frequently asked questions

About Relaxation

When can Relaxation be hazardous to your health? Can Relaxation kill you?

A lot of people will have experienced getting ill with a cold or fluey bug as soon as they take a holiday. It is also true that some high-stress occupations have a higher death rate in the first year of retirement than lower-stress occupations.

There are two aspects of this phenomenon worth looking into: ‘Exhaustion’ and the ‘Type of Relaxation’ we’re talking about.

Exhaustion - being under stress for a long period leads to a form of exhaustion. A person may not recognise the state they’re in as ‘exhaustion’ because we’re capable of settling into a kind of survival mode. In other words we get used to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. One of the features of a stressed state is that some aspects of our awareness are switched off. We’re deeply wired to survive circumstances in which pain could be a fatal distraction, which is why there are many recorded examples of people realising they were injured or wounded only after the immediate crisis is over. It is only when the need to override exhaustion has passed, that people stop, relax and sometimes crash. The sudden change can cause an increase in stress-response and an increase in suppression of our immune system.

Type of Relaxation - What is often meant by the term “Relaxation” is a “relaxation of effort”, in other words a cessation of activity. This is what we call a Passive form of relaxation. It’s like when someone flops onto the ground, losing control after a prolonged period of exertion, like a runner after a race in which nothing was held back. Sometimes we learn, from early experiences, that it can be useful to flop after exertion; so that we can’t be accused, by ourselves or others, of not having tried hard enough. By adulthood, this way of saying, “I have given my all!” can be an unnoticed bad habit.

It’s an Effort Vs. Nothing polarisation that causes a potentially unhealthy intervention in our natural Relaxation Response. Our action and relaxation responses are managed by so called ‘autonomous’ neural and chemical systems in our brain and body, which are both affected by and affect our thoughts. ‘Action’ oriented systems aim to let as little as possible get in the way of carrying on with action, while our capacity for relaxation also encompasses our capacity for healing and recovery, nurture and connection. These systems are nothing if not sophistcated, and our full natural Relaxation Response is anything but passive. There is actually no reason, other than a simplistic misinterpretation, why the two branches of the ‘autonomous’ systems can’t learn to work together.

We now know that the way people can be affected by trauma can be profoundly different depending on the parts of brain called into action during traumatic events. This is influenced by circumstances, and also the sense of ‘agency’ a person might have in those circumstances. In other words, if someone feels helpless and unable to move, fight or escape, the same event can affect that person profoundly differently to another person who felt able to do something. Someone who felt able to do something but to no avail, can be affected yet differently again. The effects might be no less significant, serious or real, but different. It is now much better understood which parts of the brain and which systems are involved, and just how complex they are.

Seeing ‘Relaxation’ as a nothing that hopefully fills a void made by an absence of something, gives the impression that it is ‘autonomous’ and can’t be applied deliberately or actively during events. It is conversely a well known secret that top sports performance is impossible without a proficient level of relaxation under pressure. The movement of a highly skilled master of any discipline is characterised by a relaxed quality of fluidity.

Development of such fluidity is usually put down to many, many hours of practice in the discipline in question, Relaxation Skills being assumed to be a kind of lucky side-effect of competence. So, the missing factor that makes Relaxation a ‘secret’ active ingredient is methodology. Relaxation in action is assumed to be impossible, or a lucky accident, or a personality trait, if no method for achieving it can be discerned.

We call this type of Relaxation “Dynamic Relaxation” and further break it down into three groups or stages of skill sets: Live, Active and Dynamic. The origins of our methodology are in mastery in disciplines where fluidity was a matter of life and death i.e. under extreme pressure, and where it was understood that life also had to be sustainable and worth living the rest of the time. Some of us in the last several generations of this tradition have continued developing methodologies for its application in any compatible discipline.

Conclusion - The hazard to health is actually the ‘exhaustion’ caused by prolonged imbalance, followed by sudden Passive Relaxation. In other words, an unhealthy “All or Nothing” “Switch on, switch off,” pattern.

The answer is not “Don’t relax!” The answer is Actively Relax more before, during and after; so on holiday or in retirement no less than at work or in action. You can start learning Dynamic Relaxation Technique right now, in our Virtual Dojo.

Can Relaxation help with Stress?

Yes. If it’s the right kind of Relaxation.

An imbalanced pattern of floppy, “dead” or passive relaxation and periods of strain, can be a cause of stress, as can excessive boredom, lack of pressure and lack of stimulation. In essence a lack of agency or control over what’s going on increases stress. Obviously there are lots of things we discover we can have little control over and must accept. The right kind of relaxation skills can help with both of these types of life-challenge.

