Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
Squeeze slowly down one arm with the opposite hand, then the other, and work over whatever muscles you can reach. No table, no appointment, nobody else in the room.
Firm and rhythmic beats fiddly. Give the forearms, upper arms, shoulders and thighs a proper squeeze and release, a few seconds each. Doing it yourself sidesteps all the complications of being touched by another person, which matters a great deal if touch has been used against you. It also puts the relief in your own hands, on a bus, at your desk, at three in the morning.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'your Lord has provided a stream at your feet' (Quran 19:24). What she needed was already within reach, which is the appeal of a practice that needs nothing you do not have.
فَنَادَىٰهَا مِن تَحۡتِهَآ أَلَّا تَحۡزَنِي قَدۡ جَعَلَ رَبُّكِ تَحۡتَكِ سَرِيࣰّ ا
but a voice cried to her from below, ‘Do not worry: your Lord has provided a stream at your feet
Qur’an 19:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A network meta analysis comparing massage, yoga, progressive muscle relaxation and stretching for occupational stress in healthcare workers found each helped somewhat, with none clearly ahead. Simple physical approaches are worth having and none of them is magic. Those trials mostly used taught programmes rather than someone squeezing their own arms.
Zhang M, Murphy B, Cabanilla A, Yidi C. (2021). Physical relaxation for occupational stress in healthcare workers: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.. Journal of occupational health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Pressure from your own hands feeds the same steady signal up the nerves as anyone else's would.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Slide one hand behind your head at the base of the skull and rest the other on your forehead. Let your hands take the weight for a minute.
Work one side of your face or body first, then stop and compare. The difference between the treated side and the untreated one is often surprisingly clear.
Deep change tends to follow self acceptance rather than the other way round. Waiting until you have fixed the thing before you are allowed to be kind to yourself usually keeps the thing exactly where it is.