How the Physical Body Holds Mental Tension

Tension 

 

The connection between mind, body, posture, and stress

Tami Bulmash

 

 Photo by Dylan Sauerwein on Unsplash

 

If you’ve ever endured a nerve-racking situation followed by a throbbing noggin, it wouldn’t seem far-fetched to connect one with the other. Nearly one in four adults reports experiencing multiple headaches every year in the United States. The World Health Organization estimates 50% of all adults have at least one headache annually. Though there are over 150 types of headaches, tension headaches are the most common and often triggered by stress. Yet while doctors might agree the two can be linked, they still don’t understand exactly how.

Brian Cole, MD, an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush and a professor of orthopedics, anatomy, and cell biology at Rush University Medical Center, agrees with this sentiment. “The exact reason why stress creates headaches is still unclear. One theory is that muscle tightness in the neck and head, which can reflexively increase with stress, results in dull tension headaches.”

It’s reasonable to presume a relationship between a headache and stressful thought exists because of where the brain is located. Since thoughts tend to be associated with the mind — which is often synonymous with the brain — they all appear to reside in the same place. However, the farther down pain travels in the body — further distancing itself from the head — the murkier the relationship between thoughts and tension becomes.

Yes, We Really Are Having More Headaches Right Now — Here’s Why

People can experience stress in different ways during the pandemic. Many of those experiences can trigger headaches.

elemental.medium.com

When pain is felt, it’s usually assigned to a specific body part. Localizing pain to a certain region inadvertently disconnects it from the rest of the body, thus making its origin harder to pinpoint. For instance, there is a low likelihood a medical doctor would suggest the onset of torticollis, a form of neck strain, is the result of ruminating thoughts. Linking kyphosis, or hunchback, with depression sounds even less plausible. But are connections like these really so hard to believe? Not according to Erik Peper, PhD, a professor of holistic health studies at San Francisco State University.

The manifestation of thoughts in the body

In his study, “How Posture Affects Memory Recall and Mood,” Peper illustrates how thoughts and body tension are interrelated. Participants were asked to recall negative memories while sitting in slouched and upright positions. They were told to do this again, but this time to think of positive memories. Peper’s research found that 86% of participants reported it was easier to access negative memories when collapsed than upright, and 87% of participants said it was easier to access positive images while erect than hunched over.

Peper explains, “If you are in a collapsed position, I think almost everybody finds it harder to access or be really involved in a positive memory and vice versa. When you’re in the upright position, it doesn’t mean you can’t have negative or hopeless thoughts. However, if you keep that opposition — as if you’re slightly removed from the emotional impact, once you’re in the upright position, it’s easier to access the more empowering and positive thoughts. Because thoughts and body are not separate.”

The evolutionary patterns of posture are described in Peper’s book, Tech Stress, where he examines the prevalent symbols of power throughout evolution. “A depressed or collapsed posture is a universal symbol of constricted posture in both humans and animals. In nature, throughout the animal kingdom, collapsed posture indicates submission. On the other hand, erect posture universally indicates leadership.”

But don’t get too excited about straightening your back just yet. There is a difference between sitting tall — which connotes length — and sitting straight. The latter has become a well-known way to command sitting correctly. Thoughts evoked by picturing a “straight” back might resemble a soldier pose, the most common depiction of what “standing up straight” looks like. Yet, if the images associated with a straight back were truly congruent with alignment — or balance for that matter — good posture would not be analogous to a fixed and tense figure.

Everything You Know About “Good Posture” Is Wrong

Could the way you’re aiming to hold your body be making pain worse?

elemental.medium.com

The power of habit

The desire to perform activities successfully is a deep-seated norm. “Sitting up straight” is the perfect example of how people may unwittingly arch backs, lift chests, pull back shoulders, and tighten necks — namely contort their bodies — in a strained attempt to do it the “right” way. Because the alternative — collapse — represents defeat.

