There are evenings when your body has been exhausted for hours and your head keeps running anyway. Tensing muscles would be too much; there is no energy left for active exercises.
That is exactly what autogenic training is for. Physically you do nothing. You silently repeat calm phrases about your body ("My arms are pleasantly heavy") and let come what comes. In the app, Autogenic training takes you through the phrases. Here is the same exercise to read up on.
Why it works
The method is over ninety years old and comes from the neurologist Johannes Heinrich Schultz. The idea behind it is unusual but well documented: it is not will that relaxes you, but imagination. If you repeatedly focus on heaviness and warmth over weeks, the body follows in time: muscle tone down, blood flow in arms and legs up, nervous system in recovery mode.
Two things matter, and both sound wrong at first:
You must not force anything. Anyone straining to become heavy will not become heavy. The phrases are an invitation, not an instruction.
It does not work immediately. Autogenic training is one of the few relaxation methods you genuinely learn. The first time, many people feel almost nothing. After two or three weeks of short, regular runs, the heaviness often arrives with the very first phrase.
What it gives you
A deep calm that needs no physical effort, which is why it fits when the day has taken everything. Once you can do it, you can also get it in a few minutes sitting down.
What it is not: fast help. In the acute peak it does nothing; Stop stress fast is there for that. And it is not therapy, even though it appears within therapies.
The full text is in the app
In bloomnow you get the whole article, together with the exercises that belong to it. The app launches soon. Leave your address and we will write to you at launch.
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