THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE ITSELF. It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. This breakthrough in neuroscience is called neuroplasticity, and it’s changing the centuries-old idea that the brain is fixed and unchanging.
Norman Doidge, MD, a psychiatrist and researcher, who wrote several books on the topic, including “The Brain that Changes Itself” and “The Brain’s Way of Healing,” reports that the brain is not, as was previously thought, like a machine, or “hardwired” like a computer.
Doidge says, “Neuroplasticity not only gives hope to those with mental limitations, or what was thought to be incurable brain damage, but expands our understanding of the healthy brain and the resilience of human nature.”
If you suffer from chronic muscle tension or pain, neuroplasticity might be of special interest to you!
If you’re dependent on daily stretching or frequent massages just to feel comfortable in your body, then you’re not alone. Some common tension issues people live with include tension or pain in their backs or neck and shoulders, jaw and/or TMJ symptoms, hips, or have regular migraines.
We assume that feeling this way is normal, or that it runs in the family—that tight muscles are just an unavoidable way of life as we age. But this is not the case.
Chronically tight muscles are basically unconscious habits of contraction that the nervous system has “turned on” in order to stabilize your skeleton as a whole.
For example, if you hurt your left knee years ago, your entire body had to compensate at one time. As time passed, you got used to these compensation patterns until it just felt normal to you.
Consider this scenario: perhaps you unconsciously learned to lean a little bit into your right hip and leg when you walked, to avoid putting full weight on your left leg while your knee was healing.
And then, to counterbalance the right-leaning of your lower body, you learned to lean in the opposite direction with your shoulders and neck.
All of this was a brilliant way your brain orchestrated to support your whole body while there was instability. In fact, you became so good at this new muscular “pattern” that you didn’t even notice it — until the muscles holding you in this “pattern” began to hurt and cause pain. You see, the muscles were holding the bones in place based on their instructions from your brain.
Learn more about how compensation patterns are formed and how we can work with them.
So a massage might help relieve this constant tension temporarily, but the original muscle patterns has not changed at the origin. After a few days, they’ll snap right back into place per their instructions from your brain, the control center of your body.
Another example might be chronic jaw and neck pain or neck and shoulder pain.
This is where neuroplasticity comes in!
When a person’s nervous system feels safe, like it can relax and let go—when it feels “heard” rather than fighting to hold muscles in place—the brain will tell the muscles to stop holding on for dear life. Depending on the history and physical trauma involved in a given situation, this can happen within weeks or months.
For physical muscular tension, The Feldenkrais Method® is an effective modality to change these neural pathways from old, unhealthy patterns to more efficient, healthier ones. To learn more about how Feldenkrais® works, click here.
When old muscular tension is released, there is also a sense of emotional calm and mental clarity. This makes sense because when your nervous system no longer has to expend so much energy stabilizing your whole system, there’s a natural feeling of physical and mental relief and ease.