Back Pain
It’s inevitable. Like death and taxes. Back pain.
Second to colds, the most likely reason you’ll visit a healthcare provider will be back pain. Fifty percent of Americans report back pain each year.
Are you in pain right now? Is your movement limited? Are you reducing your activities because of the pain or the fear of the pain? Let’s look at why.
A lot of back pain comes from overexertion. If that’s you, you’re lucky. Your pain will go away once your body recovers from being pushed. And there’s a good chance it won’t return—unless you overdo it again. In time, you’ll be fine.
For pain due to overexertion, traditional remedies work well. Cold compresses can reduce swelling. Warm, moist heat helps muscles that feel tight. Alternating the two can be beneficial. And of course, massage and gentle stretching relax the tightness, and the movement prevents further stiffness. Rest always supports the body in healing, and topical ointments will give you warmth and local pain relief.
Chronic Back Pain
Chronic back pain is a different animal. Pain often occurs without physical exertion; it just shows up. As the frequency and intensity of episodes increase, each incident leaves a tension residue that sets up the next attack of pain. Pain pills and muscles relaxers can help, but many people don’t like their side effects. One thing is clear: just treating the symptom is not enough—particularly when the problem is likely to return.
Prevention and Treatment
The best way to treat chronic back pain is to prevent it. Learn to lift using your legs. Sit on your sits bones. Stop slouching! It will all reduce back strain. Use ergonomic furniture that adjusts to your unique body, instead of forcing your body to adapt to the furniture. Moving helps, too – get up and walk around, take breaks.
And the most critical behavior—the one we never think—about is breathing. I know, you are breathing. The question is how well.
When I taught Mindfulness Stress Reduction courses in Scottsdale, AZ, the principal reason people came to us was back pain. At the time, we were the largest company offering these courses in the country. Most of our students for the 8-week course were referrals from hospital networks or corporate clients.
We taught the students to breath. As easy as it might sound, the first few weeks were tough. Doing very simple relaxation exercises would actually create stress. The students’ old habits prevented them from relaxing and breathing fully. Once they realized how tense they were, they saw and how much they were limiting their breath—even when they believed they were relaxed. With daily homework and coming to the weekly class, their awareness and breathing increased as their stress and pain declined.
What does this mean for you? If these very tense people can dramatically change their stress and pain in 8-weeks, so can you. The first step is to become aware of how you hold your body and your breath. If you are holding one, you are holding the other. As your breath becomes fuller, slower and more relaxed you begin to train your body not to hold stress, but to release it.
In keeping with letting go, I suggest to my clients that they do not do “back strengthening” exercises. I have not seen a back that was muscularly weak; I see many that are structurally weak. Our bigger back muscles are not meant to be posture muscles, they are designed to move us, not hold us. The constant holding makes them tighter. Rather than getting stronger form sit-ups or back extensions, practice breathing and stretching.
The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs
ADHD has become a veritable plague on our children. Some attribute the rise in the incidence of this condition to us simply being more aware of what always existed. Mike Adams contends that the cause of ADHD is diet. Others argue that this syndrome is only a creation of professionals and drug companies. Many are pushing for more testing and pharmaceutical treatment.
On top of all this, the media is telling us children with ADHD have smaller brains. But Mike Adams points out that the study the media is quoting about the “small brain phenomenon” was done on children taking ADHD medication. Further, he references a longitudinal study proving that children on these meds experience stunted growth. All these study results raise more questions than they answer.
I had ADHD as a child, I had it as an adult, and I’ve had dozens of children and adult clients with it, so I speak from personal experience. To address this issue, to get at the root cause, I believe the first thing we need to do is step back from all the hype. Let’s take a hard look at the culture our children are growing up in. The expectations, constant stimulation and projections from their parents continue to increase. Our children are simply stressed out.
What cured me of my ADHD was dealing with my stress – my old, stored stress – and learning not to reproduce it. I have found that, for most children and adults suffering from ADHD, their way of dealing with stress produces the ADHD responses.
A growing number of studies demonstrate that Mindfulness practices reduce ADHD symptoms. In one study, 78% of participants reported a reduction in total ADHD symptoms when using Mindfulness techniques.
