sleep and daytime naps consolidate learning and shift it from short term memory to long term memory (See: Take a Nap! Change Your Life, Amazon link)

Play, Positive Times, and Hanging Out with People as Rest and Recovery – Taking time to make friends and to contact friends strengthens us and it puts us right into the field of effect of Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory. The theory and supporting studies show that when we are positive (from play, humor, optimism) we are more creative, open to seeing and exploring options, and more open to helping others). Positive uplift often comes in the company of others, not water cooler sort of complaint sessions but time well spent with true friends.

These are just three areas of Rest and Recovery and each provides benefits for our minds and bodies and have the spin-off effect of making us sharper and more capable of  facing and working our projects and problems. Extensive is the evidence that Rest and Recovery is related to productivity, creativity, and responsibility.

Step 1: Clean-up Your Beliefs/Get Your Philosophy Right – Really look at the notion of not being engaged on something 24/7. This includes not ruminating, not planning, not talking, not wondering about some hot project or personal matter 100% of the time. It will take self-challenge to see that to rest up or to take regular breaks and disengaging is not: sloppy, traitorous, unkind, missing opportunities, overlooking something. Can you take 20 minutes today to be disengaged, in heart and mind?  If yes, do it and do it again tomorrow and the next day. Get ever better at strategic disengagement. If you do this long enough you will discover: it feels good, it is not as hard to do as you first thought, and you find the power of bounce back.

Step 2: Adhere to the basics – 15 minutes of aerobic exercise per day; 15 minutes of meditation per day; and high quality and high quantity sleep (no skimping here – 6.5 to 8 hours).

Step 3: At least one activity with friends per week with no special focus on: worry, justifying some action, complaining, planning, etc. Simply be with friends, explore, play, share.

That’s a good beginning.

Easy Starts: How to Jump Into Meditation

I’m frequently asked what are the best books for starting mediation. I have settled on a short list of resources. Two of them are listed here:

The Calm Technique: Meditation Without Magic or Mysticism – Australian Paul Wilson came out with this book some time ago but it remains one of my favorites because it is so clear, simple, and precise in its introduction to breathing and mantra meditation. You will find this highly valuable book priced from 1 cent to about 2 bucks. Amazon link

Unplug for an Hour, a Day, or a Weekend: Create a Home Sanctuary with 32 Contemplation Cards, Companion Guidebook, 2 CDs of Guided Meditations is a complete look at mindfulness meditation. It comes in a fun format of: a booklet, two CDs, and “contemplation cards”. Perhaps I’m a sucker for this sort of packaging but it helps make the whole thing feel like an all encompassing experience. At any rate, this box of meditation is grossly under priced ($10) given what Sharon Salzberg includes in her instruction. Amazon link

The Smile Powerhouse

Photos of smiling nuns taken when they came into religious service when they were in their early 20s, reveal which will live the longest. The right type of smile, wrong type of smile, it makes a difference.

While conducting research on the physiology of facial expressions in the mid-19th century, french physician Guillaume Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A “Duchenne smile” involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow’s feet around the eyes). A non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomatic major muscle.  Many researchers believe that Duchenne smiles indicate genuine spontaneous emotions since most people cannot voluntarily contract the outer portion of the orbicularis oculi muscle. The young women who were fated to be long-living and healthier nuns, wore the Duchenne smiles in their entry photos.

Fake smiles, on the other hand point a person in the direction of greater stress and greater illness. “A study of city bus drivers led by a Michigan State University business scholar found that the drivers who fake smiles at work worsen their mood throughout their day, which in turn affects their productivity. The problem is that smiling for the sake of smiling can lead to emotional exhaustion and withdrawal. Women were hurt more than men by the fake smiles, which the researchers attribute to the fact that women are both expected to and do show greater emotional intensity and expressiveness than men.” Link to article

Meditation masters have picked up on the power of the smile. Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh makes a simple smile part of his basic mindfulness practice (link to article)  Modern Taoist and teacher, Mantak Chia carries smiling instruction further by having us smile to the many parts of our body using an actual smile and our mind’s eye. Each part gets a smile and the opportunity to bath in good will and relaxation. Link to article on Chia’s methods  Link to Chia’s book, The Inner Smile

Go Wide Focus – An instant stress reduction technique

This is an instant stress reduction technique in that it can be brought out, anywhere, anytime and–if practiced–will bring stress levels down very quickly. Stress comes down, but not to zero but to a level where you will have more wiggle room.

