Relaxation Exercises : Progressive Relaxation

Progressive relaxation will help to relax the entire body. It will help you to create a mental image of this relaxed state that can be recreated instantly whenever it is needed.
This exercise can be done while lying in bed, face up and arms at your sides.
- Make fists with both hands. Clench your fingers although not so tightly as to be uncomfortable. Your wrists should feel tight and even in the forearms. Hold this tension for few seconds and then relax. You will feel heaviness and limp in your hands.
- Like in the previous example, make your fists tensed again, such that the muscles start quivering. Now relax. This should make your hands feel more warm and heavy, and this would extend to your lower arms.
- Now concentrate on your upper arms. Focus on your biceps, making them tense, and your hands should remain relaxed and heavy. Quivering will start, and then relax again. Now do this again, tense, hold and then relax.
- Now that you have a hang of this, this process of tensing, hold, relaxing should be done for as many muscle groups as possible. Once you are done with your arms, do the same for stomach, buttocks, thighs, calves, feet, chest, shoulders, neck, jaw and eyes.
- Once you have started doing this a couple of times, one of the prime advantages you will learn from this is being able to get relaxed. Without doing much of these relaxing, you will be able to easily distinguish between muscles that are tensed or relaxed, and be able to focus on the tensed muscles.

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