Wednesday, 23 September 2020

RELAXATION

Relaxation is “a state of consciousness characterised by feelings of peace, and release from tension, anxiety and fear”.

The 3 aims of relaxation:

·        A preventive measure, to protect body organs from necessary wear and tear and in particular the organs involved in stress-related disease

·        A treatment, to help relieve stress in conditions such as essential hypertension, tension headache, insomnia, asthma, immune deficiency, panic and many others. Relaxation strategies may help to make the body’s innate healing mechanism more available.

·        A coping skill, to calm the mind and allow thinking to become clearer and more effective. Stress can impair people mentally, relaxation can help to restore clarity of thought. It has been found that positive information in memory becomes more accessible when a person is relaxed.

Deep relaxation:

1.   Procedures which induce an effect of large magnitude

2.   Carried out in a calm environment

3.   With the trainee lying down

4.   Examples- progressive relaxation and autogenic training.

Brief relaxation:

1.   Produces immediate effects

2.   Can be used when individual is face with stressful events

3.   The object here is the rapid release of excess tension

PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION

Edmund Jacobson, a pioneer in this field; his works lays the foundation of both the tense-release and passive approaches. Arising out of electromyography (EMG), he was able to demonstrate that thinking was related to muscle state and that mental images, particularly those associated with movement were accompanied by small but detectable levels of activity in the muscles concerned. Just as a calm mind would be reflected in a tension-free body, so Jacobson proposed a relaxation musculature would be accompanied by the quieting of thoughts and the reduction of sympathetic activity, notions that would have relevance in the treatment of anxiety and associated conditions. Muscle activity is accompanied by sensations so faint that we do not normally notice them. To promote awareness of tension, Jacobson emphasized the need to concentrate on those sensations, cultivating what he called “learned awareness”. Once tension had been recognized, it would be easier to release it.

Introducing the method- points to be included in psycho-education/ rationale for relaxation

·        resting enables body energy to be used more efficiently

·        it helps protect us from illness

·        by creating and releasing tension you will learn: to tune into subtle feelings in the muscles and to recognize different levels of tension and to release that tension

·        muscles that are unnecessarily tense reflect their tension in the mind. If that muscle tension can be released, you will feel mentally calmer.

·        Your internal organs will also benefit (pulse rate and Blood pressure will be lowered while you are relaxing)

·        It is not possible to learn it in 1 lesson; the more you practise, the more proficient you become.

APPLIED RELAXATION

The methods described previously are concerned with the induction of deep relaxation. Their purpose is to equip the individual with routines to be performed in the privacy. These methods are useful for unwinding after a stressful day, but may not however, provide strategies for coping with stress as it occurs. Goldfried (1971) recognized the extent of the gulf between relaxation in the therapeutic environment and relaxation in the stressful situation, focused expressly on the issues of the application of the skills. He emphasized the need for a portable and shortened form of progressive relaxation, a form that could use as a general coping skill in everyday life. In doing so, he gave the individual a new role, defining him as an active agent in his treatment rather than a passive client. The approach was called “training in self-control” because it implied active mastery of anxiety by the individual himself. The method consists of 6 components, in each of which a particular aspect of relaxation is taught:

1.   Tense-release technique

2.   Release only technique

3.   Cue-controlled (conditioned) relaxation

4.   Differential relaxation

5.   Rapid relaxation

6.   Application training

 

 

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