The relaxation response

Following the post at reference 1 about silent consciousness, I have now taken a more serious look at Herbert Benson’s best-selling book at reference 2. Inter alia, a guide to attaining the relaxation response, apt to involve silent consciousness.

Benson, to be found at reference 3, is clearly an interesting chap. The author of a number of self-help books, in the best US tradition, with this one being very successful; a one-time medical doctor at Harvard and elsewhere; and, I imagine some kind of serious Christian, although this point is not made clear. Happy to work with both transcendental meditators (TM) and Catholics, to name just two groups. Going so far as to meet with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the chap who made TM into a big business, now to be found at reference 4.

I was unable to find out much about his co-author, Miriam Z Klipper. Perhaps she was a science writer who acted as a higher-grade ghost writer to the good doctor.

My copy of the book is the first English edition of 1976; a short, decently produced book from Collins. A book which I bought from eBay, with the seller recovering very well from an initial glitch in its delivery, going to far as to add an apologetic Christmas card to the package!

Printed in Baskerville, a font which, for some reason I no longer remember, my elder brother was keen on. Microsoft offer one variety, snapped above: a font which does not translate to my laptop very well and looks rather light compared with the Times New Roman which I usually use – but the Linotype version looks well enough on the printed page of the book. Perhaps the lightness of the font makes it more vulnerable to the vagaries of image processing at the margins. Not enough solid black to hold it together.

A book which appears to have been bound and assembled in old-fashioned signatures, although I failed to find any actual thread. 125 pages of text arranged in 8 chapters with another 25 pages of bibliography and index at the end. The book also shows its age in the form of a number of rather crudely presented diagrams, figures and tables and I dare say the physiology has moved on in fifty years. But an easy and interesting read for all that.

A one-line summary might be that high blood pressure is very common; is responsible for a great deal of sickness and death; and, might be usefully reduced by sensible use of his relaxation response, a response which can easily be generated by the recipe snapped below, the original of which can be found via reference 1.

High blood pressure is also a cause of thickening of the arteries, a condition which is both serious and common, apt to lead to damage to the brain, damage to the heart or damage to the kidneys. Or, presumably, any combination thereof. Also a cause of heart attacks and strokes.

There is also talk of lactate, but I am not convinced that it is very relevant to the main argument – and, in any case, the world may have moved on.

A recipe which has much in common with the recipes to be found in many religions, both east and west.

It seems reasonably clear that this relaxation response does reduce blood pressure, a reduction which is sustained as long as the twenty-minutes-twice-a-day regime is maintained. Benson reminds those with high blood pressure who might be tempted that the regime should only be taken with medical supervision.

As well as reducing blood pressure, the response also includes a slowing down of metabolism generally for the duration of each session. A rather more marked reduction than is obtained by, for example, sleeping. Which is rather different – and Benson suggests that the straight-backed, sitting postures favoured by many adepts may be all about stopping oneself from going to sleep.

Adapts are also able to more or less suppress what are called ‘distracting thoughts’ in the snap above. Which prompts the thought that while psycho-analysts work at getting their patients to let the subconscious bubble to the surface, to let it all hang out, hopefully to be resolved in some helpful way, here the idea is the push the subconscious well down, well out of sight. A contradiction which is perhaps sufficiently resolved by saying that both things can be useful, can be therapeutic, if applied in an appropriate context.

Stress

A lot of the narrative is built around the fight or flight response, a near instinctive, if not actually instinctive response to unexpected external stimuli. Is this someone or something that I should fight – perhaps in the case of a competitor male after my territory or my wife – or should I flee – perhaps in the case of a lion eying me up for lunch. Noting, in passing, the importance of a pair of eyes locked onto one in this context, in the case of human-to-human interactions often interpreted as aggression or aggressive intent.

This response consists of various physiological changes, readying the subject for action, including raising the blood pressure and making the heart beat faster. All of which is a good thing out in the jungle, but is not always helpful nowadays. Benson argues that the continual need to suppress this response in situations in which it is no longer appropriate is part of the cause of our epidemic of high blood pressure. From where I associate to people with anger management problems: does letting it all out do anything for their blood pressure?

We have a diversion onto stress in general and we are offered a table of stress-inducing life events. But I failed to be convinced that there is more of it about than there used to be: would not the prevalence of hunger, violence, disease and death in the good old days have generated plenty of stress?

But the message, perhaps implicit, is that regular use of the relaxation response will certainly mitigate the effects of stress and may well reduce its incidence: a bout of relaxation may well take some of the psychological heat out of the important business meeting to follow.

Relaxation around the world

A lot of space is given to activities which result in the relaxation response around the world, through the ages. Mostly in quest of the desired altered state of consciousness, states which are most easily reached through by special procedures, by special exercises – and unnatural to that extent. An altered state which is mostly seen as pleasurable and so desirable. Better than sex or booze. I believe Aldous Huxley made a similar point in his near contemporary novel ‘Island’.