We need to teach our children—and ourselves—to experience stress in a healthy manner. We all need to learn to accept its present effect on us, then release the stress or tension in the present moment. With this conscious response to it, stress does not build. The released stress does not find another means of expression, such as ADHD behavior.
ADHD is only one manifestation of the effects of constant stress; we are seeing more incidences of everything from childhood obesity to violence. Repressing the symptoms of ADHD with a time-release amphetamine is not dealing with the cause. When we finally deal with that root cause—the stressful environment our children live in—our children will be calmer, healthier and blissfully unmedicated.
Mindfulness does Google
Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph. D., the man you essentially created mindfulness stress reduction teaches Google about how to be mindful. This video is an excellent, simple instruction on how to use the power of mindfulness. If you are not familiar with mindfulness, use this video to be your introduction. Enjoy.
We Are Now in “Extreme Stress”
You thought it was bad before, but it’s getting worse. According to a new American Psychological Association (APA) study, a third of us are experiencing extreme stress: “nearly half [of Americans] believe stress is damaging their health, their relationships, and work productivity, and that it has got worse in the last 5 years.”
As our society evolves, the effect of stress increases. Being constantly assaulted by information from the media, pressing decisions, and unending stimulation (which we mistakenly believe is an escape from the other stressors) is causing our stress to grow. All this is occurring as we experience a decrease in resources of time, energy and possibly money. We are squeezed.
Decrease the Irritation
Your first tendency is to change your external world – you try to remove or reduce the stressors in your life. Go for it. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that manipulation of these variables have a limited effect. What you need to change is how you respond to stress, or how you frame it.
A secret to generating a new stress response in yourself is this: give up an old believe or behavior pattern. Maybe you created myths that are not serving you. A common one is: “I should have it all.” This begs the question, what is “all”? If you can redefine your “all” based on what you really need and want, your stress will change.
The myth that “I have to know” or “I must stay informed” sets you up to fall prey to the media’s constant barrage of stress stimulation. Implicit in this myth is that there is always more to know, so you are hooked to your media dealer. Recent research on dreams and stress support this as well as how the news sets up post traumatic stress for children. Because most of society operates under the effects of these myths, it’s easy to miss something insidious: the constant media exposure keeps your nervous system on alert.
By addressing these myths and their behaviors, we remove irritating stimuli from our lives.
Operate from New Beliefs
Go beyond focusing on what you don’t want to what you want. Create beliefs that serve you. Tim Ferriss’ popular book, The 4 – Hour Workweek is one of many advocates of leaving quantity of things for quality of life. The rapid growth of the Slow Food movement supports you leaving fast food to enjoying the experience of eating.
Focusing on being rather than doing is a simple statement. The faster you travel through life, the less aware you are of your experiences. The more hyped you are, the more you look for the next extreme experience that you can really feel. As you allow yourself to go through withdrawal from over-stimulation and constant arousal, you need less intense and less frequent stimulation to feel alive. If you constantly over-salts your food, you never get to experience the true flavor of what you’re eating.
A difficult belief to leave behind is one the belief that you don’t deserve healthy relationships. Do a survey of you relationships and ask yourself, “Am I losing or gaining energy from this relationship?” If you’re putting more in than you’re getting out, make a shift in that relationship. Speak what you truly feel and want. As you hold true to yourself, the relationship will either shift, or end. But either outcome is for your benefit.
As you take risks to speak your truths, take risks to pursue your passions. Yes, this can be stressful. The stress from moving forward in life tends to have a different effect than being at the mercy of life. It’s analogous to the stress of getting in shape—painful at first, perhaps, but the process becomes fun, and the results are always enjoyable.
I invite you to transform your extreme stress into extreme pleasure. Find role models for this; there may not be many, but they are out there. Often these are people who walked away from “success” to pursue a deeper desire. Ultimately, you may prove to be role model for others.
Is Stress Real, Is Fibromyalgia Real?
These are two questions that are often asked by those experiencing the effects of either. We live in a culture that likes to label every thing. Medicine can’t treat a problem unless it is a diagnosable disease. If it not a disease, it is not real.
