Stand with parallel feet, placed shoulder-width apart, your weight centred in the middle of each foot.

Conciously relax your ankles, then your knees and your hips.

Your palms are held lightly against your sides, with your elbows arched slightly out from your sides.

Now, relax your chest muscles, breathe gentlly through your nose and gently focus your attention on your lower abdomen.

At the same time, be aware of your weight sinking downward, from your hips to your feet and imagine your spine being stretched slightly upwards.

That's the technique, try holding it for a couple of minutes and do it regularly, to gain the benefits mentioned.

  What effect does this have on energy, health, awareness and stress levels?

Well, you're going to use a lot of energy keeping those tight muscles working.  Muscles work by contracting and shortening and you'll have all those tight muscles firing away, using up energy and producing lactic acids and the other waste products of combustion.  So if you feel tired all or most of the time, an overload of muscular tensions and compensations can be a big part of the problem.

Circulation can suffer as well.  The circulation of blood and lymph fluid has to fight gravity as it returns up the body from the legs.  To do this it relies on the regular contraction and expansion of muscles that press against the walls of the blood vessels moving the fluids upwards through a series of non-return valves.  This pumping action is less effective when the muscles involved are weak or tight.

Muscle co-ordination relies on constant, neural feedback to the cerebellum, the part of the brain that deals with movement and which decides what muscles need to be engaged in any particular activity.  When muscles are weak or spasmed and their signals are unclear, movement patterns will tend to be less co-ordinated and clumsy.

Finally, what effect can this muscular tension have on your mental and emotional stress levels?  When muscles are tensed for action, and have adjusted to take in more oxygen to fuel that action, and when that burst of energy doesn't happen, the nervous system becomes edgy.

As long as the "fear, fight, flight" muscles remain tense, and especially as long as the breathing pattern stays stressful, the nervous system remains on high alert, ready to react to some undefined threat to your survival.

Mentally, this can translate into a feeling of anxiety as you go through your day, so that even when you have no obvious cause for alarm, you may still feel uneasy.

Check the quick-fix "standing and centreing".  Use it to increase your awareness of unneccessary muscle tension and to help you become more grounded.

This is the theory.  When we're worried or scared, the brain responds as if to a physical threat and sets off a stress responce (see more details on the "talking relaxation" post).  Among the changes that take place, blood is moved from the rational, thinking part of the brain to a more primative, instinctive part.

This is fine if there's a real, physical danger.  You don't have time to think and your instinctive response is faster and is more likely ot help you avoid injury.  However, most of the things we worry about don't involve potential physical danger and are best faced by the rational, thinking part of your brain.

this technique keeps the reasoning part of your brain involved when you are worrying about something and takes the unreasonable stress away, so you can see the situation calmly.  To do it…

(1)   Locate the paired neuro-vascular points on your forehead, over the centre of each eye and about one inch up from your eyebrows.

(2)   Rest the three middle fingers of each hand over the points, the fingertips of your ring, middle and index fingers grouped together and pressing very gently on the points.

(3)   Think about what's worrying you for about a minute.  For instance, if it's an exam that you're taking in a couple of weeks, spend a minute going through it.  Start on the exam day morning and mentally go through the day, breakfast, arriving at the exam venue, sitting the exam and so on.

(4)   At the end of the minute, take a deep breath and repeat the process twice, going through the exam day, followed by the deep breath, three times in all.

Three times is usually enough and after the three minutes there should be a noticable reduction in the associated stress.

Earlier, we saw that two of the changes that take place when the stress response is activated are, the breathing pattern changes and muscles become tense.

We saw how the way we breathe could be altered to encourage the relaxation response.  Releasing tight, stressed muscles can also bring about the relaxation response, but…

High levels of mental stress are not the only cause of muscle tension.

As children in mostly urban environments, we would have had less freedom to play and to explore than the young nomadic hunter/gatherers who were our distant ancestors, so we would have started with a smaller, less co-ordinated range of movement.

As adults, our ancestors would have further developed their movement skills as they hunted and foraged.

For us, most of our working day is spent in positions that restrict and restrain our physical movement range.

So we end up with some muscles that are constantly stressed and tight and some muscles that are weak and underdeveloped.

This often results in stiffness and pain which adds to our mental stress.

Then you have the "fear, fight, flight" or stress response which tightens the muscles used for running or fighting, which involves most of the body's major muscles.

So you may have a physical body that wasn't particularly well co-ordinated to start with.  With muscles straining to balance the physical effects of work and leisure.

Throw in the tense stress response muscles and you could have a lot of restrictions in that body of yours.

Next post, we'll look at the effect these restrictions have on your health and energy levels and what you can beginto do about it.

The breath cycle speeds up and moves higher in your chest, involving secondary muscles of respiration located in your neck and shoulders.

This allows you to take in more oxygen to fuel your rapid muscle use as you fight or take flight.  When the danger, real or imaginary, is over, the breathing pattern should return to normal

However if the stress response is set off often enough, or for long enough, this breathing pattern becomes fixed and starts to create problems.  This "overbreathing" can upset the acid-alkaline balance in the blood, causing dizziness, tingling and crawling sensations over the skin and widespread aches and pains.  It can set off panic attacks.

Because this high-chest breathing is a reaction to perceived danger, every time you take a breath you send an anxiety signal to your brain, keeping the stress response active.  This can leave you feeling fearful all or most of the time, even if, objectively, there is nothing to fear.

You can break this cycle by changing it to a more relaxed, diaphragmatic method of breathing – Here's how.