Benson also suggests that his relaxation regime does indeed reduce the need, the desire for recreational drugs, legal or otherwise: for example for alcohol, marijuana or prescription pills. Or I dare say the ‘Neptune’s fix’ which featured recently at reference 12.

A lot of Christians were into this sort of thing, particularly during the Middle Ages, particularly monastic Christians. I think the idea – in effect, of attaining the silent consciousness with which we started at reference 1 – was to bring you closer to God (or to your chosen saint). The relaxation response was perhaps a useful by-product. There were also advocates from the Jewish and Moslem worlds.

Benson even ropes in our own Romantic poets, offering ‘The Prisoner’ by Emily Brontë as an example of their going into trances.

But the worlds which come to mind more often are those of the Buddhists and the Yogi, personified for many baby boomers by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, already mentioned. Those of the east are perhaps into silent consciousness, into getting closer to their god (using the term loosely), while Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation (TM) is into both silent consciousness and relaxation, that is to say in the relaxation response.

Intercessory prayer

I mentioned serious Christians above, and Benson was serious enough that he was involved in a study to test whether intercessory prayer worked. Whether having people praying to God, or perhaps to a saint, about your health did you any good. It seems that it is thought good enough just to make a list of the people you want to pray for and then in your prayer just to refer to the list, or perhaps to put the list in a special place. You don’t actually have to go through the names viva voce – which would rather slow things down.

And while I dare say one could get picky about the work reported at reference 7, the answer seemed to be that prayer did not help.

To which I add a pick of my own. Intercessory prayer may not make a difference to the outcome, but it may make the subject of such prayer feel better about it all – which is something worth having. And I have known people for whom this was the case.

Hypnagogia

This is a word used to describe the state of being in the process of falling asleep while hypnopompia is the state of being in the process of waking up. The Italians have one word to include both states, a convenience we don’t have. Something that some workers, for example Andreas Mavromatis of reference 4, have taken a good look at. In my own case, I am conscious of spending more time in both hypnagogia and hypnopompia than I used to, in fact I rather enjoy it. Perhaps a consequence of being retired and not being in a hurry to be anywhere else, to be doing anything else.

The interest here being more altered states of consciousness, albeit rather transient ones.

Along the way I came across the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, with big scores being bad, which can be measured using a short, straightforward questionnaire. There are not many questions, but as an older person who does not sleep as well as I used to, I thought that they were well chosen. However, while I have seen plenty of claims that it is widely used, I have not been able to find any simple, recent statistics about the scores one might expect to see.

Notwithstanding, I read at reference 6 that ‘factors relating to anxiety and stress are one of the most important concomitants of sleep complaints in the general population’, so there is a link back to the present paper. 

On the down side, reference 6 goes on to deploy statistical techniques which are well beyond me – and well beyond, I dare say, a good many workers who use the index in their work. Not that that is a bar: I also dare say that one can make good use of an established statistic without needing to know what goes on under the hood. Any more than you worry too much about the details of how the RPI is calculated; you just trust ONS to do a decent job – and most of the time this is enough.

I have also been reminded that devising a statistic to tell you how well someone is sleeping is different in all kinds of ways from measuring their temperature. And more so to the extent that you elect to make use of subjective assessments of this or that component, as here. You don’t even have the comfort of being able to repeat the measurement; the moment has passed and who is to say that this moment is anything like that moment. All of which prompted a visit to Cronbach’s alpha, for which see reference 10.

Work in progress.

Other matters

The relaxation response made something of a splash in the 1970s. But while the present book seems a little quaint, a little dated now, it is also odd how it seems to have faded away. There is plenty of interest in alternative medicine, which is to where Benson’s relaxation seems to have been dispatched. I wonder whether this has anything to do with the fact that no drugs and no machinery are needed. There is nothing to sell and so it is put aside by those who hold many of the medical purse strings, that is to say the big corporations selling drugs and machines.

Benson offers a twenty minute procedure to deliver the relaxation response, something that a busy man of business or a busy housewife might find time for twice a day. While in the past, I used occasionally get something very similar at the end of a bout of serious exercise, particularly of the hill climbing variety. I remember several occasions of feelings which somehow combined emptiness – that is to say the silent consciousness – with mild euphoria and exhilaration, which resulted from getting to the top of a hill or a pass and looking down at the country spread out far below. Or more mundanely, of sitting back on completion of a run, of perhaps two or three miles.

I remember once linking the hilly euphoria to the death instinct of the Freudians. A connection to be revisited in slower time. Not just now, anyway.