A century-old method known as the Alexander technique was developed upon the principle of unknown habits. The founder of the technique, F.M. Alexander, was a Shakespearean actor who repeatedly lost his voice during performances. He thought he was doing everything right, yet his problem only worsened.

Alexander sought the aid of medical professionals to fix his problem but to no avail. He came to wonder if perhaps it was something he was doing to himself that caused his laryngitis. He learned that once he stopped repeating certain habits — such as standing soldier-like while performing — his voice returned. More importantly, he discovered the self-imposed pressure to perform successfully resulted in tense and tight positioning that constricted his breathing and voice.

The next time you sense the slightest tinge of stress — whether you’re running late or feeling angry, frustrated, or generally inadequate — just pause. Take note of what is happening in your body. Catching that moment is key.

Common contributing stressors

Wanting to succeed in life is part of human nature. Social comparison theory tells us that individuals determine their own worth based on thoughts of how they stack up against others. Yet, comparison doesn’t always lead to self-improvement. For example, social media has made measuring up seem impossible as it takes a considerable toll on self-esteem and can lead to depression.

In addition to the pressure of achieving or maintaining success, Americans are notorious workaholics. They work long hours, take few vacations, are more likely to work at night or on weekends, and feel pressured for time. It’s no wonder Americans are among the most stressed people in the world.

Beret Arcaya, a master Alexander technique teacher and the founding member of the American Society for the Alexander Technique, describes this as a “habit of thoughts.” She says this is something we do with our brain and we don’t have to. “You don’t have to be on that rat race. You really don’t. But you’ve got to get conscious of when you’re doing it.”

The way you react to each situation is a choice, though until that choice is realized, the reaction remains a habit. When it comes to lack of time, Arcaya explains, “You have to say, ‘Ah, I was just thinking that way again — I don’t have any time, I don’t have any time, I don’t have any time!’ Wait a minute. Stop and feel what happens to your breath.”

Arcaya tells her students there may never be enough time, but that’s fine. There might even be a way out of the rat race if you don’t react to it. She says, “Don’t even argue with the habit. Don’t even argue with ‘I don’t have enough time, or I didn’t have time today.’ It will make you stay in the moment, and that will elongate the time.” In other words, wait before responding to a stressful thought because that delay keeps you in the present.

Psycho-physical pain

Having taught the Alexander technique for over 40 years, Arcaya is no stranger to human behavior and how habits present themselves as tension. A renowned teacher, people come to her when they have exhausted all other options to ameliorate their pain.

One such woman came to her after suffering for years with terrible neck pain. Doctors couldn’t find a way to help her. They didn’t consider her stress level even though thoughts of neglect, abandonment, betrayal, and loss consumed the woman’s life. She developed a wrenching spasm of the neck called torticollis shortly after the passing of someone beloved to her.

Arcaya recalls it was way beyond a stiff neck, the woman was essentially trapped in her pain. The pain made it impossible to eat or walk properly, forcing her to walk sideways. It seemed the woman couldn’t face the events of her life. Her head was turned away, and the tension locked it there. It was as if it was all too much; she couldn’t even look at it.

When asked if she believed thoughts could directly impact the body, Arcaya responded, “Thoughts and the way you think — and the whole way you are when you are thinking — is your body tension. It doesn’t impact it; it is it.”

See it to believe it

As past president of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, Peper is an established biofeedback expert. His work focuses on training individuals to learn awareness and gain control of body functions through the aid of electromyography (EMG). During a treatment, biofeedback sensors are attached to the skin to measure the body’s biological signals that are shown as feedback that informs and assists in health improvement.

‘Biofeedback’ Could Ease Headaches, Anxiety — and Maybe a Lot Else

By providing a window onto the body’s inner workings, biofeedback could help people control what was once thought to be…

elemental.medium.com

The psycho-physiological principle asserts that “every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely, every change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state.”