In work with people experiencing occupational stress and stress caused in various other ways, we looked at what people tend to do to alleviate stress. We found that a high proportion of the things they did because they felt stressed, were attempts to escape the causes of their stress, i.e. going somewhere else or doing something else to get away from the problem. This of course can sometimes be highly appropriate, for example, going for a walk to take a break, or the type of deep relaxation that can be experienced from the work of a highly skilled physical therapist.

In many cases a big difference was made by learning new skills that gave greater control or sense of agency in the particular stressful situations being experienced. Active and Live Relaxation techniques were among the most effective things people could learn to change that relationship with reality. An important part of this is learning how we function, and how to operate the systems that manage our sub-conscious responses. Often, just a bit of new information could make a significant difference.

We all have a finite capacity to accept change, or to process what we’re going through. When we run out of capacity we get stressed. Some of that capacity can be used up by things we’re hardly aware of, or don’t realise are having that effect. Cold or hot weather, physical pain, the need to perform a task under pressure, how we perceive things, what we expect of ourselves or how people treat us, are all examples of things that on any given day could potentially use up our capacity. Making allowances, or freeing-up some capacity when needed, is a skill set in itself, and closely connected to self-awareness, and Relaxation skills on which it depends. We can develop our capacity, but only by learning our way forwards, physically, mentally and emotionally.

Relaxation can help with Stress, provided it’s not used to avoid learning and change, but to facilitate it.

Can Relaxation help with Anxiety?

Fear, heightened awareness and wariness are completely appropriate things to feel in certain circumstance. They are a natural part of survival instincts. If we can’t switch off those feelings, if they become habitual, or irrational, we might be described as suffering from or diagnosed with “Anxiety”. Sometimes, when things build up, we can get into a state in which anxious thoughts and threat response go round and round in a cycle it is difficult to stop.

There is, of course, a problem with the concept of rational and irrational fear. By nature, our survival instincts are irrational. They don’t wait for our rational mind to work out if it is reasonable to feel nervous, aware or wary. The parts of our brain that trigger this kind of response work far faster than the parts of our brain that are “rational”. So much faster, that we’ve reacted by the time we have time to think. So when we rationalise, it’s always after the reaction and we can only then decide if the reaction was appropriate or if it was nothing after all. And sometimes a reaction was appropriate but we can’t see it rationally. We might dismiss the feeling and later say, “I knew I should/shouldn’t have…”

One of the jobs of that fast, reptilian part of our brain is to spot something out of place in our surroundings. Something that doesn’t fit the pattern. As a prehistoric human, if you heard a rustling in the undergrowth, was it lunch? Or were you lunch? If you ran into a predator somewhere, and your system went on alert fast enough for you to leg-it and get away, that part of your brain would remember. After running, you’d get back to a reasonable sense of security, relax and recover, and probably forget. Years later, if you were passing through the same place, or somewhere similar enough, the hairs on the back of your neck would stand up, and your body would be ready to run.

Part of the “Anxiety” problem is that modern life is less clear cut. People feel threat from all sorts of non-physical dangers, and often have lost awareness of ‘real’ physical dangers. Many of the things they feel threatened by aren’t the sort of things you can physically run away from. If you get hit on the head repeatedly, it would be normal to develop a habit of ducking in anticipation. So how can we navigate through all this confusion?

The clue is in the bit about the reptilian brain remembering. It learns!

You could learn Dynamic Relaxation, and it would help. Active Relaxation would help you develop your situation-specific skills. Live Relaxation would help you get really good at calming down every time a threat response was triggered. You could even learn how to break a cycle of anxious thoughts and base-brain response. And you could begin to manage the level of arousal during a response. And in time, with time and repetition, your base brain would learn to be more discerning about when there really was a threat and when it was imagined.

And then you could also actively train your base brain to respond appropriately to threat or no threat, and learn to trust your instinct. And this might be why you’d build on Dynamic Relaxation by joining us to practise Aikido Isshinkai.

Can Relaxation help with Trauma?

There are two questions here. Are we talking about prevention? Or treatment of a pre-exhisting Trauma? The answer to both is yes, however, the key is in “Movement”. For reasons you may already have guessed if you’ve read my previous answers, it would most likely do more harm than good to simply tell a traumatised person (including yourself) to “Relax!” Especially if the person in question understands ‘Relaxation’ to mean “a nothing that hopefully fills a void made by an absence of something”, or “flopping after movement”, or what we call “Passive Relaxation”.

