Relaxation, scientists are finding, does much more than reduce stress. It also can relieve pain and help control sickness. More and more is being learned about how tension – emotional stress – is bad for both your mind and body. Doctors are now prescribing relaxation training as part of the treatment not merely for minor ills but also for infertility, heart disease, and, sometimes, even cancer.

The concept of relaxation as good medicine, once totally dismissed by scientists, is accepted now, thanks largely to Dr. Herbert Benson, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

When the mind is stressed – by anxiety or anger, for example – the body responds. Metabolism, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and muscle tension rise. These reactions date to prehistoric humans, who, if faced with danger, chose either to fight or to take flight. Hormones pour out to ready you for action. One hormone, epinephrine, speeds up the heart. But if your heart is weak and the small arteries feeding blood to it are blocked with fats, epinephrine might overload your heart. It is in just such a case that relaxing could help save your life.

Through effort and training, Dr. Benson says, you can learn how to quiet yourself down and summon at will the healing changes in body chemistry called “the relaxation response.” For 20 years, Dr. Benson tested and ultimately proved the healthful effects of relaxation. He recorded changes in the bodies of his subjects and their diseases after treatments combining medication, relaxation therapy, nutrition, exercise, and stress management. He compared them with control groups of similarly ill but untreated subjects. In The Wellness Book, Dr. Benson and Eileen M. Stuart, R.N., tell how to elicit the relaxation response and gives details on many routes to reach it.

Dr. Redford Williams, professor of psychology and director of the Behavioral Medical Research Center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, terms relaxation “a critical element” in stopping or slowing disease when combined with a variety of psychological methods. “Studies published recently have shown these interventions improve prognoses in cancer and heart disease,” says Dr. Williams. Today, data support relaxation as being able to, among other things:

•   cure some cases of infertility,

•   lower high blood pressure,

•   help control glucose and insulin levels in those with diabetes, and

•   slow the progress of heart disease.

Amazingly, relaxation has also been proved to cure cases of infertility that have no obvious biological cause. (Good news for those enduring costly, sometimes painful infertility tests and treatments.)

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GENERAL HEALTH