Four Free Relaxation Exercises that Can Improve Your Mental Health

I never thought I would be writing these kinds of blog entries for Slightly Nutty. Next thing it will be ‘Ten herbs that can change your life’ and ‘Four questions to ask before choosing a therapist’. (I have also considered writing a joke book called How to Write a Best Selling Self-Help Book – I bet there are people out there who would consider buying it.)

But please bear in mind but I’m really addressing myself here. Because what I’ve noticed over the years – and only recently been able to put into effect as much as I want to – is that everything in our culture teaches that we shouldn’t use our own resources, and that you have to pay for things to make your life better.

Now this is often the case. Other people have skills that are different from ours, and to pay them for those skills can improve our lives while keeping the economy ticking over. A good physio can do wonders for a sore lower back. A skilled therapist provides the objectivity that we cannot bring to our own lives. I get all that, but I still think that we are subtly discouraged by the culture to do the simple things that can enhance quality of life, and that don’t cost a penny.

So here are four things you can do yourself, that don’t cost anything. Two can be done in front of TV, and two probably not. You probably know about them already but a reminder won’t do any harm.

Please note this isn’t medical advice – please see a physio if you have serious muscular or spinal problems.

Self-massage

This is a great thing to do in front of tele to ease sore, aching muscles. This Wikihowguide gives excellent suggestions – not just for obvious things like a sore neck but also massaging tummy, arms, feet and even your back if you have a basketball handy. It recommends showering first and using massage oil but you don’t need to prepare in this way to benefit.

There’s no reason to wait until your muscles are sore. If you do self-massage regularly, sore muscles would probably reduce over time.

Progressive relaxation

No, this isn’t time out for left-wingers. It basically involves tensing and relaxing one muscle at a time from the top of the head down to the toes. It is best to do this either sitting in a chair or lying down. In theory you could do it while sitting and watching tele, but listening to relaxing music will be more effective.

You can also do this just before going to sleep.

The extent of the exercise is up to you. The longer you take in tensing and relaxing each muscle, and the more muscles you include, the more effective the treatment will be – but it doesn’t have to be long, or involve every single muscle. There are plenty of relaxation CDs, and they can certainly help you let go, but the point is you don’t need a CD; you can run through the muscles yourself.

The trouble with progressive relaxation is that so many claims are attached to it, such as its ability to cure insomnia and anxiety. Rather than focusing on grand claims, what seem more relevant to me are its immediate benefits. It simply makes you feel more relaxed, and after doing it for a while you will get better at letting the muscles go. I always think of a floppy rag doll when I do this exercise, focusing on letting go of the muscle when I relax it.

Meditation

Many people run a mile when they see the word meditation. They think that adopting it involves joining an ashram and sitting still for hours, or they go to a website that tells them they should meditate for at least ten minutes every night as well as every morning as a bare minimum. More than anything, I believe, we associate meditation with failure. We are not good enough for it; we fail before we even start because we know our brains are too chattery, too noisy.

The best way of approaching it is to clear your brain of preconceptions and the need for achievement. You are not going to move to a cave. You are just trying to change your brainwaves to achieve a greater mental serenity and stamina.

The important thing about meditation is that the trying – the early stages, which are so trying – are already doing some good, and that even five minutes in the morning has some benefit. Sure, once you start you may get completely enthused and build a little altar, or go on a retreat. But you don't have to do any of that. And even if you don’t keep it up, your brain will remember the degree of inner quietness you achieved. I have taken meditation up and dropped it again throughout my adult life, and every time I take it up again I don’t have to go back to the beginning. The learning from last time is still there.

Mindfulness meditation is a great form because it doesn’t just accept that the brain will chatter, or that you’ll lose concentration; it incorporates that assumption into the process. Every time your brain strays you simply bring it back to your breathing, and perhaps note mentally what’s happening. Through the mental chatter you continue to take note of the steady in and out of the breath. After a while the brain does tend to slow down, but the point is you will receive benefits before that. And there will be days when you slip into that effortlessly and days when the brain chatters throughout, and this is all okay.

Since getting back to mediation for all of a month, I’m already noting more stamina, more mental energy and calmness. I now meditate between five and ten minutes six days a week.

I meditate sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the side of my bed, with a blanket around my shoulders. To stop myself from putting it off, it’s the first thing I do when I get out of bed after going to the loo. If I turn my computer on first, my meditation practice probably won’t happen that day as once I’m in ‘doing’ mode, I’m a-goner.

Here is a simple, uncomplicated description of simple mindfulness meditation. 

Deep breathing

Deep breathing, sometimes called abdominal breathing, is great if you are prone to panic attacks because it retrains the breath so that even when you are nervous you have a greater sense of control. But I imagine it would be useful for any form of anxiety and especially useful before public speaking or a scary social event.