Accused of being a quack, the physician Hans Steles who put stress on the map had to move to
Fibromyalgia, suffering the same plight is now being honored with its first drug. Pfizer in a new television ad touts the value of its drug Lyrica for fibromyalgia. I am glad that the suffers of this often misunderstood condition are getting recognized. So often, I have seen people who are told that either they are imagining their symptoms, they are depressed (inferring crazy) or to just get over it.
The cause of fibromyalgia
The downside of this drug release is it further diverts the focus from the real cause – stress and toxicity. Just like with Prozac and depression we will likely see the abatement of symptoms for some, no effects for others and an adverse reaction by others from this drug.
Many have cured themselves of both depression and its sibling, fibromyalgia through releasing their chronic stress and learning not to recreate it. There are few problems with this approach. First, it requires personal responsibility and commitment. Often it requires stepping beyond the traditional models and their treatment regimes. At some point as the stress starts to leave a person’s body the emotions that were associated with its imprinting are felt.
When these emotions first occurred, usually in childhood, we did not have the permission or the tools to express them, so we stuffed them. These emotions became stress, which became tension, which wears us out frequently causing depression, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. As we begin to accept the stress so we can release it, we are accepting the former unacceptable emotions. This is not easy – but it is required if we are to get well.
Original fibromyalgia doc is cynical
In 30 years, I have never seen anyone truly get well from these conditions without dealing with their stress and emotions. The drugs maybe great at suppressing some of the symptoms; no drug removes the cause – stress. “Dr. Frederick Wolfe, the director of the National Databank for Rheumatic Diseases and the lead author of the 1990 paper that first defined the diagnostic guidelines for fibromyalgia, says he has become cynical and discouraged about the diagnosis. He now considers the condition a physical response to stress, depression, and economic and social anxiety.” – as quoted from the New York Times.
The New York Times article finishes with – “Still, Dr. Wolfe expects the drugs will be widely used. The companies, he said, are ‘going to make a fortune.’” Let’s hope all this attention validates the pain many suff and supports them in healing the cause of the pain.
Stress and Sex
As one goes up the other goes down. Stress can not only kill us, it also can kill our sex lives. Survival is our first priority; continuing our species is down the list. Stress as we know it is a maladapted survival response that takes our energy and focus away from sex.
Sex and survival are mutually exclusive
If a tiger is chasing you, you are not relaxed – you are running for your life. It is not until you escape and come down from the fight-or-flight response that you begin to feel your sexual urges. Relaxation is the setup for sexual arousal.
Our bodies often follow our heads. If we are mentally stiff, we will be physically stiff. If a man’s head is focused on solving the crisis at work, his little head is unable to receive the attention it needs to feel safe to come out and play. Treating your sexual performance as you might treat your professional or athletic performance will not work. It would be like expecting someone to feel and express his sadness about a deep loss while he is lifting a new level in weights.
Sex is a mirror
An old friend and teacher used to tell me that the body does not lie. In some way, your body will express physically what it is experiencing. The expression may not be outward, but it does occur.
Sex may start a mental experience, yet the act becomes very physical. For your body to be fully engaged it must be fully available to experience all aspects of sex. If some part of your life is not in sync, such as your relationship with your partner, your body will manifest that tension. That body/mind tension will eventually show up in your sex with your partner.
Why do you think affairs are so much fun? You get to experience sex without experiencing the stress that exists in your on going relationship.
Mediocre sex
If you want better sex – create better communication. Your sex life, more than any other aspect of your life, is an expression of how well you and your partner communicate. The communication that might need to occur may not be about your relationship. You may only need to share with her your frustration about work and your fear about not performing well. Those little truths can set your sex life free.
A recent British study suggests that half of their citizen’s sex life suffer because of stress or medical issues.
I have worked with many couples who are so embarrassed about intimate health complaints that it has caused a huge breakdown in communication and put serious pressure on the relationship. Talking to a partner or a professional candidly about the issue is not easy, but it may save a great deal of emotional strain. Denise Knowles, a relationship counsellor with Relate
How to shift it
Chill out – do some stress reduction. Review some of the other posts on this blog. Teach your body/mind not go into the stress response as your default. Getting good bodywork is a quick way to facilitate the process of removing old stress and learning to relax.
