Six Great Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body

Here are six different types of REAL relaxation that will make your body sing with "ooh's" and "ahh’s." Add these great techniques to your relaxation program. You can use these techniques for different purposes throughout your day: to take a break from work, reduce stress, create a positive mood, dissipate a negative feeling, or to promote health and longevity. Be sure to check out our article, 6 Relaxation Exercises to Reduce Stress for instructions on these relaxation techniques.

1. DEEP-BREATHING

There’s a reason that when you’re tense or nervous, it helps to pause and take a few deep breaths. Taking a few deep breaths allows your mind to slow down and helps reduce tension.

How to Do Deep Breathing

Place your hand on your abdomen.

Breathe in deeply through your nose. Your hand should move out.

Exhale slowly through your mouth. Your hand should move in.

Breathe deeply and evenly.

Continue to breathe this way for several minutes.

You can take this exercise a step further by practicing a deep breathing exercise for twenty minutes each day. Practicing deep breathing regularly can make a big difference in your day! Consistent practice can elicit your natural relaxation response, the opposite of your stress response. When your body is in deep relaxation, your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and metabolism decrease, and your mind feels a sense of calm and control. Deep breathing can reduce or stop your stress response. Do deep breathing the next time you’re feeling stressed, and you’ll be amazed at the results!

2. PROGRESSIVE MUSCLE RELAXATION

Are your muscles tense from sitting in front of your computer all day?

Or are you on your feet for long periods of time?

Tense from constant pressures?

Do you do a lot of heavy lifting or walking?

Simple to do, muscle relaxation can be a great way to relieve tension and reduce stress. The exercises usually involve tensing and releasing different muscle groups to relax them. Muscle relaxation can be done in a single muscle group in the specific area where the tension occurs (such as in the example of shoulder muscles below) or as a total body method for deeper, full-body relaxation. This total body method is better known as Progressive Muscle Relaxation.

Shoulder Relaxation Exercise

-Pull your shoulders up as though you were going to touch your ears.

Hold them for 10 seconds. Let your shoulders down and relax.

-Again, tense your shoulder muscles as you did before. Hold them for 10 seconds. Notice the tension. Let your shoulders down and relax.

-Enjoy the feelings of warmth and heaviness.

By practicing deep muscle relaxation, you train your body to recognize the difference between muscle tension and relaxation. Eventually you’ll be able to recognize and release tension in the muscles in a specific area of your body. Progressive muscle relaxation can be effective in relieving stress symptoms such as migraines, tension headaches, hypertension, anxiety, and insomnia.

In general, this technique is safe to try, but may not be recommended if you’re experiencing pain in your joints. Check with you physician before doing any significant tension of muscle groups, as certain orthopedic conditions can be aggravated.

3. MEDITATION

Perhaps meditation may seem like a mysterious practice, conjuring images of monks sitting cross-legged in temples. You may have heard of celebrities and other famous people practicing meditation.

Putting aside the hype, meditation is simply a self-directed practice for relaxing your body and calming your mind. In addition, meditation can increase your energy and give you a sense of control and balance in your life.

Meditation may be more popular than we think. According to the Journal of American Medical Association, about 10 million American adults—or one in eight—meditate regularly. Perhaps the popularity of yoga has renewed interest in meditation as well as the books, videos, tapes and classes on meditation that have made the techniques more accessible.

There are various types of meditation with different names and range in complexity from strict, regulated practices to general recommendations. We will describe two popular meditation techniques briefly:

Mindfulness Meditation develops your awareness of body sensations and thoughts in the present moment. Many classes on mindful meditation offered today, grow out of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Mindful meditation classes often ask participants to meditate daily for 45 minutes. Mindfulness meditation can reduce stress and pain from chronic illnesses. By slowing your heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and relaxing your muscles, mindfulness meditation can diminish your perception of pain.

Transcendental Meditation (TM) was developed by Indian leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who extracted the essential elements from yoga and brought his practice to the United States in the 1960s. TM is simple to learn. In this technique, you are silently repeating a mantra (word or sound) while sitting in a comfortable position. Passively disregard any distracting thoughts, and bring your mind back to the mantra. The recommended length of time to practice is 20 minutes in the morning and again in the evening.

Thirty years of studies on TM have shown that it reduces chronic pain, anxiety, high blood pressure, cholesterol, cortisol levels (the hormone that initiates your body’s stress response), and substance abuse and increases longevity and improves the quality of life. Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, developed meditation techniques based on TM. You can learn these techniques from his best selling book The Relaxation Response.