Practising deep breathing is great to do in front of teeve, because it’s a wonderful rationalisation for blobbing, something I love to do (another blog entry I am planning is – seriously – ten things to do in front of tele).

Here’s a good description of the process.

Hope you have fun with these exercises, and get something out of trying them.

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‘Is That All There Is?’ Anxiety, Exposure and the Adrenalin Crash

I was quietly, morbidly terrified. The cream walls pressed in on me. I sat on a swivel chair behind the clunky reception desk as if it offered protection from the ordeal to come.

To my right, the shopfront-style window showcased the darkening sky and the wide, bare street. On my left, visible through glass panels in the radio booth, my friend Melissa moved dials up and down, put discs into a console and spoke into a fat black mike. I could hear her voice on the speaker broadcasting into the room.

Melissa hosts a Sunday afternoon radio program on a community radio station, and I was about to read out a film review on it. Melissa had been suggesting for years that I start a regular review segment on her program, an informal arrangement every two or three weeks. I’d always refused, but now, thanks to taking half a Luvox a day, I thought it was worth a try. And I was suffering for my decision.

Sure, the radio station is a local one with a limited audience. But ‘stuffing up’ would be a definite setback. And anyone coming into the reception area would hear me stumble on that huge speaker, including the two late-middle-aged men who were due to come in any minute for the program running after Melissa’s show.

I had my review printed out, the sheet already damp from my sweaty fingers. I was too scared to do anything but glance over it, as sustained attention would remind me of the ordeal to come.

Finally Melissa summoned me. This was actually a step forward as the lonely anticipation was worse than being in the booth with Melissa, ready to roll as the last bars of the music track played themselves out. Truth to tell it wasn’t my first time in the booth: a couple of years ago Melissa had interviewed me about my self-published book The Inspired Shopper. That had been hard, but as an interviewee I had far less responsibility.

To cut a long story short, I sailed through it. I started with the high point of the film and went from there. Melissa and my on-air rapport helped. We often discuss films over the phone, so this was familiar territory in some ways. And she knew I was nervous, so could take over if I started to panic. It went so well that a friend who listened said he had been expecting me to sound okay with room for improvement, but that I had sounded much better than that – his only criticism being that I talked too fast.

Afterwards we went out for a drink at a large noisy cafe on a nearby corner. Walking to the cafe with Melissa in the hostile cold of mid-June, I didn’t feel the rush of victory and mastery that I’d been expecting; instead I felt empty. There was a sense of anticlimax. I had made a major breakthrough, yet nothing had changed.

I’ve had this feeling often when I’ve done something that caused what is called ‘anticipatory anxiety’. Instead of a sense of pride in having made it through a feared event in one piece, there is a feeling of flatness and disappointment.

Part of it is surely psychological. If you anticipate something perfectly ordinary, and then you achieve it without all the imagined catastrophes occurring, you realise that all the energy you expended on the anxiety was a waste of time. Not only that, but given that the feared event is probably something you were able to do with ease as a child, or even a few years earlier, you are confronted with the essential mundaneness of much of life. Your achievement doesn’t feel like an achievement at all, just a big let-down. The song that sums up this ennui perfectly is the 1970 Peggy Lee hit ‘Is that all there is?’

But there may also be a physical aspect. Anxiety produces the fight-or-flight syndrome. The sympathetic nervous system causes the body to produce stress hormones that include adrenalin (also known as epinephrine) and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is associated with feelings of pleasure and plays a role in addiction.

If you’re a nervous person like me, adrenalin can seem like a sadistic enemy. It makes your hands shake, your legs turn to water, your heart thump madly and your digestive system melt, while it spitefully steals your ability to breathe. But it also sends energy surging through your bloodstream. It helps you to complete the challenge that has called it up in the first place, among other things by elevating blood sugar and  increasing blood pressure and the flow of blood to the muscles. 

After the challenge is completed, the body goes into recovery mode. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. Blood pressure and breathing return to normal, and the heartbeat slows down. Levels of adrenalin drop and remain low for a period that depends on the severity of the stress. It’s common to feel tired and listless.

But that's not the whole story. While adrenalin is released instantly and has a short-term effect, another stress hormone, cortisol, works differently. Cortisol levels start rising just as your adrenalin levels start to drop. Just as it takes longer for cortisol to build up in your system than adrenalin, it also takes longer for cortisol levels to drop. Wikibooks has this to say about it:

Together with the rise of cortisol and the decrease of adrenaline, come the nasty side-effects of the stress hormones. It is at this moment that you feel bad, anxious, and having [sic] lots of negative thoughts. And this is perhaps one of the critical features of stress which flies against common sense: you only feel its bad aspects when your body is stressing down and progressing towards a more relaxed state. When you are building up on adrenaline, in effect stressing up, you might even be feeling good! This explains what is popularly known as the adrenaline rush and the consequent adrenaline crash.

