THE PAIN IN YOUR NECK IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD

The business executive who makes a telephone call with his fists unconsciously clenched and his jaw out-thrust and the secretary, who types all day with her knees pressed tightly together and her back arched are both suffering from the same thing: Tension. It is brought on by excessive use of muscles not really involved with their tasks at hand.

This point-that tension with all its physically and emotionally debilitating effects, is related to the prolonged contraction of extraneous muscles-was made repeatedly here by speakers at the initial meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Tension Control (AAATC).

Moreover, they emphasized their belief that tension starts in the brain with the issuance of commands to contract and hold contracted various muscle bundles throughout the body.

In short, that pain in the neck is all in your head.

If this is so, they argued, that people are the originators of their own tension, headaches and backaches, high blood pressure and various other ailments linked to tension, then they can also be the agents of their own recovery.

There were no magical cures, however, for tension revealed at this meeting. Speaker after speaker stressed the importance of self-awareness of the individual's muscle state and the absolute necessity of continued practice to master tension.

F. Joseph McGuigan, executive director of the AAATC and a professor of psychology at Hollins College in Roanoke, Va. said that a wide variety of techniques-including biofeedback and hypnosis and yoga-may be used to control tension and that the new association was not pushing any particular one.

However, most of the 150 psychologists, psychiatrists, physical therapists and physical educators who attended the meeting showed varying degrees of ideological indebtedness to Dr. Edmund Jacobson, an 86-year-old Chicago physician who has made tension and its control his life's work.

Jacobson's approach to the problem is basically educational in nature. Through a series of simple exercises, at first involving only the big muscles in the arms and legs, Jacobson helps the individual to recognize both the presence and the absence in muscles.

Through repetitive effort, the individual comes to recognize the signs of tension in his or her muscles and to concentrate on relaxing until those sensed signs evaporate. In many regards it is not unlike yoga.

Charles Beach, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University, and Thomas R. Burke, a psychologist with Hunter Collece in New York city, told the meeting about the usefulness of tension control techniques for athletes.

Beach, who has worked on tension control experiments for the past few years with Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitching star Mike Marshall, said that while an athlete must employ tension to compete successfully, the tension of muscles not directly needed for hitting baseball can be an impediment.

"Choking", said Beach of the anxieties that afflict some athletes at crucial mements in a game, "is simply a matter of too much muscular tension. Tlhe successful athlete uses the right muscles in the right sequence to do the job he's got to do."

Beach said that high school athletes who have successfully completed a tension control program run by himself and Marshall have reported that while they might not perform any better than they did before, they were able to block out such things as crowd noises and squelch butterflies in their stomachs at critical moments in the game.

Burke said that there was no conclusive proof of increased performance as a result of tension control techniques, but that he thought that calories not wasted by a long-distance runner in holdin his facial muscles in a grimace or his head cocked at an odd angle might be available to him later in the race, thus enabling him perhaps to run either farther or slightly faster.

But many physicians view with scepticism claims that tension control can master such physiological alilments as heart disease, hypertension (hi blood pressure) or ulcers. Although all of these illnesses have some element of tension or emotional stress in them, no one knows just what role it plays or what fraction of the illness it accounts for.

"Tension control is not a cure-all," McGuigan said in rebuttal, "and I would not want to represent it as that. But I do think we have impact on heart disease, hypertension and ulcers. To the extent that tension control reduces a person's tension, it reduces the effect of tension as a factor in these diseases."

TORONTO DAILY STAR

DON SAYS: An extremely interesting concept. Perhaps in early life I could have controlled better my fight/flight condition in the world of big business. How wonderful if I had learned to handle the tension in the work place! Perhaps I would not have abused alcohol as much.