How Meditating Helps in Dealing with RSI
In our opinion, it is! Meditation has a powerful supportive impact on the healing process of RSI. Meditating helps us to improve our health, to maintain our stress reserves, to neutralize the stress reaction, and to react less reactively and subconsciously to stress. Meditation relaxes people, it reduces muscle tension, and it helps you to know your body well, which speeds up awareness and changes in people's behaviour. Meditation also teaches you to accept your complaints better, which is very important for RSI patients because RSI is something that you cannot fight.
Meditation is a technique that supports other remedies. It can never be an alternative for other remedies. It cannot in itself solve the problems. Good food, frequent physical exercise, time for rest and recreation, social activities, not making your life too complicated, and pleasant working conditions are essential for the prevention and the cure of any disease. Here are the positive effects of Meditation:
1. The medical effects of Meditation are unsurpassed.
Being cured of RSI is often a long process. The physical and mental reserves are often exhausted and the body is full of tensions. If we look at the scientific research on the effects of Meditation on our health, it becomes clear that Meditation can help any RSI patient a lot with his healing process. Here are the main effects of Meditation on our body. The results of Meditation:
- The autonomous nervous system is stabilized.
- Heart beat, blood pressurem and metabolism are reduced.
- The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) increases.
- EEC: theta, delta, and alfa brain waves are heightened. Beta waves are reduced.
- The EMG activity increases.
- The immune system is improved.
- The cardio-vascular effectivity is increased.
- Breathing effectivity is increased and breathing speed is reduced.
- The blood supply to the skin is improved.
- The stomach and the bowel system start to work better.
- The endocrine function is better.
- Muscle flexibility is increased, muscle tension is decreased.
- The left brain half and the right brain half cooperate better.
- The body position is improved.
- Strength, resistance, stamina, and energy reserves increase.
- Falling asleep becomes easier and the quality of your sleep improves.
- Physical pains get less severe.
- The production of serotine increases.
It seems clear to us that in the light of all these positive effects and the fact that Meditation has no negative side effects, Meditation is very useful for the physical well-being of everybody.
Warning! Experience shows that when RSI patients start to meditate, they can get frightened by the fact that they feel their pains more acutely. As a result of the relaxation response, the body produces fewer natural pain killers. We do not suppress anything any more and we become more aware of everything, including our injuries. This is a temporary and natural process that usually passes away soon. The fact that we have contracted RSI makes it probable that we have suppressed many things for too long and it is high time for us to start coping with things instead of running away from them.
2. Meditation helps us to maintain healthy stress reserves.
Stress may be the cause of RSI and having RSI complaints can in its turn cause stress. This means that we have to learn how to deal with stress. People that are interested in stress prevention cannot ignore the role of Meditation in this. In the first place, Meditation supports our parasympathetic nervous system, which has the function of building up our stress reserves, the maintenance of our body, and the ability of our body to return to a state of equilibrium after a stress reaction.
Scientific research has demonstrated that people who meditate recuperate much faster after a stress reaction. The latest brain scan techniques have proved that meditating not only trains our mind but also brings about structural changes. People that meditate regularly are not so often confronted with a fight-or-flight reaction, which means that they are not easily irritated or annoyed as people that do not meditate. Scan results show that the activity in parts of the brain that are particularly active with people with a negative attitude is shifted to parts of the brain where a lot of activity is measured with people who are often optimistic, have a lot of hobbies and passions, are more often relaxed and satisfied. When we meditate more often, we will experience that fewer and fewer stressors can really affect us. Consequently, it is not surprising that also as a result of the strong and sound basis that science supplies us, Meditation more and more gets the character of a mainstream movement. Time magazine (8/4/2003) puts it this way: "For upwardly mobile professionals convinced that their lives are more stressful that those of the cow-milking, soap-making, butter-churning generations that preceded them, Meditation is the smart person's bubble bath."
