Collectively, we have been overlooking our innate ability to reduce the long-term effects of stress, anxiety, trauma, and injury. Day-to-day stress, worry, fear, and emotional or physical trauma, all cause involuntary muscular contractions to occur. Ideally, these muscular contractions relax after the circumstances pass. However, if the stress or anxiety is long-term, or the trauma or injury is deeply embedded in the brain, muscular tension will become habitual unless we intentionally release it.

Our bodies are naturally self-sensing, self-regulating and self-adjusting. Yet, self-sensing gradually diminishes over our lifetime because our attention is primarily focused on what is going on around us, rather than within us. As sensory self-awareness diminishes, our innate resilience to prevent and release the accumulation of muscular tension is compromised. As muscular tension accumulates, we develop stiffness, aches, and chronic pain in the spine and joints. Breathing becomes shallow. Ease of movement is lost. We even lose height. We associate these changes and loss of comfort with aging, but teenagers and younger children are now commonly experiencing back, neck, and joint pain as well as distorted postures.

We have the innate ability to prevent and regain this loss of comfort and ease of movement. The sensory motor self-awareness that infants develop as they gain control over their muscles is always available to us. It is not accessed through strength training, stretching, endurance workouts or force. Rather, regaining sensory motor self-awareness and control requires focusing attention inward on the internal sensation of movement. Although the value of movement with awareness is not a new concept, breakthroughs in neuroscience are demonstrating the plasticity of the brain to make changes throughout life through focused attention. This new understanding of the value of focused attention makes us ripe for recognizing the necessity to reinforce and maintain sensory motor self-awareness.

Day-to-day stress specifically causes the muscles of the back of the body to contract. The lumbar spine is especially vulnerable to this involuntary contraction, which explains why lower back pain is near epidemic levels. Anxiety causes the muscles of the front of the body to contract. The abdominal muscle is especially vulnerable to this involuntary contraction, which is one reason that shallow breathing is so common. When the muscles of the trunk become chronically contracted, the loss of comfort and movement that begins in the lower back, neck, shoulders and hips, extends down into the limbs, hands and feet.

Overriding unconscious, involuntary chronic muscular contractions requires a conscious, voluntary contraction of the muscles. By taking a few minutes a day to intentionally contract the neuromuscular patterns of day-to-day stress and anxiety, children can retain – and adults can regain – the body’s innate ability to prevent and release the daily accumulation of muscular tension that restricts the spine and joints.

As the importance of reinforcing sensory motor self-awareness to maintain muscle resilience becomes common knowledge and common practice, our ability to release the muscular tension of stress and anxiety and maintain full, healthy breathing will surely reduce the incidence of stress and shallow breathing-related conditions. Maintaining the efficiency of the body’s self-sensing, self-regulating, self-adjusting nature may be the simplest, most cost effective preventative healthcare measure that we can take.

Noreen Owens, M.Ed., Hanna Somatic Educator and author of Where Comfort Hides. This practical book, by Noreen Owens, provides three easy lessons and a brief, clearly illustrated movement routine that specifically targets stress and anxiety. Where Comfort Hides is available through your local bookstore or can be ordered online through www.xlibris.com/wherecomforthides or www.owensomatics.com.