Muscle fatigue: why the body gets tired even when doing nothing

Why do we feel tired when the body is actually doing nothing during the day? A sedentary lifestyle, traveling by car or public transport from work to home and back, relaxing at home on the couch … and still a person feels like a squeezed lemon.

Let’s try to figure out what happens in the body when we accumulate emotional experiences.

Step 1: Voltage

How do we know when we are emotionally stressed? Emotions are realized through the body. And stressful situations are reflected in the body by quite real muscle tensions. That is why we call experiences emotional “tension”: we seem to clench into a fist, close up, defend ourselves, or prepare for a fight.

Step 2: Voltage stabilization

Normally, a person, once tensed, should relax. I worried, quarreled, reconciled – everything passed, the stress recedes, and with it the muscle tension. However, the specifics of our time is such that many of us are constantly under prolonged stress: chronic anxiety about work, constant tensions in the family.

I am sure you have noticed this, if not for yourself, then for your loved ones: the phone rings, the person sees the identified number and, without answering yet, picks up, grits his teeth, presses his head into his shoulders. This is a symptom of prolonged stress: a person is always ready for the worst, which means that from incident to incident, he maintains tension – both emotional and physical, at the muscular level.

Step 3: Getting Used

If there is no time to relax, the muscles are in stable tension. What is the brain doing at this time? This is a very wisely arranged biological machine, it adapts to the circumstances. First, the brain receives and processes signals from the muscles: we feel tension in the back, neck, shoulders, and pelvic region.

And then the brain understands: it seems to be forever. Either I constantly process these signals and clog up my RAM, or … we stop receiving! And blocks the receipt and processing of signals from overstressed muscles. And we, oddly enough, cease to feel the usual tension. But the muscle clamps themselves remain.

Step 4: Living with a Deficit

To maintain muscle clamps, energy is needed: not some mystical, but quite real adenosine triphosphoric acid. And the reserves of this energy in the body are not infinite. If we give a significant part of it to maintain the accumulated muscle clamps, then a stable feeling of fatigue appears – there is not so much strength left to maintain other functions.

Let’s draw an analogy with money: a person earns well, but gives two-thirds to taxes, mortgages and, say, alimony. And despite the high position, it always seems to him that he lives from hand to mouth, from paycheck to paycheck.

What to do in this case? In a situation with a mortgage and alimony, you will, of course, have to earn more. And in the case of energy, constant “payments” can be abandoned: it is enough to relax the usual muscle tension in order to feel much better.

You need to break out of the vicious circle and gain access to additional sources of energy, such as fitness, hiking in the mountains, swimming in the sea, skiing and many, many other options for developing the body.

How to relax muscle tension

Unfortunately, we cannot get rid of emotional stress. We are human beings, which means that we will always worry for one reason or another. But we need to learn how to relax muscle clamps immediately after we have tensed up – to return to normal, and not to accumulate tension.

To do this, you need to restore normal muscle tone, that is, teach them to both strain and relax. With tension, we already have too much, so the first step in the formation of normal muscle tone is relaxation skills. How to learn them?

1. Operator-dependent procedures are manipulations performed by another person. There is a huge variety of relaxing massages, as well as osteopathic procedures that allow you to relax and harmonize the body, restore muscle tone.
2. Water procedures – such as a bath, a jacuzzi and many others, after which a person comes out “as if reborn.” They must be combined with procedures of the first type so that they effectively complement each other.
3. Healing exercises aimed at relaxation. If massage and water procedures relax a person in a passive (lying) state, then gymnastics – for example, qigong for the spine Sing Shen Juang – helps to transfer this relaxation into movement.

By combining all three directions, you can restore elasticity to the muscles, and freedom to the body. And then emotional tensions will pass through the body like a wave: it surged and left. And the state of fatigue can be kept under control: yes, we will not stop getting tired, but now it will be a pleasant fatigue, after which you can quickly recover and take on interesting, inspiring things again.