Communicate more of your thoughts and feelings. Begin speaking those feelings you have not spoken. In the above study, three out of five Brits said they struggled to speak about personal issues. Start taking risk, just like you did when you and your partner began dating. Some people get bent out of shape when it comes to talking about feelings.. Going back to the beginning often rekindles the spark that was once there.
Keep others out of the bedroom Don’t bring unfinished business into the bedroom. Believing that having sex will solve the problem is a lie. Yes, it will often take the edge off and can create a feeling of intimacy for a period of time.Unfortunately, the issue and its charge is there to come up another time. Do what you need to deal with the problem or release the tension before you enter the bedroom.
Build intimacy
Support intimacy Great sex is predicated on great intimacy. Sharing difficult feelings quickly builds trust and intimacy. Having a weekly ritual where time is scheduled just to talk has transformed relationships.
Both of you can have your own stress reduction practice. She may have yoga; you could have your weekly massage. Additionally, the two of you can come up with something you do together, like going to a
With sharing your feelings, share what you want emotionally and sexually. Sharing our wants certainly sounds simple, but we all know know difficult it can be. Telling your partner what you enjoy sexually is a risk for you. Yet it will support your partner in pleasing you, which empowers her. As she gives you what you want, you will need to let go and receive, another challenge for us Type As.
Play. All this talk of sharing emotions may sound intense. Create some fun around sex. Set up an experience where the two of you get to play as if your were kids exploring a new game. Bringing a child-like innocence into the bedroom lightens the whole experience, and can reduce the stress and increase the pleasure.
Go slow. Being a Type A aboutsex does not work. Go back to being the kid who played simply because that is what he wanted to do. There was no end goal, he was just having fun – that was the goal.
If you were to agree on discussing old feelings, agree to set the bar low. Your goal should be to build skills and have fun, not to resolve ten years of limited communication. It is like training for a marathon – start your daily mileage low. Going for too much too soon will create injuries and you’ll never run the marathon.
Breathe. The more you breathe, the more relaxed you will be and the more your body will be able to experience the pleasures of sex.
Sex as a stress reducer
The sexual arousal curve and orgasm mimics the arousal curve of fight or flight. Unlike many stressful events, when you have an orgasm you complete that curve, allowing for the recovery phase to occur next. The more you can relax going into asexual experience, the more we can allow yourself to fully engage – the more intense the orgasm and the release.
The act of intimacy, as much as the sex, reduces stress. Another British study:
Volunteers who had had penetrative intercourse were found to be the least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who had engaged in other forms of sexual activity….
Having intimate sex with a partner gives you something nothing else can give you.
Replace stress with great sex. Allow yourself the pleasure of learning or deepening your skills of being a relaxed lover.
Are You an Angry Man? Part 3
Your body often becomes the depository for your anger. When an emotion is not fully expressed, some of that energy or charge can transform itself into physical tension. Clenched jaws don’t happen overnight, they happen from years of holding frustration in your body. After a while, these tight jaws can increase your reaction through, enhancing the feeling of anger. It is as if the tension in your body starts to act as a computer virus running the system on its own.
The converse is also true – if you release the body, you will release old emotions. Thirty years ago, when I discovered Rolfing, a respected form of bodywork, I had no idea how much my emotions would let go. Stalking out good bodywork will significantly enhance any lake draining. The bonus is that the bodywork will aid you in increasing your body/mind awareness, thereby thwarting the rage attacks.
Psychotherapy and anger
Good therapy can be a useful tool to transforming rage. Psychotherapy that integrates the body into its process is generally quicker. Going further into your head or learning more coping skills will not heal the rage. “People who have a lot of anger invest a lot of energy in trying to control it, and that kind of friction is likely to increase the probability of a heart attack,” says Charles Spielberger, Ph.D., a University of South Florida psychologist who developed the leading test to measure anger. True control comes when you shift from attempting to repress the anger, which eventually explodes, to allowing your natural responses to take over in their smaller increments of expression.
