What Does It Mean to Relax?! - My Point of View & My Own Experience

Hi! I'm Caroline, a psychologist from Amsterdam. This is my fifth post!
My first post was an introduction, and my second was about mental preparation, my third was about mood swings, and my fourth was about Chef's Table.
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There are two kinds of people: the people who know how to relax, and the people who don’t. The first kind of people love to give the second kind advice. Unfortunately, that advice usually only applies to the first kind.
In my line of work, I hear people say this a lot: “I just need some rest,” or “People tell me I just need to relax more.” I ask them: what does the word 'relaxation' mean? What does ‘rest’ mean to you? That often turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Most of them find it difficult to remember a time when they felt relaxed, and if they do, they find it difficult to describe the feeling.

When you’re at a point in your life where you feel that you are in need of relaxation, but you realize you don’t know how to, then you’re not the only one. A high level of tension has become normal in modern society. More and more people are experiencing the mental and physical effects of long-term tension. We are grinding our teeth at night and starting this at an increasingly younger age. I asked my dentist why people grind their teeth in their sleep. I was hoping for an answer that showed there was some logic behind it, like dreaming about eating or stretching our jaw muscles, but he just said one word: “Tension.”
Could relaxation simply be the absence of physical and mental tension? What does that feel like? A lot of people don’t know, because they have never experienced it.

The decision to learn how to relax usually comes when you reach a point where the tension makes you suffer too much. This often happens in the form of physical discomfort that the medical world cannot fully explain or help with. It can express itself in bruxism, muscle stiffness and pain, chronic pain, headaches, bowel problems, and some forms of tinnitus.

A few years ago I found myself sitting in the office of an ENT specialist in the hospital, after undergoing a series of tests to find the cause of the tinnitus I had been experiencing. For months I had been hearing a low roar in my right ear, like a tractor engine, distracting me during the day and keeping me awake at night. The doctor told me that the tests could not find anything wrong with my ear, except that they couldn’t do the EEG properly because I was unable to relax the muscles in my neck.

Of course I had scoured the internet, reading about possible causes and cures, and I came across countless drawn images showing the different muscles of the neck and jaw. What struck me about these images was that I had never realized how many muscles my face contained, and how many of them seemed to be connected to my ears.

To make a long story short: When I suggested to the doctor that the tinnitus was not the problem but merely a symptom of the tension in my whole body, she said: “Oh, that’s exactly what it is.”
“So, what do I do about it? I was thinking like… yoga and things like that or something?”
“Yeah do that. Find a way to relax and get rid of that tension.”

Yes! But how?!
For me, learning to reduce tension has been and still is an interesting journey. It has included reading, writing, being in nature, exercise, yoga, mindfulness training, advice from others, and fysiotherapy (where one time a fysiotherapist used a needle to force a specific jaw muscle of mine to relax for the first time after two years of built up tension, resulting in what I can only describe as 30 minutes of orgasmic crying of relief). It has required learning to rely on an unreliable life, to be comfortable in an occasionaly uncomfortable body, to accept what's there, even when what's there is just a chaos of noisy thoughts.
The way forward is different for everyone. My advice would be to at least look beyond the symptoms, to see your story, your body, and your daily life, and learn about how it works for you. I found the book by Tim Parks very insightful, and Paradoxical Relaxation by David Wise (book and audio). For the Dutch readers: here is an interesting article about someone elses similar experience.

The noise in my ear is still reducing. Sometimes, when I am truly relaxed, it's completely gone, and I enjoy that. It's never been as bad as it was back then. It functions now as a bell in the top of a temple tower, calling for a moment of silence and reflection. It only gets louder when I get too stressed out, reminding me of the skill I am learning.