Another study led by Peper, who was instrumental in establishing the first holistic health program at a public university in the United States, recorded physiological signals demonstrating the mind-body connection.

A 25-year-old participant who had been playing the piano for 16 years was asked to relax and then imagine playing a musical piece in a series of intervals. Muscle activity was recorded from her right forearm extensor muscles and displayed on a large screen so that other group participants could observe. Each time she imagined playing the piano, the forearm extensor muscle tension increased, even though there was no observed finger and forearm movements. The physiological monitoring showed how her body responded to “playing” only in her thoughts. When recordings of her movement were shown later, she reported being completely unaware of activating her muscles — especially since her forearm appeared to stay in a relaxed position.

If the mere conscious thought of performing an activity (such as playing the piano) can evince body tension, what can be said about the impact of unconscious thinking? This begs the question of what might happen to the body with repeated thoughts of anger, resentment, and hopelessness — or with thoughts of kindness and love.

What you can do (or not do) about your thoughts

According to Arcaya, thoughts don’t have to become tension. She says, “We’re always directing ourselves. We don’t realize it a lot because it is subconscious.” She notes that direction provides a purpose toward a goal that serves to guide or motivate. “To have conscious direction is to take agency over your life. It’s to have self-possession. To take your energy and decide what you will and what you will not do.”

When thought is attached to an expectation and the outcome is unmet, the reaction will translate into tension. That is unless the habitual response is recognized first. The next time you sense the slightest tinge of stress — whether you’re running late or feeling angry, frustrated, or generally inadequate — just pause. Take note of what is happening in your body. Catching that moment is key. Pay attention to your thoughts. Giving yourself even 10 seconds to pause might allow you to substantially calm your nerves and prevent you from going down a familiar spiral that could lead to stress and pain.

Albert Einstein famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” A habit can only be changed if it is recognized. Then it’s up to you to make the choice of which direction you choose to take. You could repeat the same habit and get the same outcome or pause and see if a new path presents itself. Who knows, you might even bypass a headache (or two or three or 20) along the way.

Tami Bulmash

I write and teach about the mind-body connection and its relationship to health and well-being. More at https://www.bodyandposture.com/

Why your most important relationship is with your inner voice

Relationship 

 

Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing, says psychologist Ethan Kross. He has the tools to improve your mind’s backchat

Rachel Cooke

@msrachelcooke

Sat 16 Jan 2021 16.00 GMT

Last modified on Sat 16 Jan 2021 21.38 GMT

• 
  

As Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, Kross found himself sitting up late at night with a baseball bat in his hand, waiting for an imaginary assailant he was convinced was about to break into his house – a figure conjured by his frantic mind after he received a threatening letter from a stranger who’d seen him on TV. Kross, whose area of research is the science of introspection, knew that he was overreacting; that he had fallen victim to what he calls “chatter”. But telling himself this did no good at all. At the peak of his anxiety, his negative thoughts running wildly on a loop, he found himself, somewhat comically, Googling “bodyguards for academics”.

Kross runs the wonderfully named Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career to studying the silent conversations people have with themselves: internal dialogues that powerfully influence how they live their lives. Why, he and his colleagues want to know, do some people benefit from turning inwards to understand their feelings, while others are apt to fall apart when they engage in precisely the same behaviour? Are there right and wrong ways to communicate with yourself, and if so, are there techniques that might usefully be employed by those with inner voices that are just a little too loud?

The psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Kross: ‘Avoiding our emotions across the board is not a good thing, but let’s think about distance instead.’ Photograph: EthanKross.com

Down the years, Kross has found answers to some, if not all, of these questions, and now he has collected these findings in a new book – a manual he hopes will improve the lives of those who read it. “We’re not going to rid the world of anxiety and depression,” he says, of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. “This is not a happy pill, and negative emotions are good in small doses. But it is possible to turn down the temperature a bit when it’s running too high, and doing this can help all of us manage our experiences more effectively.”

