Tension in body: what to do?

Tension in the body is super annoying. You want to relax on the couch, but you notice that you still have a kind of hunted feeling in your body. If you hold your hand in front of you, you see your fingers twitching. What can you do with tension in your body?

In this blog, we discuss solutions.

Where does tension in your body come from?

To find a good solution, it helps to first look at possible causes of tension in your body. There are a number of possibilities; for example, your job may require you to maintain a certain posture that causes tension in your muscles. That tension can gradually spread throughout the rest of your body[1], and before you know it, you’re suffering from constant muscle tension.

In addition, stress at work can also cause muscle tension. Research even shows that negative emotions triggered by people you interact with at work can be a significant factor in muscle tension[2].

Tension headaches can also cause muscle tension. However, muscle tension does not cause these headaches; it is really a consequence. The headaches are often triggered by certain situations. Avoiding those situations is often the way to treat this type of headache and muscle tension[3].

Physical Solutions

As you can see, the cause is by no means always physical. However, you can certainly look at physical solutions first.

This is often easier to do than the mental work that may be required to get rid of chronic muscle tension.

Examples of such physical solutions include yoga, meditation, and exercise.

This can help you move tension out of your body or relax. I myself really like CrossFit. It's a way to work your muscles. Muscle tension can then be resolved through extra effort, which then relaxes them due to fatigue.

This doesn't solve muscle tension in the long run, because it can come back when you are well rested again. So it is mainly a way to deal with it, but not to solve it.

In addition, yoga and meditation can also be a great way to deal with muscle tension. In fact, with yoga and meditation, you instruct your nervous system to calm down. This actually turns off the activation of a stress response. Allowing you to relax your muscles better again[4].

Research also shows that regular exercise or sports in general can help well against stress, and thus muscle tension[4].

However, sometimes none of this helps very well, and sometimes the muscle tension is just back when you just have to deal with that one colleague who gets the blood under your nails.

So what then? Hypnosis or hypnotherapy has also been used for some time against tension headaches[5].

But how does a hypnotherapist begin to help someone combat muscle tension? Read on.

What body do you have tension in?

A hypnotherapist always looks at which body you have muscle tension in.

If you can't get it right physically, it's good to look at your bodies. I divide them into 5 bodies, namely:

1. The physical body
2. The emotional body
3. The mental body
4. The spiritual body
5. The Relational Body.

So if physical doesn't work you look further. Emotionally you can look to see if something is bothering you. Mentally you can ask yourself if you believe something that is causing you tension. Spiritually you can ask yourself if you're doing what you enjoy, if you're doing what gives positive meaning to your life. And relationally, that already came up a little bit in the surveys, is there maybe something going on there?

What about the people around you? You can even think about people you used to associate with and whether they still influence you. For example, think about repeatedly going over in your mind something someone once said to you.

Especially the relational body has a lot of effect on the other bodies. By itself, all have an effect, but relationships often have the most effect.

Changing your view of a relationship, or how you feel about a relationship, often affects many other things. Changing your relationship with someone is something you do yourself. The other person doesn't have to do anything for that.

This is where a hypnotherapist can help you.

Unhelpful beliefs cause tension

If you have a limiting belief, such as “the whole world is against me,” this also creates tension in your body. Because every time you’re out in the world, it feels like something you have to defend yourself against .

This may have been instilled in you from a young age. For example, if your parents warned you about the evil outside world and that you should always be alert outside.

This can be very unconscious, but this is then a mental thing.

Emotional Tension

Another tension can be emotional tension. You may have experienced something emotional that you have not yet properly processed.

Something traumatic may have happened to one of your parents during your childhood, which may have caused your role to change as well. In that case, you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to process it, and over time, this can lead to that tension because you haven’t worked through it. For example, if that event suddenly forced you to shift from being a child to taking on a caregiving role.

This can cause a variety of symptoms later in life.

Sense

When it comes to finding meaning, it’s also important to do something in your life that feels meaningful to you. If you feel for a long time that you’re doing something that’s completely pointless, this can create resistance in your subconscious. You may feel that resistance as muscle tension.

To still give meaning to your life, and stand up more for your own goals, a hypnotherapist can help you figure out why you haven't been doing that well so far.

Understanding and forgiving the situation

One of the most important techniques in hypnosis for releasing tension in the body is understanding a particular situation and forgiving it. This can be especially important in cases of emotional trauma or when dealing with limiting beliefs .

Sounds easy, but it's not always so.

This is what a hypnotherapist then helps people with.

Especially if your family has created an awkward or unhealthy situation for you and then you need to understand and forgive those family members.

Then again, such a family member may have passed away, which also makes it very awkward.

Or your family member is very different now from when the situation happened. You are also different now, the whole situation is different. Then returning to the past and starting the conversation about that can go very awkwardly, because, "couldn't you have said that before?"

Instead, it's better to go back to that moment yourself. We do this with hypnosis using the inner child technique , because what you want to hear, what you would have liked to hear then, makes no sense now. Actually, your inner child needs to hear what it wants to hear.

During hypnotherapy, a therapist may suggest going back in time to the very first moment you felt that muscle tension in your body, for example. If this is caused by a traumatic event in your childhood, it can be very healing to have a conversation with your inner child—the child you were back then.

In that state, you can even help your inner child start the conversation with the father or mother, or other relationship, that you needed something from. Even if that person is now deceased.

A hypnotherapist guides this conversation so you can say what has been bothering you and so the other person can explain why they did what they did.

Forgiveness is often part of that conversation, but only after everything that was important in processing the emotional distress has been expressed.

Breaking patterns

Sometimes you may find that what you experienced as a child is something that many people in your family have experienced. For example, in the "conversation" with a father or mother, it may be said that grandfather or grandmother handled things the same way.

This can provide great understanding, but it doesn't always solve the problem. The forgiveness does.

Another way to break these patterns is by practicing the desired behavior.

Practice doing something when faced with a certain situation, such as saying you don't like something, where you normally wouldn't. That's then the pattern you want to break. You then retrieve that feeling and practice, for example in front of a mirror, saying "I don't like that," or whatever it is that you want to practice. That way it becomes less crazy for you to say something in everyday life, instead of being silent in situations that normally create tension.

Again, this is often easier said than done. A hypnotherapist can help you practice this.

Also watch this video with more information.

Want to learn more about these types of techniques to help yourself or others with muscle tension in the body? Then come to the free online master class.

Or register directly for one of our trainings or events. You can take the training in class and live online. Ideal if you can't come to class for a change.

Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:

Sources:

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030698779190233O?via%3Dihub