In my experience with my successful healing of RA more than twenty years ago, the reason for the emergence and maintenance of the disease was an overloading tension of my muscles and tendons affecting my joints, which was also triggered and maintained by poor posture.
Starting points for overloading tension can be both in the mental and physical area.
Overload equals stress.
Unpleasantries such as insecurity, mental over- or underload, sorrow, fear, shame, guilt, hate, envy, unpleasant prospects and expectations and many others lead to negative physical, emotional and mental stress.
Harmful environmental influences such as polluted water or air, fertilizer and medication residues, noise, and dust can cause stress and malnutrition or undernutrition, injury, coldness, lack of understanding, physical violence, illness, and poor posture and movement, coordination difficulties …
In trying to reduce stress in a wide variety of situations we either face its cause (responding to pressure with pressure or relaxation) or avoiding dealing with it (fleeing or freezing).
Stress equals Overload.
As mentioned before …, in 1994, during the medical examination, typical findings for rheumatoid arthritis were made. The diagnosis was: the onset of severe rheumatoid arthritis with an aggressive course.
But the reference to an autoimmune disease didn’t answer the question of why my body reacted the way it did.
Connections between causes and effects become less clear, if at all, if the consequences of our actions or behaviour only become visible to us at a later time, for example, in the form of damage. Mainly since this can also depend on the fact that several unfavourable conditions come together, one can’t be sure what comes from what.
Furthermore, the less particularly intense the sensations like unusual pleasurable ones, pain, significant effort, or struggle accompany the situations in life, the less attention we pay to them.
When I found no connection between the cause and effect at the beginning of my RA, I first learned about generally known physical processes. I drew conclusions about my situation with that knowledge. We feel stress and tension physically and mentally and use what we experience with our minds. Let’s first look at some processes in our musculoskeletal system:
Imagine that you are healthy and lifting and carrying a heavy water bucket. Our tense muscles are then clearly visible. For example on our upper arms. Experience tells us that we can feel and touch this tension well. Others can then easily perceive our tense muscles and our exertion. Our muscles, which we have tensed for the purpose of lifting and holding up, are then harder than when we are relaxed. They are also connected to our bones and joints through our tendons. Power transmission in our musculoskeletal system also affects our muscles, tendons and fascia on our bones and joints, enabling us to perform a wide variety of healthier or unhealthier body movements and postures.
Now imagine putting the water bucket back down again. By experience, we know that the muscles that we just braced before relax after work. They are now softer again and go – their average rest position corresponding – back to average length. The same happens with our tendons. We feel “relieved” in the true sense of the word.
The better we can achieve a dynamic change between the use of strength/tension and relaxation, between stress and relief in our bodies’ movement and posture, the healthier for us!
If we wouldn’t relieve our tension after putting the water bucket down, or if we kept on holding the water bucket for too long until the end of our strength, we would feel that clearly in the form of burning to tearing pain and trembling until the muscles involved would finally give in. In such or similar situations, we can directly observe how certain of our actions or behaviours lead to pain and injury.
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*contrary to such as isometric exercises in weight training