How To Understand And Relieve Body Tension
Physical tension is a reflex reaction, a response to stress-related factors designed to help avoid pain and potential injury. The muscles of your body can become extremely tense, leading to a guarded state, which can be extremely uncomfortable if it extends for long periods.
What Is Body Tension?
When you retain or experience tension in your body, it is typically due to emotional or psychological triggers. It can be stored for minutes, or even hours, affecting our normal movements.
You may find it challenging to move about or even sit due to the absence of flexibility that you would typically have if everything were okay. If you develop too much muscular tension, you may experience mild to excruciating pain and discomfort until you find a solution for this problem.
What Causes Muscle Tension?
When you experience consistent episodes of muscular tension, you must first understand what is causing the problem. Part of the solution has to do with understanding your internal chemistry. There are changes within your body that will lead to tension occurring. Some strategies for muscular tension include increasing serotonin levels and improving DHEA and dopamine levels, which quickly reduce muscular tension. To understand what is causing your body tension, create a Map of Tension (MOT).
Understanding MOTs
A Map of Tension is essentially a visual diagram written out in words and pictures to show what is happening with your body. If you are working with a professional, they will first ask you to notice what you feel. Specifically, they want to know how your body feels right now.
Without moving, you will mentally scan your body, focusing your attention on different muscle groups. As you note which ones are agitated, you will write that down and move on to the next. Once this is completed, you will then draw a printed illustration of the tension within your body. It would be best if you circled vital areas where the body tension is the greatest, and in most cases, you will have up to three definitive hotspots.
From there, you will then want to move around and begin to stretch, detailing how you feel once you start to move. Your range of movement should start with something minimal, followed by more significant activities while focusing on these hotspot areas. The purpose of this exercise is to become aware of the areas that are the most heavily afflicted.
Understanding The Origin
Once the MOT is done, it will help you focus upon these areas of your body, which will now be connected to emotional or mental events that came before the tension occurred. By understanding where these hotspots are, you can begin to journal what you were thinking about or experiencing before this happened.
There will also be times when you will feel completely relaxed. It should also be noted to form a contrast between times of tension in times of its absence. All of this information will match up with your tension hotspots, and then you can begin to make changes in your life that will eventually reduce or eliminate the body tension.
Physical Symptoms
In between the structural determinants of health, and the physical manifestation of tension, there are symptoms that you should also be aware of. Just as the MOT provided us with a physical roadmap to where the pain is most prominent, understanding physical symptoms that will often occur can also be helpful.
These will be concurrent with, but not always related to, the tension in your muscles. For example, you may experience fatigue, increased heart rate, heart palpitations, and even shortness of breath. These are all very similar to physical expressions of anxiety.
Likewise, along with your muscles aching, you may also experience muscle weakness, imbalance, dizziness, and a headache caused by stress. It is also essential to write these symptoms down throughout your day and notice where the pain begins to manifest. These health clues will help you determine the primary reason for the tension in your body.
When Is Body Tension More Likely?
There are certain times of the day where you may notice that tension in your muscles is exemplified. For example, if you are waking up and feeling very tense, it is likely due to the stress of anticipating what you must do throughout the day.
If this occurs at random times throughout your day, you need to write down what was happening. By understanding what contributes to the stress and the tension in your body, you can address these environmental factors. Certain factors may be challenging to eliminate, such as your family, job, or friends, but you will know what is causing it.
How To Release Tension
From the physician’s point of view, specifically a general practitioner, they may recommend muscle relaxers to help you. However, this is only addressing the symptoms of the problem. For that, your doctor may suggest that a psychiatrist or psychologist assist you with mental or emotional issues.
If you see these medical professionals, they will likely recommend various things before prescribing a pharmaceutical drug. They will probably tell you to go on walks, meditate, or try to look at the situations in your life differently that are currently causing your problems. Through regular therapy, you can release much of that emotional and mental tension that you are experiencing.
Alternatives For Reducing Body Tension
As with the MOT, these solutions will ask you to identify the areas of your body where physical tension is most prominent. You will also need to write down the triggers as they occur to identify the causative factor or factors further. They will typically recommend some form of visualization or slow breathing techniques designed to quiet your mind.
In many situations the body tension is triggered by the thoughts you are thinking, especially those events in your life that affect you emotionally because of Qi stagnation. By taking time out of your day to distract your conscious mind from your worries and problems, you may discover that you are interrupting the pattern of the physical tension appearing.
By using this psychological pattern interrupt, along with meditation and visualization, you may discover that your bodily tension will begin to reduce or even disappear entirely.
The Benefits Of BioScan
BioScan is another solution to consider. It is both painless and safe. It is a non-invasive technology that incorporates many disciplines, including homeopathy, biofeedback, and laser light technology. Based upon the provided analysis, you can determine what is causing the tension in your patient’s body.
It is possible to get immediate results through these scans. They target meridian and acupuncture points that will help you evaluate your patient’s internal systems.
How Does A BioScan Work?
BioScan uses Galvanic Skin Response. The data will be gathered and processed through the software. Analyzing that information will provide you with a deep insight into what may be causing body tension.
These are entirely safe to use because they are simply monitoring the electrical conductivity of the skin. By measuring the fluctuations in the detected electrical signals, like a lie detector test, they can determine exactly what is happening within the body.
Body tension is something that millions of people experience daily. Although it would be easy to say someone is stressed out and needs to relax, it is hard to resolve these issues without identifying the causative factors adequately. When you have access to technology, such as that provided by BioScan technology, it makes it even easier to identify what is happening and prevent it from occurring again.