If you are to go the therapy route, you need to find a therapist who is not afraid of his or her anger. Interview therapists; push them about how they deal with anger. You are not looking for someone who will placate your anger. What you are looking for is someone who will teach your new skills of being fully expressive. Trust your gut here.
As you learn to express all your emotions, the tension will not erupt into rage. You will start to identify patterns; you can begin alerting rage response earlier in the process.
Don’t become one of the statistics
More than 30,000 heart attacks each year are triggered by transitory anger, according to a 2004 Harvard study. These heart attacks occur because an acute anger episode actually builds on many previous episodes. These same men are part of the group that are three times more likely to develop premature cardiovascular disease, or a stroke, and six times more likely to have an early heart attack. Charles Spielberger, Ph.D claims, “The more intense the anger, the more likely the heart attack.”
You can reduce your anger intensity to a point where you express anger appropriately for the situation. You can stop having anger rule you. When anger is primarily making sure your boundaries are honored, your anger returns to acting asa servant for you.
The macho archetype of a man who does not express vulnerable emotions yet can explode on a moment’s notice is outdated. Also gone is the archetype of the sensitive man who serves women only to repress his aggressive side going to work. As men, we are beginning to learn to express our feelings and to receive love. Converting our rage into an anger ally can bring healing to our heart as well as our gender.
Are You an Angry Man? Part 2
How to heal rage
“People with this problem [IED] have an insufficient ’stop’ response,” says neurophysiologist Royce Lee, M.D. The power of built-up emotions override any conscious control. Creating more coping behaviors is not the answer. Learning anger management will not do it. Counting to 10, over-exercising, using drugs and alcohol only buries the anger further and can deny the seriousness of your rage. You need to heal the rage – the PTSD of anger.
You must develop methods of going to the cause of the problem. The first step is to get sober about your anger and rage. Your explosions of anger can be diffused before they even begin to occur. Releasing the old stress and trauma is what will transform an automatic, repeating behavior into an appropriate response.
Averting rage
Draining the lake of anger is hard work. It takes determination to release the original stress or trauma. It doesn’t happen in the moment of reaction (screaming at the sales clerk). It happens when you are not in reaction. You do it in the pre-rage moments – those times when you just feel a small irritation.
In the past, you would have ignored those little thoughts and feelings until they built up to a temper tantrum. You start by setting the intent to first be aware of those “petit mal” anger episodes. Awareness is a skill we were never taught. If we were taught anything, it was non-awareness, like when we were told to grin and bear it.
Use your body to learn awareness, specifically your breath. As you focus on what your body does under stress, or how you hold your breath all the time, you will begin to catch emotions sooner and sooner. When anger starts to creep up as a held breath or clenched jaw, you have a chance to express your anger in the moment before it builds into rage.
Rage lake-draining
Stating how you feel about what a person just said or did stops the escalation of anger to rage while breaking an old pattern of repressing those “stupid emotions.” With each expression of pre-rage anger a little of the lake of anger is drained out. You begin to build a new skill-set of behaviors that fit the situation.
To increase the draining of the rage lake you can go out in nature and let it go. This is best done under the supervision of someone who has experience with rage and can monitor you. I say this because if you really get into truly expressing your anger/rage, the levies may burst and you can feel out of control. That said – going out in the desert or some forest where you can scream and throw rocks is hugely healing. These settings maybe your only safe place to lose it.
As the anger that became rage drains off, you may discover old grief or fear. Let them go also. From 30 years of doing this for myself and helping others through the process, I have seen some unexpected effects. As the old, embedded emotions start to release, the old traumas begin to complete themselves. Your body and your emotions may experience feelings you never had before. The unraveling allows for the old emotions and their physical analogues to let go. Having support can make the process much easier and quicker.
On-going support
One excellent resource for men is an international non-profit called the ManKind Project. They offer weekend experiential trainings throughout the world. Even better than their powerful trainings is their network of men’s groups. These groups usually meet once a week. They are not the standard support group, where the focus is around a problem that often becomes self-perpetuating. The ManKind Project weekly groups focus on assisting men to be fully successful. Supporting a man through draining his rage lake is what they are about.