To make Relaxation work for us, when faced with past or future trauma, we must add movement to the equation. But not just any movement. Different types of movement have different habit forming effects, some more suited to Relaxation and countering Trauma than others.

In his excellent book “The Body Keeps The Score”, Bessel van der Kolk explains this whole issue in a wonderfully clear and readable way. I highly recommend it, especially if you are curious about options for addressing past trauma or building your resilience for the future. I also echo recommendations for people with PTSD or Complex PTSD to find a suitable qualified Professional Therapist to work with. Relaxation and Movement can help and be part of the journey, and even a valuable part of preparing for the journey, but are not a replacement for this type of work.

From our own experience, Dynamic Relaxation Technique combined with Isshinkai Aikido can have a profound impact because it acts-out the neutralisation of violence through its relaxed and fluid movement, repeatedly exorcising the fight, flight or freeze reactions and memories held in our bodies. It is a challenging practice, but a multi-faceted and multi-layered one with a history of profound transformative effects.

To some extent, fluid rhythmic and synchronising movement, by its nature, makes its inherent relaxation Active rather than Passive, and in some forms you don’t even have to know or think about it. Group drumming, which can have an almost magical impact, springs immediately to mind (See Tom Morley - Brilliant and very active around London, join him for an event if you can, you’ll not forget the experience!). There are many wonderful forms of movement that can be hugely helpful therefore, more than we could list here, even if we knew about all of them.

In Isshinkai Aikido we consciously nurture two elements to enhance this effect. The first is to use Live, Active and Dynamic Relaxation Techniques so that Relaxation is not just inherent to the movement but also consciously applied and therefore a deliberate act of “Agency”. The second is a long-term perspective on development. Finding safety, self-awareness, mutually affirmative community, fun, creativity and progress within a system that provides for our development far beyond our current horizon offers a hopeful future we can look forward to. For all of this it is of crucial importance that the movement we use is not combative, militaristic, violent or destructive, but relaxed, fluid, creative and powerful. The difference can be subtle and not obvious to the novice. To get a sensory image of what we mean, think ‘bicycle wheel turning as you free-wheel along a smooth road down a hill’ compared to ‘beating cold iron on an anvil with a hammer’. It is the repetition of significant movement that allows us to get into the deep wiring we need to reach into. Therefore, it is of crucial importance that the Aikido movement we practice is not primarily an expression of force and resistance, domination and submission, or winning and losing, but of Dynamic Relaxation, co-creativity and “Aiki”, or what we call Win-Win-Win (the other person wins, you win and we all win: i.e. you, me and society).

This ‘good stuff’ doesn’t happen when the Aikido is technically poor, or when the person doing it with you is of a ‘fighting mind’, or is preoccupied with status or controlling others. You can feel the difference in the quality of touch, and the way a person holds or grips you in certain movements. So, the quality of teaching, Teacher and practice partners are of critical importance. This is why, in Isshinkai we are now increasingly careful in screening our intake to discourage people with toxic, manipulative, antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders. Such people are not particularly rare and some are drawn to Aikido, however, those fully committed to their disorder can only see Aikido as an add-on to their ability to manipulate others, and as an activity that provides them with a target rich environment. They don’t see anything wrong with this, have no intention of changing and feel entitled to mistreat others, so the real effect of their presence is to traumatise and re-traumatise, and this is the opposite of what we do within Isshinkai.

This is why we explicitly require a demonstrable commitment to the values of our practice, and “honesty” in particular, without which we cannot learn from experience, and which, understood correctly, is a foundation stone of mental health. Manipulative people with disordered personalities are unavoidably dishonest, and therefore unable to fully embrace “Relaxation”, though they tell themselves otherwise.

Covert Manipulation, Coercive Control and Personality Disorders

If you know or have recently met someone who overuses charm and flattery, keeps changing their story, or whose feeling and actions don’t match their words, or you know someone who says they have, we strongly recommend reading this article by Shahida Arabi https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversion-tactics-highly-manipulative-narcissists-sociopaths-and-psychopaths-use-to-silence-you/

This is also a good start if you’ve become unsure what’s real in a relationship or if you have a suspicion you’ve been living under coercive control.

For our FAQ answer on how Aikido and Relaxation can help, go here

Banner Photo by Stefan Stefancik on Unsplash