Stress Coping: Body Awareness Exercise

Discover Your Stress Level
Stress in Today's Workplace
Stress And Your Health
Reduce Your Stress
Relaxation Techniques

We are going to help you become aware of the physiological response your body has to stress through the following body awareness exercise. Training in body awareness, as well as stretching and activity to relieve tension from stress are important tools for influencing your health and well-being.

Biofeedback
This exercise involves biofeedback. Biofeedback is a technique in which people are trained to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies. Psychologists use it to help tense and anxious clients learn to relax. Specialists in many different fields use biofeedback to help their patients cope with pain.

Your body’s feedback monitors measure the various effects that stress and relaxation have on your body (heart rate, skin temp, blood pressure). The first step in learning to use biofeedback to help relieve the physical symptoms of stress is to become aware of your body.

Your body constantly responds to physical signals. Consider physical messages regarding hunger and fatigue. When you are hungry, you eat. When you are tired, you rest. There are also times when you may choose not to pay attention to these physical cues. For example, have you ever chosen not to go to bed, despite exhaustion, in order to finish a project or meet a deadline?

You constantly receive messages from your body that you interpret and respond to, choosing your course of action based on internal and external demands. This interpretation and response form what we call a feedback loop. Biofeedback is simply "body feedback". When you are aware that your body feels stressed, you can choose an action to relieve the stress.

By developing an awareness of your body, you can become your own biofeedback monitor. Your choices regarding the day-to-day necessities of eating and sleeping will become clearer, and you will also understand the more subtle signals of your body. You can then better interpret them, choosing the most appropriate course of action. It’s important to remember that you have the power to change your physiology through your thoughts (mind) or through your movements (body) or both. In this way you can minimize the harmful effects that stress has on your health. If you ignore your body’s signals, those physical distress cues, your body may react through heart failure, stroke, ulcers, or other conditions.

The exercise
Let’s use both our mind and body to raise our level of awareness regarding how, as individuals, each one of us carries stress in our bodies.

Have someone read the following questions to you. He or she should read each sentence slowly. The narrator should give you plenty of time on each sentence and make sure you are ready before reading the next sentence.

Sit or lie down, and be comfortable. Close your eyes, and take a moment to notice where you find tension or anxiety in your body. Don't answer the questions aloud — just think about them.

• Can you feel tension in your head?
  
  
• Can you feel tightness in your forehead, jaw, or chin?
  
  
• What about the back of your neck, your shoulders, somewhere else?
  
  
• Are you aware of your face flushing, your heart speeding up, your body temperature feeling either cold or hot?
  
  
• Do you find yourself holding your breath, sighing, scratching yourself a lot, grinding your teeth, and clenching your fist?
  
  
• Do you feel a knot in your stomach? Or are reactions more subtle?
  
  
• Do you find that your mind races or goes blank? Do you have trouble concentrating, sleeping, or sitting still?
  

Make note of the physical messages. The greater your awareness of the symptoms, the greater your ability to relieve them.

The muscles in your body tend to hold stress in the form of physical tension. But remember, not all muscle tension is undesirable. The muscles tense naturally as a part of movement. The difficulty occurs when you accumulate excessive muscle tension and retain it for a long time. As you practice this exercise, you will increase your ability to relieve the tension in your muscles and achieve an enhanced feeling of relaxation.