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If you’re anything like me, you often find yourself grinding your teeth without realizing it, tensing your shoulders, and just generally being stressed out, whether it’s conscious or not.
If you’re looking to be as healthy as you can be, however, you can’t just get by on diet and exercise alone. Your mental health—namely, your ability to reduce stress—is just as important.
A new study looked at the effects of relaxation on people’s health. Specifically, it measured whether or not taking part in a “relaxation response program” made people healthier.
The important thing in this study is the idea of relaxation response.
Stress is an evolutionary cousin of the fight-or-flight response. When your body perceives danger, it overproduces adrenaline, driving up your heart rate and tensing your muscles.
Of course, we’re not faced with as many life-threatening situations now, so our fight-or-flight impulses respond to much less. Crowded elevators, spilled coffee, or job pressures can trigger these responses. Before you know it, you’re experiencing chronic stress.
The relaxation response, developed by Dr. Herbert Benson, is a treatment to replace the fight-or-flight impulse with mindful meditation and prayer.
When participants in a study took part in this “relaxation response” therapy, participants saw a 43% reduction in the use of their healthcare services during that year.
Dr. James Stahl, lead author of the study, said: “These programs promote wellness and, in our environment of constrained health care resources, could potentially ease the burden on our health delivery systems at minimal cost and no real risk.”
Relaxation techniques, he says, could be an excellent form of preventative care. And if they’re as effective at helping patients stay healthy and stress-free as they seem to be, it could be a low-cost solution to several health care problems.
