When I sit down and focus on really relaxing, several things happen. When I tell you the following story, don’t get me wrong; I am good at relaxation and I can do it very well because I have had a lot of training and practice.

And, given all the training and practice I have had, I am still often surprised at the stages I encounter during the process of relaxing. The first, most obvious, aspect to this story is that relaxing is not intellectual. Knowing how to relax, knowing about relaxing, etc. doesn’t make any difference at all. Only doing it makes a difference. (This, of course, is the first problem but stay tuned because there are others.)

So I sit down to relax and I feel my body start to let go. I feel my body becoming less tense and softening. I feel my breathing deepen and slow down and my body fairly quickly responding. This is good and this is what is expected.

But, guess what? This process is repeated and repeated and repeated time after time as I sit there. What does this mean? It means that I keep relaxing and then I relax some more and then I relax some more. It almost feels like I break through layer upon layer of tension. To use an active metaphor, it feels like I am busting through layer after layer of tension. And I probably am doing exactly that.

But, golly, I relax regularly. I relax often during the day mentally and take a mental inventory of tension in my body off and on all day long. How could it be that I find myself busting through layer upon layer of tension when I sit down and really DO my relaxation exercises?

And herein lies what looks to me to be the big Problem with Relaxation. Everyone, and I mean everyone, pretty much thinks they know what relaxation is and how to relax. But do they really go through the steps to sharply focus and dig deep and bring forth a strong relaxation response? I would bet that no, they don’t. We are trained to keep moving forward, keep doing and you will get ahead. But taking the time to sit down and really cultivate the relaxation response in our body? I suspect most everyone thinks it is not necessary. Heck, we all know how to relax. Right?

This whole issue is particularly pertinent for headache sufferers. People who have headaches more than once a month have built up layers and layers of tension in their bodies that pressure their nervous system into having headaches. If they never learn how to ‘bust through’ those layers of tension, they really don’t have a chance to get rid of their headaches. They think they are relaxing, they don’t think tension is the problem but they can’t know how to relax until they do it. And when they do finally learn how to relax and their headaches get less frequent and milder or go away entirely they are amazed. They are amazed that their headaches went away and they are also amazed that they were more tense, actually much more tense, than they thought they were.

So, what is the problem with relaxation? I would say that the problem with relaxation is that nobody learns how to relax and can’t get the benefits that relaxation brings unless they really learn how to relax. And because we get so used to being tense nobody can really feel how tense they are until they relax.

So, if you have headaches more than once a month I will ask you to take the Relaxation Challenge. Sit quietly for 15 minutes, look inside and cultivate a feeling of ‘letting go’ so that your muscles soften and your body gets heavy and you feel calmer. If you can’t sit for 10 minutes, then you have a problem. And this problem keeps your headaches in place. It is now your choice, do you want to keep your headaches or do you want to learn how to relax better and get rid of your headaches?