According to Kross, who talks to me on Zoom from his home in a snowy Ann Arbor, there now exists a robust body of research to show that when we experience distress – something MRI scans suggest has a physical component as well as an emotional one – engaging in introspection can do “significantly” more harm than good. Our thoughts, he says, don’t save us from ourselves. Rather, they give rise to something insidious: the kind of negative cycles that turn the singular capacity of human beings for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing, with potentially grave consequences both for our mental and physical health (introspection of the wrong sort can even contribute to faster ageing).

Does this mean that it’s not, after all, good to talk? That those in therapy should immediately cancel their next appointment? Not exactly. “Avoiding our emotions across the board is not a good thing,” he says. “But let’s think about distance instead. Some people equate this word with avoidance and repression. But I think of it as the ability to step back and reflect, to widen the lens, to get some perspective. We’re not avoiding something by doing this, we’re just not getting overwhelmed.”

Those who are able to quieten their inner voice are happier; their sense of relief can be palpable

According to one study, we talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking 4,000 words per minute (by way of comparison, the American president’s State of the Union address, which usually runs to about 6,000 words, lasts more than an hour). No wonder, then, that listening to it can be exhausting, whether it takes the form of a rambling soliloquy, or a compulsive rehashing of events, a free-associative pinballing from one thought to another or a furious internal dialogue.

But if such noise can be paralysing, it can also be self-sabotaging. What we experience on the inside can blot out almost everything else if we let it. A study published in 2010, for instance, shows that inner experiences consistently dwarf outer ones – something that, as Kross notes, speaks to the fact that once a “ruminative” thought takes hold of us, it can ruin even the best party, the most longed-for new job.

Why do some people have a louder or more troubling inner voice than others? “That’s harder to answer,” he says. “There are so many ways it can be activated, some genetic, some environmental.” What is certain is that these experiences cannot be discounted: “The data is overwhelming when it comes to the connection between anxiety and physical health conditions.” Those who are able to quieten their inner voice are happier; their sense of relief can be palpable.  

‘Our thoughts don’t save us from ourselves,’ says Ethan Kross. Photograph: Getty

What is interesting about the science involved in all this is how it both backs up, and goes against, intuition. Much of Kross’s book is devoted to what he calls the “toolbox” of techniques that can be used to dial down chatter, and while some of these seem to contradict all that we think and feel – “venting”, for instance, can do a person more harm than good, because talking about negative experiences with friends can often work as a repellent, pushing away those you need most – others confirm that when we act on certain instincts, we’re right to do so.

To take one example, if you are the kind of person who slips into the second or third person when you are in a flap (“Rachel, you should calm down; this is not the end of the world”), you really are doing yourself some good. What Kross calls “distanced self-talk” is, according to experiments he has run, one of the fastest and most straightforward ways of gaining emotional perspective: a “psychological hack” that is embedded in “the fabric of human language”. Talking to yourself like this – as if you were another person altogether – isn’t only calming. Kross’s work shows that it can help you make a better impression, or improve your performance in, say, a job interview. It may also enable you to reframe what seems like an impossibility as a challenge, one to which, with your own encouragement, you may be able to rise.

Some of his other techniques are already well known: the power of touch (put your arms around someone); the power of nature (put your arms around a tree). Activities that induce “awe” – a walk in the mountains, say, or time spent in front of a magnificent work of art – are also useful, helping with that sense of perspective. Writing a daily journal can prove efficacious for some (something that felt terrible one day physically becoming old news the next), while neat freaks like me will be thrilled to discover that what he calls “compensatory control” – the creation of exterior order, better known as tidying up – really does have an impact on interior order. Reorganise your sock drawer, and you may find that your voice quietens.