3. Meditation teaches us how to interrupt and to neutralize the stress reaction ourselves.
Viewed from the point of science, there is a general agreement that relaxation methods can interrupt the fight-flight reaction (stress reaction). The most well-known of these methods are: autogenous training, progressive relaxation, breathing techniques, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, visualization, Yoga, and Meditation. It was already well-known in the seventies after very important research done by Dr. Beson at Harvard that Meditation brings about a reaction that is the opposite of the fight-flight reaction. When we meditate our breathing, our muscle tension, and our blood pressure decrease, we often feel tingling in our skin and rumblings in our stomach, all of which point to an increased supply of blood. We also become more aware of certain aches because our stress hormones decrease. This means that we can use Meditation or similar relaxation techniques to neutralize the stress reaction. But Meditation goes further than the other above-mentioned methods. In the first place, Meditation teaches us to listen better to ourselves. We can observe our body and our mind so that we will recognize the fight-flight reaction sooner. In this context, we can think of our breathing, an excellent indicator of how our body and our mind feel at a certain moment. If we know better how to recognize stress, we can also intervene more easily. Meditation also teaches us how to be attentive, how to accept things, and how to live life with a maximum of awareness. This kind of qualities help us a lot to learn how to cope with stress instead of reacting to it.
4. Meditation teaches us to react to stress less reactively and less subconsciously.
As we can read in our articles on stress, many people react to stress subconsciously. When we are able to improve our perception of stressors, the stress process and the results of our reaction, we can change our experience of the stress reaction. When we change the experience, we can also change the effects of the stress on ourselves. When you are aware you are part of the situation, you can influence what is going to happen and you have a choice. This means that we have to develop our skills of attention and focus in order to create this level of consciousness. When we meditate, we train ourselves by means of focus and concentration to be consciously in the present and to remain there. This means that we precisely train those skills that we need to cope with stress instead of reacting to it blindly. During Meditation, we learn how to deal with noise, aches, discomfort, all sorts of thoughts and feelings. In fact, all thoughts that disrupt our Meditation again and again are little stressors. We observe them and try to let them be what they want to be without reacting to them. Key words are: acceptance, attention, not judging, focus, letting go, the NOW, presence. When we notice that we are in a state of excitement, we can interrupt the stress reaction by not only doing our relaxation exercises but also by becoming highly aware of the moment. Meditation trains us in these skills. Being fully aware means that we begin to see the situation more clearly. Sometimes we discover that there is no reason for our anxiety. We no longer allow our reactions to be motivated by emotions. We see the relativity of everything and we learn how to react better, more creatively, and more suitably to the situation. We see both the stimulus and the response and are better able to use the space in between them. We become conscious of how we react to stress, how we let things run out of hand, how we sometimes exaggerate things a little and we do all these things without condemning ourselves. By being so highly conscious, we create choices. When we start experimenting with our options we will more and more often experience that stress cannot so easily upset us any more. We see stress less and less as a problem and more and more as a friend that constantly gives us feedback. By listening carefully to this feedback, we can better judge a situation and cope with it. This gives us confidence and strength! An additional advantage of this approach is that it has no negative side effects or causes new stress.
TIP: Read the book Meditative Relaxation by John Kabat Zinn, founder of the successful stress reduction programme of the university of Massachusetts. Our philosophy and our approach are largely based on his methodology.
A lifestyle that is oriented on BEING in which things like attention, focus, go with the flow, listening to your feelings, acceptance, emotional intelligence, relaxation, spirituality, and inner rest are the most important values that make anybody more powerful and more stable. Burnout, being overwrought, and other stress - related diseases will not affect you any longer. This does not mean that you will never feel angry, fearful, or threatened any more, but you will know better how to cope with it and gradually you will become a more stable person.
5. Tackle RSI in a more physical way: Meditation in motion!
Stress often results in muscle tension and muscle tension means strength. Unfortunately, this strength or great muscle tension is often in the wrong areas of our body. The shoulders, neck and lower back are good examples of this. By means of Yoga and Meditation in motion, we can move these strengths to other parts of our body. We make our body more mobile, see to it that our strength is at the right spots, neutralize the flight or fight reaction and at the same time, we get more relaxed. If you do not like meditating, or if you like meditating but also like to do something else, we advise every patient to go and attend a Yoga session. Take care that the session is either adapted to your possibilities or not too strenuous for your arms.
TIP: Visit our ABC-of-Yoga.com site to learn more about yoga.
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