Easy Ways to Relax Your Body

Need some relaxation? I've got you covered! This week's episode is all about how to release muscle tension that causes so much discomfort, aches, and pains. You'll have a clear understanding of why your muscles get so tense and what you can do it about it! In this episode I'll discuss: * What the cause…

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the bless ful body podcast. I'm your host Chi Autumn Russell, and I'm here to share with you my best fitness and healthy living strategies and tips. And they are so good your body, mind and spirit will be thankful that you listened their friends. How's it going? I hope that you are having a wonderful day. And I thank you for joining me here at the bless full body. I am really excited about today's episode. We're gonna be talking about stress and how it effects our bodies, particularly our muscles, because it is National Stress Awareness Month At the time of this recording, which is April. And as many of you know, I really enjoy talking about stress at the university where I teach. I actually teach courses on stress management, and I think that stress is really misunderstood both good and bad. I am really looking forward to chatting about today from combining stress and the body, which is really just two of my favorite things. So before we dive into that, I wanted to do something a little knew I wanted to give a listener shout out. As you know, I'm always asking folks to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. And it is really helpful in helping new listeners find the podcast and kind of join the bless ful body community. And so I wanted to give a shout out. I have, um I'm gonna start doing this. Adds Reviews are made. Maybe not every week, but definitely if you would like to be the listener of the week than please, go ahead and leave a review and I will get to your review. Hopefully one day this week, highlighting Pack Manza, who wrote Riel Live Wellness. I really love how you give tips and practical advice on making wellness a part of life, not something we have to stop life or take time out of our days to work towards. Thanks. Well, thank you Pack Manza. I appreciate your taking the time out of your life to write a review, and I really do appreciate that. I do, as you know, believe that we really do need to make wellness part of our everyday life and not to kind of separate it from how we live, because otherwise it's not necessarily going to be something that we can really work in and do long term every day for the rest of our lives. So thank you so much for that review. I really appreciate it. And yes, if you would like to be the listener of the week than please do, go ahead and leave a review on iTunes. But anywhere you listen to your podcasts, I would love a review. I really appreciate it. Okay, so now we're gonna get started talking about stress, and we're gonna talk about what stress does to our muscles. So stress has an impact on our muscles, particularly it causes, as many of you probably know, a lot of excess tension and gripping, which can actually lead to pain. And it can lead to pain within the muscle tissue itself. And it can also lead to pain in other places. Like headaches is one that is really can be caused by muscular tension and low back eggs, which can be really distributed between the entire low back. It can also have an impact on stomachaches, right? Really, it can just affect us. Overall, it can affect our mood. Obviously, if we're feeling really, um, tense and gripping through our muscles and feeling and pain that's gonna affect how we deal with our life. So what is happening? Why does stress lead to the tension and pain that we feel in our muscles and you can relate? I imagine. Right. You can imagine. You know, particularly thinking about some type of deadline that you might have had to get to work or at school or conversation that you were really kind of dreading and how maybe you didn't realize it at the time, but later you might have gotten a headache or really felt rial. Discomfort and pain in your neck and shoulders is one of the most common places. Our faces as well within the jaw and the forehead, those air common stress gripping areas. And you might also have felt it in your lower back. Your glutes can really respond, and your pelvic floor can respond to anxiety and stress is well and get some excess tension there. Basically, what is happening is as the body interprets, a stimulus is being stressful. So as some event happens and we determined as their mind determines that it is a stressful event and it warrants us to prepare for action, Okay, and historically, this was B fighter flight. So if we were tense that our muscles would tense up and it was going to be a way to prepare us to either fight if we needed to fight for some type of Trude er invader or some threat to our well being or if we needed to flee. And both of those instances are going to be causing our muscles to need to work extra right, they're gonna need more energy. It's gonna need more reserves and just basically being ready to respond quickly. And so once you go into fighter flight, there are You know, it's a chemical reaction. There's hormones that are released both through the nervous system immediately through the autonomic nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system activates fighter flight. And that's gonna be an immediate response. And then there's also, um, intermediate response where the endocrine system becomes involved. And that's going to be all of your glands releasing hormones and basically within a couple of minutes, our bodies are please surging with hormones that are revving our system up. Some of these air adrenaline or nor adrenaline um, also court is all is going to increase, which is going to increase blood sugar and blood sugar availability, and we're gonna have a faster heart rate. Are respirations gonna increase so all of these things are happening so that our body is prepared to deal with the situation. And when you're thinking historically, over millennia, those types of situations were most likely physical. There was some type of physical threat that warranted a physical response. And that is why our bodies have really responded with fight or flight. Okay. And this is a wonderful thing. This has kept humans alive, and it's definitely useful in certain situations, right. However, it's not necessarily what is needed for a lot of the stress that we encounter in our day to day lives where we might be stuck in traffic or, you know, writing a report at the last minute. It needs to get turned down or just feeling out of control or having a conversation again, right? So all of those types of situations, our body is still going to respond in the same way as those muscle fibers