There are two secrets to this technique. First, it goes completely opposite of what your body and mind has been created to do when you are under a little or a lot of stress. Stress involves a narrowing of our focus. Our work shrinks down to what is of greatest interest to us at the moment. That can be worry, jumping out of the way of a bus, or trying to decide: “Do I flee, fight, or freeze?”

If you are jumping out of the way of a bus there is little you can do to control your stress narrowing of the mind. Nor would you want to! You are on a mission to save your life. If you are in less dire situations such as about to go into a job interview/review or are caught in the web of worry, then this is a good time to take your mind in the opposite direction.  Widening your focus, even for a few moments, will have an impact. Your attention will open up and your mind will open up. Then you might see a new way, or you might be able to catch your breath which will give you a chance to ground yourself in the moment and in your personal values.

The Technique

Right now, stop reading and expand your awareness to the space around you. You can either listen to or see actual things in the space or you can use your memory to flit from one point in the room and then to another and to another. This latter approach, gives you a sense of how big the space is. As you bring up memories to various points in the room such as the lamp in the corner behind you, the desk across the room, the doorway to the left, and the ceiling, your mind throws in details such as distance from you to these objects. This provides an approximation of the size of the space.

Hold that awareness for a few seconds or longer if you can. How do you feel? Your narrowed stress focus will be tugging at you to go back to where it was but just keep working the technique. Eventually, you probably will hit a balance of narrowed focus and Go Wide Focus.

You can go even wider if you have the chance. Think of a larger area just outside, perhaps the building, or the block. Or really open things up and think of the size of the sky. Anything to break you from the fixation of your stress-induced narrowed focus.

Look for a preferred way of doing this. You might find getting a fix on your immediate surroundings is the more powerful and effective way to go. Others will prefer very grand vistas (either visible or in the mind’s eye). Find yours.

Of course, you can flit between being in the narrowed focus to the Going Wide Focus and back again. You will not lose track with what’s going on around you or what you are there to do. What you will appreciate is the sudden easing of the stress so you can think and feel a bit more freely and be ready to explore new options when they pop up in your mind or appear before you.

Found Additional Resources:

Big Sky Meditation with Bells – Spirit Rock/Dharma Seed recording for streaming and downloading – go to Website - This presenter uses the Going Wide Focus technique and applies it to a meditation retreat surrounding for an extended time period.

The Stress Grind Spectrum

Stress is here. Sometimes it is so thick we can’t see anything else. Other times, a faint, invisible film hangs over our lives, brains, and bodies.

We can think of stress along a spectrum of experience that ranges from the chronic to the acute. Within that range are general sub-states that vary based on whether we are aware that we are in a stress condition and what we are trying to do about the situation.

Across the entire spectrum, stress is grinding away, affecting our body and our mind. The eventual general impact of stress has already been outlined by stress researchers from the 1950s or so. The “grind” can come from too much stress hormones being released for too long. Or it can be a negative attitude spawned by stress that blinds us to our options, pushes away from stress-lowering social activity, and keeps us glued to the couch instead of exercising.

Stress grinds. Immunity is decreased, major organs get hit, our brain changes. Bad news.

The 4 major stops on the grind spectrum:

Chronic, unconscious stress – also known as “stealth stress” – This is the tricky one. We might feel pretty good or even great but below the surface our bodies are a bit more agitated than they have to be. The agitation can be measured through the presence of stress hormones, changes in the variability of the time between each of our heartbeats, changes in our skin that reflect changes in skin resistance to electrical charges, and in a degree of heightened continuous muscle tension. All of these changes can be measured using technology but can’t be picked up with our own body sense. In the coming years, other ways of detecting stealth stress will be uncovered and we will be able to turn to this new technology to wake up to what is going on in our own bodies.