To be continued….
Are You an Angry Man?
When you are driving down the road and someone cuts you off – do you salute the person with your finger as you shout your feelings to them? If you do, you may be one of the 10 million men in the
This article is included in three posts.
How anger becomes rage
Anger is a healthy emotion, just as fear and sadness are. Anger becomes unhealthy when it stops being a natural response to violation or possible violation. Instinctually, we have anger as a means to vend off threats to our boundaries.
You might observe your dog growl at your cat when it looks like she will be eating some of his food. As a father, you protect your kids. If a stranger comes up to your daughter and starts to take her away – your anger will kick in.
Over the course of anyone’s life, there are many situations where anger is experienced but not expressed. As a child, anger is often not allowed. As an adult, there are many social situations where you learned to do the right thing and kept your mouth shut. The accumulation of unexpressed feelings impacts your physical body as stored stress, much like throwing your unwanted junk down in the basement.
A minor irritant occurs and then suddenly you are raging. Your head is possibly saying this shouldn’t be a big deal, yet you are screaming at the sales clerk because a bag ripped. The repressed anger from past events starts to release some of its charge as you rage. For a few moments, you feel better, as if you just had a cigarette. Then the shame comes from expressing unjustified anger.
Post traumatic stress of anger
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now a common term used to explain how incomplete stressful experiences allow stress to accumulate, creating an aftereffect. The soldier who is under constant stress of never knowing when the next mortar round will come in never experiences the completion of the trauma cycle. We are hardwired to experience stress or trauma, then have the time and space to release that stress by literally shaking it off. When a soldier doesn’t get the chance to shake off the stress, the stress builds. He returns home to safety, but his mind and body are still back in the war.
When anger becomes its own PTSD, it becomes rage. The soldier jumps when a car backfires; you chew out the sales clerk when the bag rips. The stimulus does not warrant the reaction.
To be continued….
It Is Not Age – It Is Stress
We all know too well that stress wears us down – it ages us. Simply put, we allocate our resources to what our bodies experience as survival. These resources could go to regeneration. Have you ever seen someone age over night from stress. Maybe their hair grayed quickly or their face lost its youth. Chronic stress is cumulative. The effects may not show for a few years, but after years of stress, you will be older than your twin who moved to that South Pacific island.
Long-term emotional stress causes the genes in our cells to shorten their life span. If our genes are not living as long as they could, neither will our cells. If there was a way to measure the qualitative age of our bodies, I suspect we would discover all of our cells are aging.
The closest measure of the relative age of our bodies may be the fascial (connective tissue) system – Hans Style, M.D., the father of stress research called fascia the organ of stress. Much like the rings of a tree, these thin sheets of collagen fiber exhibit the chronic strain of stress. Plastic surgeons and dermatologist inject collagen into tissue to temporally bring back youth.
We can not only slow down the aging process, we can reverse it to some extent. We may not be like salamanders, who can regenerate lost legs, but we can reverse the accumulation of stress and how that manifests in our body. Once the chronic stress response subsides, the body will naturally begin to allocate its resources to healing. After survival, out next hard-wired behavior is regeneration, not unlike the salamander. Our bodies want to be young. The fountain of youth is not an external exilir, but rather the body’s inherent ability to heal itself.
Once you reduce your body’s stress response and it has begun its healing you can aid in its rejuvenation through the use of an array of holistic disciplines. There are many spa treatments that pamper and prepare you to look young. Don’t get me wrong, Hedonism has its value: there is great health value in receiving pleasure, let alone the pure enjoyment! What I am speaking of here are the treatment regimes that address restoring your deep vitality. In the last 25 years, everything from Rolfing to acupuncture has proven their efficiency for catalyzing healing.
Through my private practice, I see clients who remove their chronic stress, learn not to recreate it and then begin to support their body in rejuvenation - transforming their health and their appearance. Not only do we want to feel good and look good, but so does our cells. When given the choice they will choose health. Being vain is good – it can lead us to rejuvenation.