tense and shorten and get ready to act when the action doesn't come. They are still if the if the stress continues. And if the body continues on into kind of a longer term stress reaction, those muscles are gonna continued a tense, and they're going to continue to be holding on to excess energy and excess tension. It's gonna shorten. And one of the other things that tends to happen over the long term is that oxygen is actually then going to start being lessened to those muscle fiber tissues. And there's several theories out there as to how this happens and how tension causes pain. But most of them hold to this theory that, you know oxygen is going to be lesson to the muscles. And also, metabolic wastes are gonna build up because there isn't gonna be the flow of energy to chronically shortened muscles. Okay, they're not gonna be a flow of blood supply. There's not gonna be, you know, the dynamic movement going through the muscle tissue. And so as oxygen decreases in, those wastes build up and the muscles continue to shorten. That can cause discomfort and eventually pain both within the muscle itself. Whichever muscle is tensing and it can also have effects, like I was saying on other parts of the body, like I'm headaches. Um, certainly clenching through the face can cause jaw discomfort and jaw pain, and this also then becomes a sick, cyclical reaction. It becomes a feedback loop, which most types of stress kind of negative impacts of stress do. Often then caused more stress, right? Because as we become uncomfortable as we start to feel this pain, then that in itself becomes something else that we can worry about and fear and have anxiety around, and that will increase our stress right. It becomes a new source of stress itself. And so it can really be this feedback loop, a positive feedback loop, meaning that it intensifies the situation and continues adding to the hole. So that's basically what's going on when you are starting to feel discomfort. Particularly related to stress came. These aren't the only reasons why your muscles can be sore right. There's other things that can be happening. Um, postural Lee, we can have, you know, muscle tension, muscle aches and pains from the postures that were in and the activities that we're doing. We can also have muscle soreness after working out right? So this isn't the only time that we experience muscle aches and pains. But when we're feeling muscular tension and particular muscular tension that is caused by stress, that term that we often use for that is called bracing in case our muscles are bracing and tightening. And that's gonna lead to that excess tension and discomfort and pain. So what can we do about this? And there are a number of things that we can do, which is really helpful to help alleviate some of this discomfort. One of the first things that we can do is basically get ourselves out of the stressful situation. All right, so that is definitely easier said than done and is basically something that will be covered over many podcasts because stress dealing with stress, there's no cut in clear solution. There's no there's no one way. Typically, when you're dealing with stress, you have to have multiple ways that we're going to deal with the situation in a real holistic way. Okay, so instead of thinking, okay, let's solve our stressor. Another thing you can do to really think about is how we can just kind of manage our stress response. In general. OK, one of the best ways is exercise. I sure you're not surprised? You knew I was gonna say that, right? And in particular, exercise does help us, Um, alleviate stress in general. And that's going to be a whole other podcast episode in the next couple of weeks Talking about that. But I did just want to mention it here that specifically for bracing, moving your body will help to get those muscle fiber tissues moving right. You're gonna be lengthening and shortening as you contract and release your muscles. That is gonna help with getting oxygen and blood flow to your muscle tissue and also help with alleviating and eliminating waste that is built up. Okay, so exercise will specifically have an effect on the muscles themselves. Now, if you have basically taken, you know, if you've gone into, say, a spasm or into some really intense pain from that muscle tension and, um, you know, it's kind of gone beyond just aches and pains, then obviously exercise. You might need to progress really slowly and really cautiously and just doing really gentle movements until the muscles can actually start to relax a little bit. Normally this takes a few days and then you can do some more movements. And so exercise can help after you're already in discomfort? Absolutely. And it also can help us kind of a preventative. So the more we are exercising within our day to day lives and doing movements, even not just exercising, but say getting up from the desk and moving around every hour, which, if you've listen to my podcast before you know I advocate that, then that definitely can help eliminate bracing and muscular tension, too. Okay, and another great method that can really help with muscular tension. Embracing in particular is rolling out and self massage or massage in general. So getting a massage is basically going to help you get that muscle fiber moving. It's gonna help the tissue kind of become more pliable, more supple. Get some of the the blood flow so you won't be doing this through your own movements. But through the massage, you'll actually be helping to eliminate those waste products and get more oxygen to your muscle tissues and just really get that nice, nourishing movement throughout the muscle fiber itself. Okay, massage is great. I highly recommend going to get regular massages, and also I recommend rolling out so either Using You know, you can just use your hands if you have Teoh. I really love using a small ball like a tennis ball and using that to roll whatever parts of your body is feeling some excess tension and some excess bracing the feet are actually really good ones to do the hips, The shoulders are all fabulous areas to release with a small ball or with a tennis ball. And I highly, highly recommend that. And if you go to my YouTube channel, I actually have ah, short little foot released video using a tennis ball that you can watch and learn how to do that is at bless ful body on YouTube. And you confined that video there for you for Stress Awareness Month. And you can also use a foam roller for this. If you have a foam roller, it doesn't just have to be a small ball. You can use the roller as well, and those air fabulous fabulous techniques for helping to alleviate bracing and muscle tension, and this works in multiple ways as well. Not only does it help to actually deal with muscles that are tense, but if