Family Weekly j February 17, 1963
Today we live in a fearful world, and
fear is the father of tension. Our
senses are prodded by stimulating
sights, sounds, and the dilemmas of
family, social, and business life.
Our children compete to get into a good college.
Husbands compete in jobs and professions. Wives
compete with the problems of child-rearing,
schooling, and homemaking.
Small wonder that we are reaping a calamitous
harvest with half our hospital beds filled with
mental patients, and with half of our people seek
ing medical treatment for ailments brought on, or
made worse, by too much worry and anxiety.
But this tension-ridden way of life need not
harm us if we take steps to save ourselves. An
antidote exists, based on scientific data. By using
it, we can stay this onslaught against our nerves.
Its name is Progressive Relaxation.
In the past two years, the practice of Progres
sive Relaxation has zoomed from a respected but
little-practiced method of repairing one's emo
tional or physical state to a lusty movement
taught in a dozen U.S. colleges and YMCAs.
And with reason. Not long ago, a famous pian
ist stumbled into a Chicago doctor's office and
slumped into a chair. "Can you help me relax?"
he begged, holding up shaking hands. "In two
days, I must give an important concert, but I'm
too jittery to play. Aren't there drugs for this?"
The physician took the musician into a small
room. "I'll give you something better," he said.
"I'll show you how to relax yourself, any time,
anywhere. And once you've learned, you'll never
need help again."
Two days later, the musician played his con
cert relaxed and confident, and one critic wrote:
"He never performed more brilliantly."
A middle-aged woman lost her husband, saw
her child go to a mental hospital, and found
herself almost penniless. Her worries brought fa
tigue and thoughts of suicide. A friend intro
duced her to Progressive Relaxation. Presently,
her spirits returned to normal, she completed a
course at a secretarial school and got a full-time
job. She was completely rehabilitated.
What is this wonder? Where does it come
from? It is a self-operated method which en
ables a person to relax his tense muscles, thereby
turning off impulses which tension-stimulated
nerves transmit constantly to the brain. The re
lief is akin to that obtained when one turns off
a bright light that hurt the eye. Its discoverer
is a courtly, 74-year-old physician, Dr. Edmund
Jacobson of Chicago.
Dr. Jacobson's lonely crusade to teach us to
relax began a few years after he became a phy
sician in 1915. He made his first experiments
with muscles and nerves at Harvard in 1910, and
found that tense muscles transmit messages
along their nerve fibers, whereas relaxed muscles
HOW
TO BE
REALLY
RELAXED
Beset by anxiety, we have
forgotten how to rest our
bodies even in sleep,
but here is a unique two-week
program by which you can
achieve "zero tension"
and better health
By CURTIS MITCHELL
President of the Association for Control of Tension
transmit nothing whatever. To prove it, he taught
himself to relax and fired electric shocks into his
own hands. In the relaxed state, true to his rea
soning, he could not feel the shock.
He believed that modern man is constantly
tense to some degree, whereas, to be healthy, he
must have periods of relaxation. To further his
research, Dr. Jacobson asked the Bell Telephone
Laboratories to help invent an instrument that
would determine the amount of electrical current
In each human muscle. This project has cost him
almost $1 million to date, but his laboratory is
now equipped with neurovoltmeters that can
measure current to one-millionth of a volt
What his first instrument revealed was star
tling. Each person he tested was a victim of ten
sion. More often than not, even a night of sleep
failed to relieve it. Here was waste, a serious
leakage of energy. Could this explain why some
persons became fatigued without apparent cause
or why arteries harden, ulcers form, or hearts
stop? Dr. Jacobson trained himself to relax more
and more, measuring his progress toward "zero
tension" electrically. To test his methods, he also
trained some of his students.
Two unanticipated events years later brought
Progressive Relaxation from laboratory to prac
tical application. A wealthy Chicago industrial
ist, Oscar G. Mayer, suffered two severe heart
attacks. Using relaxation as therapy, Dr. Jacob
son treated Mayer with such success that he was
restored to health and vigor. He became a tire
less disciple and a forceful spokesman.
The other event was the renewed interest of
physiologist Arthur H. Steinhaus, who had been
one of the students trained in the technique 30
years earlier. Now dean of George Williams Col
lege in Chicago, he added his prestige to a revo
lutionary idea.
Why not encourage laymen to teach relaxation
to the general public? he asked. Why not use
relaxation to prevent the onset of disease? Al
ready, 30,000 teachers of physical education
possessed a trained knowledge of physiology and
neurology. If they were mobilized in Progressive
Relaxation, the benefit would be incalculable.
SO GEORGE WILLIAMS COLLEGE under Dean Stein
haus became the center of a vastly important
experiment. Its purpose: to learn whether trained
laymen could teach relaxing. Money to start
the project was supplied by the Foundation for
Scientific Relaxation, a nonprofit organization
founded by a grateful Oscar Mayer.
Today, nearly 100 laymen have been certified
as teachers by George Williams College. Many of
them are turning in astonishing reports.
A teacher at the University of North Carolina
scheduled three relaxing classes, wondering if
she would have enough students to fill them.
Popular demand forced her to add an extra
course, which she is giving without credit, yet it
has an almost perfect attendance record. From
such classes everywhere in the country, reports
tell of housewives and businessmen discovering
tensions within themselves and how to cope
with them.
This Family Weekly self-help course in Pro
gressive Relaxation is a condensation of the
George Williams College Course, specially adapted
for home use. Proficiency comes only with a good
many hours of practice, but practice regularly
and you will be richly rewarded.
Next Week: Differential Relaxation
In addition to completing your two-week course
in the fundamentals of relaxation, next week you
will learn how to relax while cooking, driving,
making a speech, or whatever else you undertake.
This method enables you to reduce tensions in
muscles required for the job you must do and to
eliminate tension in muscles not needed. Dr.
Jacobson calls it Differential Relaxation.
Famlllr Wrrklv, ffbruary 17, 196.1