The model Heidi Klum is said to take her milk teeth as a lucky charm when she flies, clutching them during turbulence. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Research shows, too, that superstitions, rituals and lucky charms can be useful, though most of us will draw the line at, say, taking our milk teeth with us when we fly, as the model Heidi Klum is said to (she keeps hers in a tiny bag, which she clutches during turbulence). Placebos have been found to work on chatter, just as they do in the case of some physical illnesses. In one study in which Kross was involved, a saline nasal spray acted as a kind of painkiller for the inner voice: data from brain scans showed that those who’d inhaled it, having believed they were inhaling a painkiller, displayed significantly less activity in their brain’s social-pain circuitry compared with those who knew they had inhaled only a saline solution.

No wonder, then, that Kross believes children should be taught the science behind all of these ideas, and in the US he has already begun working with teachers to make this happen: “We want to find out if knowing this stuff influences how they regulate themselves.” Does he make use of the toolbox? (Physician, heal thyself.) “We should probably ask my wife,” he laughs. “But yes, I do, absolutely. I’m human, too.” In particular, he is “very selective” when it comes to friends from whom he seeks “chatter support”.

Everyday feelings of sadness are elevated for many, but there is also a lot of resilience – we often underestimate that

Kross finished his book long before the outbreak of the pandemic, let alone the storming of the Capitol. But as he observes, it could hardly be published at a more opportune moment. “This is the perfect chatter episode for society: a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, political uncertainty, widespread groupthink.” His most cited paper to date looked at the harmful implications of social media, often “a giant megaphone” for the inner voice – Facebook expressly asks its users: “What’s on your mind?” – and an environment that he thinks we need to learn to navigate with more care.

As for the pandemic, though, he is less pessimistic than some about the effects it is likely to have long-term on mental health. “We are already seeing signs that depression and anxiety are spiking,” he says. “Everyday feelings of sadness are elevated for many, and then there are more full-blown episodes. But there is also a lot of resilience, and we often underestimate that. A lot of people are doing quite well. They’re managing this hardship in an adaptive way. I am an optimist. We will return, I think, to a nicer place, though how quickly that will happen, I only wish I could say.”

Which technique should the pandemic-anxious deploy? “Well, one that I personally rely on is temporal distancing,” he says. This requires a person to look ahead: to see themselves determinedly in the future. Studies show that if you ask those going through a difficult experience how they will feel about it in 10 years’ time, rather than tomorrow, their troubles immediately seem more temporary. Does this really help him? “Yes, it does. I ask myself how I am going to feel a year from now, when I’m back in the office, and I’m seeing my colleagues, and travelling again, and taking my kids to soccer – and it gives me hope.”

It is, as he says in his book, a form of time travel: a mental Tardis that, if only we can manage to board it, may make everything from a bereavement right down to a silly argument seem less brutal, just a little easier to bear.

• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross is published by Vermilion (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

As 2021 begins …

… we have a small favour to ask. You read

in 2020. And you’re not alone; millions are turning to the Guardian for open, independent, quality news every day, and readers in 180 countries around the world now support us financially.

We believe everyone deserves access to information that’s grounded in science and truth, and analysis rooted in authority and integrity. That’s why we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This means more people can be better informed, united, and inspired to take meaningful action.

In these perilous times, a truth-seeking global news organisation like the Guardian is essential. We have no shareholders or billionaire owner, meaning our journalism is free from commercial and political influence – this makes us different. When it’s never been more important, our independence allows us to fearlessly investigate, challenge and expose those in power.

In a year of unprecedented intersecting crises in 2020, we did just that, with revealing journalism that had real-world impact: the inept handling of the Covid-19 crisis, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the tumultuous US election.

We have enhanced our reputation for urgent, powerful reporting on the climate emergency, and moved to practice what we preach, rejecting advertising from fossil fuel companies, divesting from oil and gas companies and setting a course to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.

If there were ever a time to join us, it is now. Your funding powers our journalism, it protects our independence, and ensures we can remain open for all. You can support us through these challenging economic times and enable real-world impact.