HOW DOES STRESS, EXHAUSTION, AND PAIN ALL TIE TOGETHER?

What do muscles have to do with stress and exhaustion?

Tips on exercises that create conditions for your body to regenerate itself.

Do you often feel tired, on the brink of exhaustion, and have aches that come and go in different parts of your body? Do you wake up in the morning feeling as tired as when you went to bed at night? Do you often feel dizzy or like the ground is moving under your feet? Does it feel like you have difficulty breathing in or out?

Then you have probably suffered from an imbalance in your muscle tension pattern.

"Can muscle tension really be the cause of me feeling so exhausted and in pain?" is a question that many of my patients ask.

The short answer to that question is yes! Few things consume as much energy as unnecessary muscle tension.

The longer answer to the question gives you an explanation of why that is.

Here's how it all ties together, in broad strokes.

Stress, anxiety, grief, anger, bitterness, and fear all leave their specific marks on the body. Tension, stiffness, pain, sleep problems, fatigue, dizziness, anxiety, and shortness of breath are just a few of the many symptoms that can manifest when we are forced to hold back our emotions and basic needs, or push ourselves beyond healthy limits.

To suppress an unwanted feeling or hold back a need, we must slow down our breathing using muscle tension. Every suppressed feeling or need therefore generates muscle tension and a restricted breath. This will shape posture and can ultimately lead to an incorrect load on joints and muscles with unnecessary pain and fatigue as a result. But to better understand why muscle tension can cause such pain and fatigue, it is necessary to understand how the muscles themselves work.

All muscles are composed of two different types of muscle fibers, the slow ones and the fast ones. The muscles that have predominantly slow muscle fibers are located near the skeleton and are called postural muscles, in other words, postural muscles. These muscles use approximately 20-30 percent of their full capacity. Therefore, they are enduring and can work over a long period of time without getting tired. These muscles allow us to sit, stand, and walk for a long time without getting tired.

The muscles that have an abundance of fast muscle fibers are usually more superficial. They use 70-80 percent of their full capacity over a short period of time. Imagine, for example, that you are going to chop wood or swing a tennis racket. When you do that, you use the fast muscle fibers that give you the power and speed to swing the axe or the racket. The prerequisite, of course, is also that the underlying postural muscles in turn do their job and keep the rest of the body stable during that time. Therefore, a prerequisite for the body to function like a magnificent and well-oiled clock is that there is always a well-balanced balance and interaction between these different types of fibers.

STRESS AND MUSCLE TENSIONS

What happens when we face major challenges in life, or push ourselves during periods of intense and prolonged stress, is that the body uses all available resources to cope with the stress. You often have to slow down your breathing by generating muscle tension to cope with holding back feelings of frustration, anxiety, and your basic needs for rest and recreation. The slow fibers are not enough. Now the fast fibers are activated as a kind of readiness. If this continues, lingering tensions and pains in the muscles will arise over time. You get less oxygen supply and it makes you increasingly tired.

The body starts to "stay up" with the help of muscle fibers that are not at all intended to perform long-term work. You have simply ended up in a vicious circle. You usually first feel it in the area around the neck, shoulder blades, shoulders, and jaw joints. It gives you roughly the same feeling as constantly being on an icy surface where you don't quite have control of your balance but pull up your shoulders and bite down to avoid slipping.

It's not surprising that the muscles with an abundance of fast fibers start making themselves felt when they always have to work overtime. In the beginning, you usually feel it as a feeling of tiredness or diffuse pain. But as you continue to push yourself, these muscles will demand more and more of your attention. The fatigue and the diffuse pain will turn into an increased experience of pain and can often cause a burning and stinging sensation. By this point, you have probably also started feeling more and more tired. There are few things that consume as much of your energy as muscle tension of this kind. Usually, other symptoms have also appeared, such as dizziness, sleep problems, and breathing difficulties, to name a few of the most common.

GOOD NEWS

One of the benefits of practicing body awareness exercises is that your fast muscle fibers are relieved so that your slow muscle fibers can do their job well again. This works best when you do the exercises with an emphasis on being comfortable and slow, and when you perform them with directed attention, or what is called mindful presence. It is also important that you make the movements as small and therefore as little effort as possible. We often think that we have to exert ourselves for an exercise to be beneficial. In body awareness training, it's the opposite. You practice doing only the bare minimum and doing this with increasingly less demanding efforts. The way to increase the exercises is actually to make them smaller. If you want to increase the ability to early notice when you are exerting yourself too much, you should adjust the movement so that it feels as comfortable for you as possible. It's easy to see that this will eventually contribute to being more attuned to the body's signals in everyday life and to early detect the need for rest.

There is always an opportunity to return to a more gentle way of using your body - the body has a fantastic ability to regenerate itself as long as you give it the right conditions for it!

In my book, “Regaining Balance, the Swedish Healthcare Method to Reduce Stress, Anxiety and Pain".  can follow a 10-week program to strengthen your own healing process.

Good luck and feel free to contact me through the website if you have any questions or if you want to share experiences from your training that can be helpful for others!