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When some clients tell me, “I just can’t relax. No matter what I do, even under hypnosis.” I would recommend to them the book Relaxation Response, written by a very mainstream medical doctor, Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School, in 1975. It became national bestseller and was updated and reprinted in 2001. For those who like “scientific measurements”, this book is full of diagrams and charts.

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This book is especially helpful for people with chronic stress and high blood pressure.

People can’t relax because our usual thinking is concerned with events outside ourselves. Through emotional attachment, social feelings, ideological beliefs and sensory contacts, we are constantly diverting our thinking toward external factors. Any attempt to redirect this outwardly directed consciousness requires a different mental process.

The book explains “Fight or Flight Response” in details. This term was fist described by Dr. Walter B. Cannon at the turn of the twentieth century, as an “emergency reaction”, in the same institute as Benson – Harvard Medical School.

Fight or flight response is the inborn mind mechanism. In the past, it had considerable evolutionary significance. Individuals with this response could survive more effectively, passing it on to their offspring. However, we are living in a very different world now than our ancestors.  Nowadays, this mechanism is activated when we face stressful events. We may differ in what is stressful to us individually, depending on our own value systems, but our society poses enough stressful circumstances to affect all of us. When this happens, blood pressure increases, including heart rate, increased rate of breathing, increased body metabolism, or rate of burning fuel, and marked increase in the flow of blood to the muscles of the arms and legs.

People then start to have associations, and develop fear, or phobia. And chronic elicitation of the fight-or-flight response leads from the transient elevations in blood pressure to a permanent state of hypertension. In the brain, it is hypothalamus that controls the evocation of he fight-or-flight response. When a single situation requiring behavioral adjustment occurs again and again, the fight-or-flight response is repeatedly activated.

When the fight-or-flight response is evoked, a part of the involuntary nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system becomes highly active. It deals with the everyday bodily functions that normally do not come into consciousness, such as the maintenance of heartbeat and blood pressure, regular breathing, the digestion of food. The sympathetic nervous system acts by secreting specific hormones: adrenalin or epinephrine and noradrenalin or norepinephrine. These hormones, epinephrine and its related substances, bring about the physiologic changes of increased blood pressure, heart rate, and body metabolism.

The fight-or-flight response happens in an integrated fashion, as it’s controlled by a part of an area in the brain called hypothalamus. And as it’s involuntary, we think we don’t have control over it.

We don’t need to give examples of monks who meditate years to show you it is absolutely possible to control and change your blood pressure, heart rate, breathing or metabolism. We as hypnotherapists, can show you, and guide you, to use the power of your mind to achieve this by hypnosis and self-hypnosis, because there is another response in us that we can activate and it can lead to a quieting of the sympathetic nervous system. This is Relaxation Response.

Your hypnotherapist can help you activate this involuntary response anytime you want. So that we don’t have to change your environment to avoid fear, phobia or stress, we can train ourselves to have a different response.

Think of those surgeries without anesthesia. Your mind has greater power than you want to give credit for. Needless to say all my clients may feel hot, warm, or cold, raise one of the arms… and last but not lest, feel relaxed by simply accepting the suggestions. By the way, hypnosis is mentioned in this little book and is described as “a widely known but still poorly understood technique”.

Just in case that you are curious. The way to bring forth the Relaxation Response is to have the following four components:

1. a quiet environment
2. a mental device – a mantra or sound, or a fixed gaze
3. a passive attitude
4. a comfortable position

Breathe Deeply

If you feel things getting on top of you stop what you are doing and take ten deep breaths. This will properly oxygenate your blood giving you a new burst of energy while lowering stress levels. This is perhaps the most powerful office relaxation technique there

Eliminate Clutter

Don't let stress at work make you ill.

If you work at a desk or in a confined space try your best to keep it neat and tidy. Eliminating clutter can be very therapeutic and it also means that when you need to find something quickly you will be able to do so without turning the place upside down and creating unnecessary stress.

One Task At a Time

Multitasking creates a lot of stress as the mind struggles to focus on more than one activity at once. Some believe that multitasking saves time but this is a fallacy. Instead you should write a list of tasks you need to do and complete them in order of importance. You will be able to focus better on each task and your quality of work will actually improve without wasting any time.

For more about this read my previous article The Stress of Multitasking.

Take Your Break Outside

Most workplaces will give you two ten or fifteen minute breaks along with half an hour for lunch. First things first, no matter how much work you have to do you should always take your breaks. Time away from your desk will give you mind a chance to rest and you will feel refocused when you return.

To get the most from your break, if the weather is nice, you should take it outside. Fresh air is rejuvenating and you can take the opportunity to go for a quick walk. This is a great way to reduce stress.

Stay Away From Negative People and Conversations

There’s always going to be a group of negative people at any workplace. Do your best to steer clear of these kind of people as they will drag you down with them. Similarly negative conversations will also put you in a negative frame of mind so try to be positive at all times.

Learn To Say No

Unfortunately some people will try to take advantages of others at work by coercing them to do their work for them.  If a boss or colleague is heaping work on you faster than you can finish it you have to put your foot down, say no, and tell them that you simply can’t do it without the amount of other things you need to do.

You’d be surprised how many people try and pass work on that really they should be doing themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be a doormat in this way.

It can be hard to summon the courage to say no but one way to gain the mental strength required is with hypnosis. HypnoBusters sell an effective session on MP3 appropriately titled Say No Hypnosis.

Reducing stress at work can take some effort but it really is worthwhile. Most people spend around a third of their weekdays either at work or travelling to work so if you can reduce or eliminate the stress this causes you are well on your way to be a totally calm and relaxed human being.