Stealth stress creeps in a couple of ways: environmental conditions like loud sounds or strong lighting impinges upon our body; little changes in the social pecking order in our lives; a tad bit more uncertainty about what’s coming next; and other tiny, drip, drip, drip, ways.

Chronic, conscious stress, without a solution/managing focus - Ah, this one we know. Burnout is a great example of this position on The Stress Grind Spectrum. Here we are in a situation that we know is driving us to be out of whack but we keep in the situation. We have developed ways to “put up with” or blunt the sharp edges (i.e. with more food, more drink, more television, more Internet). Especially notable in chronic, conscious stress, whether it is burnout or some other situation,  we are not putting much energy towards thinking of solutions to the issue or even thinking much in the way of investigation of alternatives, observing to learn more, etc. We are like flies in a spider’s web, we know it and just assume the spider (stress making us sick or driving us nuts) will come someday to devour us. Trapped. Not good. Oh well.

Acute, conscious stress with a solution/managing focus – Here we are in the fire of stress and we actively looking and acting for ways to do something about it. Solutions can vary from helping others who are stressing us; finding answers and fixing a problem; removing a stressor; tapping new resources to control the stressor, etc. The emphasis here is action. Action to tackle stress.  We can be hit with things we don’t want to deal with the moment but we are actively addressing the challenge. Or, we actually may be seeking acute, conscious stress such as when we take on new challenges like: running a half marathon; taking a public speaking engagement; getting up and performing; going on a blind date. Stress is there and we can feel it but we know that it will not last forever and we are trying our best to deal with it.

Acute, conscious stress without a solution/managing focus – Here we are in the thick of a stressful situation and we aren’t doing anything about it. Why? Most likely we lack the capability to be solution focus because anxiety or even panic has kidnapped our brains and shut down our executive functions. Executive functions include: analysis, planning, working memory and more. All of that is gone because we have been taken over by pure body reaction. Our bodies have methods to shut down everything we normally feel and think so that it can put all energy towards saving our bacon—getting us to take flight, to fight, or to freeze. In anxiety and panic, we are under the influence of very old, primitive, and darn serious brain/body mechanisms that aren’t interested in idle chatter, hanging out, taking it easy, or speculation.

Bottom-line: We need to be aware of this demading spectrum of grind (and pain) and, of course, do something about it. More about that later.

Manage Your Sleep, Manage Your Stress

Sleep, the great medicine that lies at our feet.

Sleep is not a throw-away activity that is welcome when we get everything else done and really serves no purpose. Completely wrong. Before the 1950s we could get away with underestimating the importance of sleep to restore and regulate our bodies and minds, but no more. Five decades of solid research has confirmed that we can’t get away with poor sleep if we want to manage our stress. Every year much more is learned to show us we just can’t hide from or gloss over the power of sleep.

Managing Sleep
Quantity and quality. That’s what our sleep comes down to. Fortunately, since 2009, tools are now available to help us track and, in the case of two devices, coach us towards getting the sleep we need to counter stress.

Zeo – This is a simplified brainwave monitor that gives us a map of what sleep experts call, our sleep architecture. Sleep architecture is the pattern of brainwave changes and duration that churn away as we snooze. Typical patterns have us moving quickly into deep sleep, then into dreaming, back into deep sleep, and so on throughout the night. Deep sleep and dream sleep patterns are especially important. They will determine how clear headed we will be and how refreshed/recharged we feel.

Zeo (pictured) shows us how long we have slept, what our sleep patterns look like, and ranks how well we have slept (Zeo Score).  For added benefit, Zeo has an online service that allows users to upload data for comparison with other sleepers and provides suggestions on how we can sleep better. Pictured is the table side receiver unit that picks up signals from a headband the sleeper wears all night long that transmits brainwave data.

