The Tactile Difference Between Physical Tightness & Stress

A common question that I get from clients whether they are new or been with me for years is there a difference between stress and physical tightness? The answer very much is yes. I think the reason that some people get confused is the gap between the chicken and the egg. What I mean by that is that stress can have a physical impact on the body but people think that it's a chicken and egg argument. In reality there is no chicken or egg. Emotional stress does have a physical impact however what I am specifically talking about here is is there a tactile difference between the two in other words even the physical impacts appear differently depending on their cause. 

What a person is suffering from emotional stress many times the tissue feels tighter than a relaxed tissue but not as tight as physical injury on the tissue. Let me provide a simple analogy to help you better understand the concept: imagine a healthy relaxed person has the muscle tone of a gently pulled apart with no slack rubber band. Now imagine that the person was under emotional stress. The emotional strands would be like pulling your fingers apart allowing the rubber band to stretch which will still allow to be pliable but will be tensor than when you started. Now finally think of a person under physical stress caused by damage from mechanical tension he would take a number of rubber bands of the same length and now put them together under that bit of tension and that will give you an idea of the sensation of someone under those conditions. Now you might be asking yourself if that's the case when someone is under physical stress rather than emotional stress and they're just more muscle fibers interacting with you makes the muscles less mobile? The simple answer is no and in additional rubber bands represents the same muscle tissue but more of those muscle fibers within that muscle are activated when someone's experiencing mental stress tends to be less of a physical reaction I fewer muscle fibers.

For those of you that are interested this rings true for everywhere in the human body. When people describe a stress headache that's a little bit different issue that can be chemically induced or mixture of chemical and physical induction of a headache. A prime example would be someone's blood pressure going up when their stressed. This is a hormone related reaction that has a physical consequence. There is again a tactile difference in how muscular charge taking place to spite the cause. I know some people are going to ask about the idea of things like meditation with massage in order to help determine whether it is stress or mechanical physical issues so that they can decide at home how best to treat it in my response to that is to say by all means go ahead. This does not mean your going to be right but there is no risk to trying. If your right you can start working on the problem faster most likely than waiting for a bodywork session.

If you have any questions like always please go to my website https://www.tonyschwartzbodywork.com/ and contact me with any additional questions you might have.