Place one palm on your upper chest and the other on your lower abdomen, below your navel.  Using your hands as sensors, monitor your breathing pattern for a few minutes at a time, concentrating on the movement under your lower hand.

As you breathe in, your lower abdomen should rise gently and it should sink down again, as you exhale.  There should be very little movement under your upper hand.  Keep the breath gentle and use your mind and your awareness on your lower abdomen to guide the breathing downwards, don't force it.

You can do this re-training exercise standing, sitting or lying down.  Lying on your back, knees up, is probably the easiest way, initially.  The more often you do it, the faster the pattern will change for the better, so get going!

This is particularly effective if you can't sleep or if you are in a situation where you are beginning to panic.  To do it…

• Breathe in to a count of three.  As you exhale, slow it down to a count of six.
• If you are really stressed, a count of two in and four out may be more manageable at the start but after a minute or two,  as the breath slows down, you should manage the three in, six out, or even a count of four in and eight out.
• Continue until you feel calmer.

Again, this is because our hunter/gatherer nervous systems can't tell the difference between a real physical threat and any number of other things that may cause us to become worried or anxious.

In this case, the overactive stress response and the underactive relaxation response create an imbalance that leads to the stress cycle.

To break this cycle and to restore balance, you must turn on the relaxation response and, although this takes some persistance, the principle is simple enough. Bring on any aspect of the relaxation response and the whole relaxation system responds.

In practice, there are two aspects that you can influence. Your breathing and your muscle tension. The Double-Breath release is an excellent way to reduce stress, but to be really effective it should be done regularly. I'm adding a new breath technique today, under the "quick-fix" section.

This is "counting the breath" and, if you are about to panic, a few minutes of this technique will calm you down.

Next post, we'll look at how stressful breathing patterns can become habitual.  How these patterns can have such a negative effect on your peace of mind and what you can do about it.

We're talking about relaxation and to begin the relaxation process, it's useful to know about the stress response, how and why it affects us and what you can do to break the stress cycle.

To sum up, so far…

WE've evolved from a long line of hunter/gatherers and it's only in the last few thousand years that humans have settled, grown crops, herded animals and developed settlements that eventually became towns and cities.

This is a very short time in evolutionary terms and we still have hunter/gatherer nervous systems.  These systems don't always suit our modern urban lifestyles.

Here's why…

Broadly speaking, our nervous systems sub-divide into two main groups.   The voluntary nerves, which are under our concious control, for example you're using them to read this, to sit down, to type an email.   And the involuntary nerves, which are not under our concious control and which regulate the heartbeat, the functioning of our organs and glands and so on.

Then there's the autonomic system (part of the involuntary nerves) and if your mind is beginning to wander off at this point, bring it back.   You really need to know about  this autonomic system because its the cause of all your stress and tension.

The autonomic nerves are divided into two groups, each of which have opposite effects on your body.   The sympathetic nerves which wind you up and are responsible for the "fear, fight, flight" or stress response.   The parasympathetic nerves which calm you down and initiate a relaxation response.

The autonomic system is at its best in the simpler world of the hunter/gatherer.                                                                                                                                        

When your ancient ancestor came across a wolf on his way home to the communal campsite, the stress response, prompted by his anxious reaction, swung into action.

As soon as he registered the threat, adrenalin was pumping through his body, increasing heart rate, diverting blood, increasing oxygen intake, tensing muscles to run or to fight.   When it was over, when the fighting or running was done and the danger was past, the relaxation response kicked in.   Heart rate and breathing slowed, muscles relaxed and the body was back in balance until the next threat to his wellbeing.

Nowadays, its not so simple.   Your brains have evolved to the stage where any thought or circumstance that causes you anxiety can set off the stress response, even though your anxiety is not caused by something that is physically threatening.

So you can be threatened by a whole pack of phantom wolves; – mortgage arrears, relationship problems, hellish neighbours or job worries for example and these issues can set off the stress response as surely as if you had a real wolf on your tail.

Back with your old wolf-meeting ancestor, as soon as the danger was over, relaxation and balance came back.

That won't happen in your case, though, not unless the neighbours leave, you get a new job, your partner turns into a model of loving tolerance and the bank writes off your debt.

The things we feel threatened by can continue for a long time before they're resolved and for all that time your autonomic system keeps the stress response in play, doing it's best to protect you against a series of physical threats that don't exist.

After a while, you start to develop worrying symptoms from your over-stressed and overstretched nerves, like headache, digestive problems, forgetfulness, even panic attacks.   Now you've got even more to worry about and the stress cycle is established.

To break the cycle, to become more grounded and balanced, you need to activate the relaxation response.   For now, try the double breath release from the "quick-fiv" section.   Do it often and you really will feel a general calming effect.

Next  time we'll look at relaxing in more detail.

This can lead to neck pain and stiffness and tight neck muscles are a primary cause of headache.

This technique will give immediate relief and increased range of movement.

To do it…. 

• While sitting straight, check your neck's range of movement by looking left and right.
• Then grasp the skin and muscles at the back of your neck and hold firmly, as you do several little nodding movements with your head.
• Now do the movements side to side and finally, make several tiny circles with the tip of your nose.
• Release your neck and check your improved range of movement.

Whatever the annoying event – an argument, someone's rudeness or discourtesy, an incidence of road rage – close your eyes and bring it to mind….

See a picture of the annoying event in your mind, as if you were looking at a photograph or painting of it from from the outside.  Look at a scene from the event and include you and whoever else was involved, in your mental picture.  Picture your scene in colour or in black and white.

Now put a frame around your picture, hang it on a wall and shine a spotlight on it and that's it!

This technique changes the way that the brain "codes" the memory and takes the negativity out of it.