Who invented relaxation?

August 16, 2017

Who invented relaxation?

Why we keep letting stress control our lives? Relaxation is the easiest way to take this toxic energy out of our bodies, here is the testimony of Paul Lehrer.

Paul Lehrer lay on a couch looking at the ceiling of a room on the third floor of the Commodore Hotel in New York and tried to relax.

But it wasn't, he recalls, "the most ideally relaxing situation". There was no music playing softly on the stereo, no aromatherapy or tea lights. Instead, because of the heat, the windows were thrown open and the air was filled with the fumes of buses and trucks. Lehrer's ears hummed with the clanging of the construction site across the street, where they were putting up a new skyscraper, and underneath that cacophony he could hear the bustle of Grand Central Station next door.

Worst of all, every few minutes an old man would come into the room and sharply upbraid him for not relaxing the right way. It was 1973 and Lehrer, a psychotherapist, had come to be treated and to train under an 85-year-old doctor called Edmund Jacobson.

The reason for the change was the widely held belief that modern life was placing special pressures on the body.

"I think unfortunately what it did is it led psychologists to de-emphasize really meticulous muscle learning in the way Jacobson taught it, to the point that very few therapists train people as thoroughly as Jacobson did," says Lehrer, "and that's too bad because Jacobson's method worked."