On the other hand, I sometimes play with something like the Benson game from time to time, with some interest and pleasure. But this morning’s thought was quite different: why do I want to go to the bother of turning my mind off? If am tired, I can sleep; but I don’t really need to be present and absent at the same time. Far too much real stuff to do.

Then waking the other morning, I remembered about Winfree and the beating of the heart, for which see references 8 and 9. The beating of the heart is a complicated business, in some large part a local matter rather than a central matter (which last would make transplants rather difficult), and there is no doubt room for all kinds of complications, both electrical and chemical. Some arising from the behaviour of sheets of loosely coupled oscillators, behaviour susceptible to modelling and graphic display on a computer. Who knows what stress might do in the matter. So there is a connection to the present book in that both involve hearts and rhythms, but I don’t see anything stronger. Not just yet anyway.

Lastly, I learned of an old use of the word ‘recollection’, seemingly used by the Christian mystics of old to describe the gathering of their minds together in preparation for entering what sounds like a version of silent consciousness, a place where man can be in direct touch with the divinity, with the divine. A business which started with St. Augustine, a quote from whom is snapped above. I had had hopes that this reference 13 would throw some light on this, but while I find seven stages for a soul to progress through on its journey from the lair of the beast to the presence of the Triune God, I find no recipes for action and just two uses of the word ‘recollection’, neither in the present sense. OED is not much help either, although it does hint at the present sense, perhaps because it draws on examples in the vernacular, starting as it happens in the 17th century, and is not concerned with what might have been written in Greek or Latin at the time of the Fathers.

Has Benson been careless in ascribing the use of the word ‘recollection’ to people who did not speak anything like modern English?

Conclusions

Another interesting read.

With one of the take-aways for me being a reminder of the way that silent repetition of something, a rhythmical repetition, a something which is perhaps short and banal like the phrase ‘op cit’, perhaps the first line of the ‘Ave Maria’ prayer snapped above, perhaps synchronised with breathing, can more or less block conscious thought, whether that thought might have been about something in the here and now or something bubbling up from the subconscious.

Maybe also that keeping time, in the musical sense, is also important. Perhaps I should pursue the intriguing business of the rhythm of one process imposing itself on that of another, loosely coupled process. Maybe reference 11 would be a satisfactory entry point.

From where I associate to the way in which, when one has wrongly identified something a few yards in front of one, for a few seconds at least, one continues to force the something into the wrong mould, to latch onto the clues which tell in favour of this wrong identification to the exclusion of all others. Something which television detectives, on the chase of a red herring, know all about. 

PS 1: Microsoft’s Word seems to have strong views about the use (or not) of hyphens to link words together. I am getting a bit fed up with all its red and blue pencil underlinings of my efforts!

PS 2: just the one brush with the 'div' problem noticed at reference 14 this morning. Possibly the result of not clearing a space inserted by Notepad to stand for a picture in the original.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/silent-consciousness.html. 

Reference 2: The relaxation response – Herbert Benson, Miriam Z Klipper – 1976.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Benson. 

Reference 4: https://www.tm.org/. 

Reference 5: Hypnagogia: The nature and function of the hypnagogic state – Mavromatis, Andreas – 1983. His PhD thesis at Brunel University, London.

Reference 6: The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index: A New Instrument for Psychiatric Practice and Research - Buysse, Reynolds, Monk, Berman, Kupfer - 1989.

Reference 7: Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer – Benson, Herbert; Dusek, Jeffery A.; Sherwood, Jane B.; Lam, Peter; Bethea, Charles F.; Carpenter, William; Levitsky, Sidney; Hill, Peter C.; Clem, Donald W.; Jain, Manoj K.; Drumel, David; Kopecky, Stephen L.; Mueller, Paul S.; Marek, Dean; Rollins, Sue; Hibberd, Patricia L. – 2006.

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/awakenings.html. 

Reference 9: When Time Breaks Down: The Three-Dimensional Dynamics of Electrochemical Waves and Cardiac Arrhythmias – Arthur T. Winfree – 1987.

Reference 10: Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests - Lee J Cronbach – 1951.

Reference 11: Hierarchically coupled ultradian oscillators generating robust circadian rhythms – Barrio, Zhang, Maini – 1997.

Reference 12: ‘Gas-Station Heroin’ Sold as Dietary Supplement Alarms Health Officials: Tianeptine, found at convenience stores, at smoke shops and online, can mimic an opioid. It is among a growing class of substances that are difficult to control – Jan Hoffman, New York Times – 2024. As a legaliser, I think I have to argue that control of supply is the answer here. Legal, but not too easy or too friendly; corralled into rather antiseptic state-controlled outlets.

Reference 13: A study of the mysticism of Plotinus and Augustine – R. Baine Harris – 1954.

Reference 14: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/testing.html.