Perhaps the feeling of 'blah' afterwards is a combination of a lowering of blood sugar and blood pressure, a drop in dopamine and adrenalin, and the continuing presence of cortisol? For some people cortisol levels remain high after a stressful event is over, contributing to chronic stress. (There is also a link between elevated cortisol and depression, but it is disputed.)

The post-event blues I've described here aren't confined to the anxious. Google is filled with mentions of ‘post-event depression’. If you attend a fantastic concert, a dream vacation or even your own wedding, there is a flatness afterwards as you return to normal life. I suspect most people put this down to the boredom of daily life, but perhaps there is that physical element as well.

This article on the Psychology Today website talks specifically about post-wedding depression. One of the antidotes it recommends is focusing on life after the wedding, rather than seeing the wedding as an end goal. This suggests that seeing any kind of social or psychological challenge as the be-all and the end-all may be part of the problem. Perhaps it would be better to keep in mind that life will go on afterwards much as before, apart from the subtle internal change of meeting that particular challenge; and, once the challenge has been met, to look ahead to the next challenge.

But I think the most important way to cope with post-event let-down is to keep the bigger picture in mind. In my case speaking on the radio doesn’t necessarily translate to, say, being able to talk comfortably with my relatives at the next family do. It should, but it doesn’t. Nevertheless it is still a victory. As long as I am willing to stay in my discomfort zone, and to build up my tolerance of unpleasant feelings, I can gradually increase the scale of the challenge. A feeling of short-term victory would be nice, but more important to keep in mind is my larger plan for a greater involvement in life – that’s the hope, anyway.

Have you experienced a feeling of let-down after achieving a social or other goal? Please let us know.

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Help End Puppy Farm Cruelty (Content warning: upsetting image & descriptions of animal welfare conditions)

Dogs and cats are sensitive, intelligent animals who feel pain, extreme temperatures, hunger and fear just like humans. Yet in Victoria’s puppy and kitten farms they exist in conditions we wouldn't condone for the most ruthless criminals. This is not the behaviour of a civilised society.

The Victorian Coalition government went to the last election promising drastic improvements to the laws governing puppy farms. But the government’s revised Code of Practice for the Operation of Breeding and Rearing Businesses actually reduces animal welfare standards.

If it becomes law it will lead to horrific conditions and appalling situations for dogs as well as cats. The RSPCA’s verdict is damning: ‘this code legalises some of the abhorrent conditions and practices regularly seen by our Inspectors at puppy factories’. (Ironically, Victoria’s premier, Dr Denis Napthine, is a veterinarian by profession.)

Recommendations in the revised code include the following: 

• If litters of puppies are included, the ratio of carers to animals could be as little as 1:500 outside business hours.
• Maximum litter numbers for females will be increased while males will have no maximum number.
• There will be no maximum breeding age or period that an animal could be bred from, so these animals could potentially spend their entire lifetime confined to farms.
• There will be no requirement to regulate temperatures, that is, to provide cooling and heating.
• The recommendations allow for ‘any method’ of euthanasia as long as it is ‘humane’, but ‘humane’ isn’t defined. In theory methods of death could include shooting or bashing, causing incredible suffering.
• Breeding between second-generation related animals will be acceptable.
• Tethering is allowed (except for some categories of breeding females). RSPCA Victoria advises against tethering.
• The code will allow working dogs to be housed in small raised pens with wire floors.
• Breeders, rather than vets, will be able to declare an animal fit for sale. Not only do breeders lack the appropriate qualifications to do this, but this may also mean that neither the animal nor the buyer will be protected from post-sale welfare or return issues.

The campaign for animal welfare standards in breeding farms is being spearheaded by RSPCA Victoria – more background can be found here.

The government is calling for feedback on the revised Code of Practice, and the deadline is 9 am on Wednesday 14 August.

I’ve created a campaign on this issue through GetUp! Please sign the petition and demand that the Victorian Minister for Agriculture, Peter Walsh, include in the code of practice the minimum animal welfare standards recommended by the RSPCA. (It would be great if you could sign before 14 August, but the campaign will continue after this date.)

Please also share the petition on Facebook and Twitter.

You can also write to the Minister directly and to the Premier, Dr Denis Napthine.

Ultimately puppy and kitten farms should be abolished, and this is the aim of the Oscar’s Law campaign (and RSPCA Victoria). I completely agree with this aim, and would like to see the selling of dogs and cats through pet shops become illegal.

But this is a humanitarian emergency: in the meantime breeding dogs and cats must be legally protected by meaningful animal welfare standards. The Victorian Government must stop giving breeders carte blanche to mistreat these animals, and shoulder their responsibility for the welfare of animals in Victoria.

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