If you are interested in the meditation techniques described above and others, check with your local YMCA, health clubs, colleges, universities, medical centers, and mind/body facilities. As there are different kinds of meditation, classes and instructors, you may want to experiment and do some research to find one you’re comfortable with. Talk with people who have taken the class you’re considering, or ask to sit in on a session to get a better sense of what the class is like. Ask the instructor to describe his or her training and reasons for becoming an instructor. Also, it’s important to be aware that meditation can relieve symptoms, but doesn’t cure illnesses or replace psychotherapy for depression and severe emotional disorders.

In general, meditation is a safe technique to try, but people with certain types of mental illness may find it aggravating rather than helpful. Please consult with your doctor before you begin meditation to find out whether there may be any risks for you.

YOGA and other STRETCHING EXERCISES

Taking Mini-Stretch Breaks. Spending a few minutes to stretch not only helps release muscle tension but can prevent complicated health problems in the long run. If you are one of those workers who stay glued to the computer eight hours a day, you may be increasing your risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic back, neck and shoulder pains, eyestrain, swollen ankles, and pinched nerves. Stretching is important to ease muscle stiffness, increase your body’s flexibility and improve blood circulation.

According to health experts, stretch breaks don’t have to be lengthy to make a positive difference. Just taking a few minutes out of every 45 minutes to walk around or to stretch at your desk can greatly reduce your risk of repetitive injuries. You can find good stretching exercises in books about preventing repetitive stress injuries and through on-line health sites. Many stretches are easy to do no matter how flexible you are. Tape the instructions for the exercises near your desk as a reminder to yourself to take regular stretch breaks.

Yoga. You may want to include this wonderful exercise in your relaxation program. Yoga poses stretch and tone your body muscles and increase flexibility and strength. Studies have shown that yoga is helpful for asthma, arthritis, anxiety, stress, fatigue, nicotine addiction, and high blood pressure, and improves your mood. Different schools of yoga vary in pace, details of the postures, and emphasis placed on meditation and breathing.

If you’re interested in yoga, check with your local YMCA, fitness center, colleges, and universities for information on their classes. If you’ve never taken yoga, take a beginning class to start gently. If you have glaucoma or high blood pressure, you should avoid inverted poses. Your instructor can modify and adapt the postures for any age and most fitness levels. Take care to not let anyone pressure you into doing poses that are uncomfortable or painful to you. And be sure to discuss any back and knee problems and other health problems with your instructor, so he or she may adapt the postures to meet your needs. Please check with your doctor before beginning a yoga program to see what precautions you may need to take to prevent injuries.

5. BIOFEEDBACK

Biofeedback can provide effective relief for stress-related tension, chronic pain, drug addictions, muscle dysfunction caused by injury, migraine headaches, sleep disorders, epilepsy, asthma, hypertension, and other medical conditions. This form of therapy doesn’t treat any disease or symptom directly. Instead, biofeedback uses special machines to help you control body functions that you normally consider involuntary, such as your heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, brain wave activity and temperature. By controlling your body’s responses, you can relieve muscle tension, reduce pain and promote healing.

In a typical biofeedback session, you are connected to a machine that measures your body’s (biological) response and feeds this information back to you through sounds and visual cues—hence, the term biofeedback. A biofeedback therapist may guide you through mental exercises to help you reach your therapy goals. By observing the feedback from the machine, you learn to control your body’s responses by trial and error (i.e., relax muscles, raise hand temperature, or slow a heart rate).

Training for some disorders may require eight to ten sessions while long-term or severe disorders may take more time. Obviously, the goal is to teach you how to control your body’s response without the help of the machine or therapist. After you complete the training, this therapy generally requires you to continue practicing the techniques, such as relaxing tense muscles. The success of the therapy can depend on several factors, including amount of practice, motivation and your health condition.

Many people prefer biofeedback therapy because it gives them control over the treatment. If you’re interested in trying biofeedback, you should get a medical exam to identify any health problems that might call for another form of treatment instead of or in addition to biofeedback. Your doctor can help you decide the risks and benefits for your situation, and may be able to refer you to a biofeedback specialist. You should seek a biofeedback specialist who is certified by the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (http://www.bcia.org/).

6. SELF- RELAXATION (AUTOGENIC TRAINING)

In autogenic training or self-relaxation, you are repeating a specific statement while focusing on bodily sensations. You repeat a set of instructions to yourself (i.e. "My arms are warm and heavy") several times while observing your body’s sensations. You use six focusing techniques: warmth and heaviness in your hands and arms, warmth and heaviness in your feet and legs, regulation of your heart rate, centering on your breath, warmth in the abdomen and coolness in your forehead.

You can use autogenic training to increase warmth in your limbs, improve blood circulation, reduce muscle tension, improve sleep, and relax your body. Autogenic training can help relieve high blood pressure, headaches, chronic pain, allergies, ulcers, and anxiety.