you regularly rollout It does help to prevent muscular tension from escalating into a spasm or intense pain, and it also helps us increase our awareness. And that's going to be one of the main ways that we can deal and prevent muscular attention, embracing from really negatively impacting us. And so as we increase our awareness of this and it's a mindfulness practice, basically we will be able to really help, um, kind of keep the bracing from really occurring. So as you become more proficient through rolling out or self massage and also through a particular meditation techniques, which I will talk about next as you can do these practices, what will happen is that then, when you're in the moment of stress and you're starting to have the stress response, part of mindfulness and awareness that is so helpful is that when you're in that moment, you can actually start to kind of step back and see what is happening and understand your reaction so that you can actually help your body not necessarily ever start to brace or grip through the muscles in the first place. Okay, this rolling out helps us do that because we can really get a sense of where were gripping right where it's the most tender, where it's the most painful. And then we can also start to teach ourselves what it feels like when those muscles are relaxed. Because so many of us actually live in kind of a chronically tense state that it's not. We're not even really aware of what that feels like to be released and relaxed to our muscles. We actually just kind of think that the tension is normal, Okay? And so rolling out can kind of give you that perspective. It can help you see. Oh, well, my glutes air really tense. And there, you know, after I've rolled out, I can feel them being softer and more released. And then you can start to notice when you were gripping and holding tension through those body areas again, okay? And that also brings me to this idea of meditation and relax ation. Ah, particularly body scans and progressive muscle Relax ation. So both of those techniques are basically designed to help increase awareness of when we're bracing and when we're holding and gripping excess tension. So the progressive muscle relaxation, which I do also have on YouTube you can listen to a progressive muscle relaxation meditation. They're basically it takes you through the entire body and asks you to tense up different areas and then release them. And the point of doing this is so that you can start to understand the difference between when a muscle is tense and when the muscle is relaxed. And you can really feel that for some areas when you you know, kind of go into asking the muscle to contract, it's already in a contracted state and some areas. It's really hard to get to relax that that sense of release and relax ation is just a really foreign concept, OK, and something that the body just really doesn't understand. So rolling out and doing these meditations are really useful in conjunction together. OK, so as you roll out, you're actually manually releasing the muscle fiber tissue, and then you can take that into either the body scan, relax ation or the progressive muscle relaxation, and you can play with how you can consciously start to release and relax your own muscles. And once again, it's a mind to muscle type of activity type of technique, and that is gonna also just really heighten our awareness, right so we can become more aware of what our body is actually doing and what it feels like when it is holding on to stress and when it's holding onto tension and then when it's not. Also, something to note that I have seen reports that if we are embracing and holding on to our musculoskeletal tissue, which is our voluntary muscular tissues. So the things that we kind of control with our conscious mind are by, you know, just your muscles that move your skeleton. So your biceps and your quadriceps and your hamstrings all of those types of muscles, what we tend to think of when we think of muscles, if we're gripping and that tissue, it is very likely that were also gripping in our involuntary muscular tissue, particularly through the digestive track. So our stomach is designed to contract and release, and our intestines contract and release and all of that tissue can also hold tension. And so there I have seen studies that say that if we are tending to grip and hold tension and are voluntary muscle tissue, that that means that we're most likely also holding on detention into our involuntary muscle tissue and that really seeing are voluntary. Muscular tissue are skeletal, muscular tissue like the biceps and triceps and all of the muscles that move our skeleton. That it actually as it decreases, are tension overall that that actually has an impact on the other muscular tissue on that involuntary tissue. And so even something like the self massage and the meditation can even help with digestion. Okay, and what also happens is, as we start to release, it also helps us get a little bit out of fighter flight and helps us kind of turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest system. So as we start to do this work of releasing and relaxing, that also sends a signal to our brain that we are not in danger and we're not in a threat situation and that we can then actually start to get out of fighter flight so that can help us immensely. Right? Because if we're stuck in chronic stress, that is a really unhealthy place to be. Basically, if you are feeling stressed, if you're feeling some muscular tissue, I really invite you to check out the video, particularly using the tennis ball and rolling out your feet. Massaging your feet has impacts all over your entire body because of the way the fascia, the connective tissue that is in the bottom of your feet connects to the fascia. That is the basically the connective tissue throughout the rest of your body. So even just rolling out your feet can help you relax your back. Your shoulders can help with, um, all sorts of aches and pains and bracing throughout the body. And so that is a really good place to start. If you're feeling really tense right now, find a tennis ball and get rolling. So I hope that this has been useful today, and I hope that you learned a little bit about our muscles and how we respond to stress. So the next few weeks I will be talking about stress because it is National Stress Awareness Month and subscribe. So you don't miss an episode. And as I was saying in the beginning, I would love it and appreciate it if you could subscribe, rate and review the podcast. I really love reading the reviews, and it helps me plan and prepare for future episodes as well. Okay, friends, I hope that you are well and having a beautiful day. And I look forward to talking with you soon. Much love. Take care, Theo.