Up by Jawbone (pictured), Fitbit (not shown here), and Bodymedia (not pictured) - All of these devices are built to track movement so that we can push ourselves to be in better shape through: walking, running, and exercising.  Each unit tracks steps, estimates calories burned, and keeps track of total time we spend at various activity levels. In addition to keeping an eye on daytime movement, they can track nighttime movement (or its absence) as well.  Have a lot of movement during the night? Then you are spending more time thrashing than snoozing deeply. Built-in clocking software gives a nice chart of the amount of sleep by date, number and duration of awakenings, and estimate deep sleep/dreaming periods.

Lark (pictured) is a movement sensor but is made for only tracking sleep sessions, not daytime fitness activities. It also includes a silent vibrating alarm.

Do any of these devices substitute for a night in the sleep lab or professional sleep coaching? No, but they put so much more real information in front of us than has ever been available to the average person before. Armed with this new data, we can shape our sleep and shape our lives. These devices here, they are affordable, they are helpful, they are powerful. Get one to guide you towards better sleep and thereby, away from stress.

What Goes Wrong at Work – The SCARF Model

No, you are not going crazy. No, you are not being overly sensitive. No, you are not exaggerating. The SCARF Model proves it.

Hats off to David Rock for his fantastic work on capturing the core stressors at work. Not only does have it down to a short list but he back’s it up with neuroscience. The hope is, that with training, managers will see for themselves the real downward effects of putting stressor after stressor on us, their workforce. If they continue to put the stress on employees they just will not get what they are seeking— greater creativity, productivity, cohesiveness, and more.

David Rock pulls together studies that basically show the importance of the work place as a social system and that our brains are wired to take social systems as darn important. In fact, brain scans show that the place where we register social “hurt” such as social slights, status downgrading, and rejection of our contributions in the same place in the brain as physical pain. “…for example, when they are reprimanded, given an assignment that seems unworthy, or told to take a pay cut—experience it as a neural impulse, as powerful and painful as a blow to the head,” writes Rock.

Why? Because many negative work situations are registered as threats.  ”The threat response,” states Rock, “is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person…This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving; in other words, just when people most need their sophisticated mental capabilities, the brain’s internal resources are taken away from them.”

Not only are the resources unavailable to the employer at that time, but all the resources we need to: see what the heck is going on; to monitor our stress; to figure out how to manage this feeling of threat; how to find a possible solution; and how to put boundaries on this stress and not let it carry on too long—all that is gone. We are left with our executive functions offline and our threat centers blaring an alarm. No wonder it is so hard to keep our cool or to keep things in perspective.

The SCARF Model puts these threats/thwarts into a simple and direct list:

S = Status
C= Certainty
A= Autonomy
R= Relatedness

Question: Which one of these is out of whack in your life?

To read excellent David Rock articles on the SCARF model, see:

• SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating with and Influencing Others
• You Tube: David Rock on SCARF Model
• Managing with the Brain in Mind

 

The No Excuses Massage

Regular, full-body, massage has built-in barriers that keep many people from getting the benefits of touch. First, the cost. Second the nudity (even when it is strategically covered by towels). Thirdly, the time commitment. Small obstacles for some but major obstacles for many, many people.

According to the American Massage Therapy Association, “In July 2008, 45 percent of women and 21 percent of men reported having a massage in the past five years.” There appears to be a gap here in terms of using this form of relaxation technique, especially for men.

Chair massage is a great avenue to getting touch relaxation with extremely minimal cost. Chair massages cost between $15 to $25 with times ranging from 15 to 20 minutes. You get back, neck, arm, hands, and sometimes head coverage. No disrobing, simply sit on the chair by resting your knees forward on a special support and rest your face on an oval-shaped pad. That’s it.

Finding chair massage can be tricky. Massage studios emphasize full-body massage so you frequently can’t find chair massage offered in those locations. Where else? Some chains like Massage Envy offer this service, some chair massage practitioners locate in high business areas, and others are found in smaller salons. If you don’t see anything popping up when you put your city or zip code into a search engine, ask around. Ask at salons and ask at mid-level to higher-end hotels. Keep searching because once you find chair massage near you, it will become one of your regular things to do. Barriers removed.

To get a better idea of exactly what you are in for, see this demo: