Causes of Stress, Pain, and Tension—And how to un-cause it
This week, a widely reported Gallup poll indicated that 55% of Americans felt a lot of stress the previous day—including anger, worry, sadness, and physical pain—compared to 35% worldwide.
This does not bode well as we know chronic stress leads to serious health problems. And a constant sympathetic state—the stress response—is not only an emotional state, it is also a physical one.
Stress distributes neurotransmitters like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine, but have you considered how stress also generates musculoskeletal tension and pain? We hold, maintain, brace, tense, and compensate for a world that demands more than we have to give.
The nervous system does not care whether your stress comes from mental rumination, a physical injury, or a response to a world event.
What is compulsive and chronic?
It's common for people to lie down on their back while their musculature is still engaged in sitting or standing. Everyone does this to some degree: We don't fully adapt to a change in gravity.
Chronic contractions can be from injury, pain, fatigue, stress, or historical patterns. There's no intrinsic narrative attached to your state. (We layer that on top in our quest for meaning.)
Chronic tension and energy expenditure
The brain uses twenty percent of your total energy. And two-thirds of that is used to help neurons send signals. So, if you're constantly firing neurons in the motor cortex to maintain a particular musculoskeletal pattern, you're exhausting a large percentage or your overall total resources. It's a high-cost activity in any system.
This is chronic fatigue, stress, and tension in a nutshell.
The back door
What to do? It is possible to cease contracting, as long as you sneak around your habits. I call it sneaking in through the back door: You put yourself in a position where it's impossible to maintain your stress response, like diverting traffic. "Hello synapses, take a detour!"
Moshe Feldenkrais didn't invent the beautiful human skill of adapting and learning. But he did locate brilliant doorways into our natural ability to let go. Try these simple movements to sneak around your jaw and neck patterns.
One-minute tips to relieve tension in the jaw and neck
1. Tongue up and down
Sense your jaw, cheeks, tongue, and throat right now. What's the state you're in? How relaxed is your jaw, throat, and tongue? Open the mouth, stick the tongue way out and try to touch below your lower lip, toward your chin. Swivel the tongue left and right a few times along the chin or lower lip. Try to do it without moving the lower jaw.
Pause, then open the mouth and stick out the tongue again. Leaving the mouth open, not moving the lower jaw, touch your tongue above the upper lip many times, then swish it back and forth. Pause.
Lastly, open your mouth, leave it open and touch the tongue once toward the nose and once toward the chin without moving the lower jaw. How free is your tongue to move? Try this many times. Find out how it affects your throat, breathing, and softness of the lips.
2. Jaw like a drawer
Open and close your mouth a couple times. Go slow so you can detect how far you go easily. Then slide the lower jaw forward, so the lower teeth are forward of the upper teeth and lower the jaw straight down and up a few times in the forward position, then slide the "drawer" back and rest a moment. Do this two or three times. Now open your mouth. How is it?
3. Talk with your tongue out
I often give this to my clients who have jaw tension. It's really very funny because you stick you tongue out, leave it out, and narrate something for a minute or two. Doesn't matter what you say, just make the sounds of speaking without letting the tongue be pulled back into the mouth.
Try this for a couple minutes and now feel the quality of your jaw, cheeks, tongue, and throat. You can't do this and hang onto the "normal" muscular habits.
4. Turn eyes to help neck
Sit with your feet flat and square your shoulders. Turn just your head left and right, slowly to see how far you can go with ease. Don't strain. Now face forward, keep your head and shoulders square, close your eyes and look to the right and back to center 5 to 10 times. Only the eyes move. (If you experience any dizziness, please open the eyes and scan the horizon.)
Open the eyes, test turning the head to the right. What happened? Do the same on the left.
5. Turn eyes to help neck, variation 1
Sit in the same way, feet flat, squared shoulders. Test turning the head left and right. Look to see how far you go. Close your eyes. Take the closed eyes slowly to the right and quickly back to center 5 to 10 times. Pause. (It's important to pause here.) Then reverse it: go quickly to the right and slowly back to center.
Open the eyes, look around yourself to the right. How far do you go with the same amount of work? Do the left side as well.
Prefer audio? Try this gentle lesson to release the jaw.