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Something as seemingly simple as frequent stretching – so what if it makes you look bored – can give your muscles the oxygen they crave and the lymphatic flow they need to keep you from becoming stiff and hypertonic.  Stretching need not be a complex ritual; it is safe to say that if it feels good you are doing it right, as long as you are steady and gentle, not bouncing or stretching muscles past the point of comfort.   Renewing the body-mind connection is your best defense against living a Milton-ized existence.

I know that it isn’t exactly a revelation that stress causes pain. What you may not know is that the instinctive muscle tensing of “Office Space” hero Peter Gibbons whenever his insufferable boss Lumbergh comes near is a perfect example of the functional dysfunction of the sympathetic nervous system.  If Peter were a hunter-gatherer in a tribe 10,000 or so years ago, the fight-or-flight response of the sympathetic nervous system would have served him well.  Now that the enemy is Lundberg and not a cave lion, however, the sympathetic response is doing him more harm than good.

The sympathetic nervous system is the body’s emergency response system, and takes over from the parasympathetic nervous system, which runs things quite smoothly, thank you, when conditions are balanced.  When stimulated by extreme stress heart rate increases, most blood vessels constrict (except for those supplying skeletal muscles), and digestive tract contractions become sluggish, hampering digestion.  

Peter’s problem is that Lundberg’s presence in his daily life elicits the same biological response as the cave lion, except that unlike the cave lion, Lundberg never goes away. Thus Peter finds himself in a constant state of sympatheticonia.  His back, which  takes on the posture of an animal ready to flee or literally “get his back up”, hardens into spasm– those evil knots that usually take up residence either in your upper back and shoulders or lower back.

Just what are those knots?  Muscles are essentially bundles of fibers. On a microscopic level, the basic contractile unit of a muscle is a sarcomere.   When stimulated by a nerve impulse, chemical shifts take place that cause the top and bottom myofilaments of the sarcomere to slide against each other and overlap, shortening the whole unit and thus contracting the muscle.  But what if some of those myofilaments decide not to slide back?  Well, enough of them behaving badly will cause a spastic knot.

But if sarcomeres are so tiny, how can they possibly cause that enormous knot that spans my entire right shoulder?  The answer lies in the pain-spasm-pain cycle – another example of the body’s attempt to preserve itself gone terribly awry.  When an injury –even a microscopic one– occurs in a muscle, the surrounding muscle tissue splints around the injury site in an attempt to protect it.  The splinted muscle is itself a muscle in spasm, deprived of oxygen and becoming a nasty repository for metabolic waste, which irritates nerve endings.  Surrounding muscle tissue splints around the splinted muscle…and so on and so on until…viola…giant spasm has you leaning against doorknobs in a desperate attempt at relief.

How can this cycle be stopped?  One of the most efficient ways to relieve a muscle in spasm is the skilled application of massage.  A skilled massage therapist knows the natural direction of muscle fibers and can use a range of techniques to get them to relax and separate.  He or she can also flush the metabolic waste and free the muscle to receive the oxygen it so desperately needs.

However, massage therapy is a therapy, not a cure.  As long as Peter works for Lundbergh, odds are his back pain will return and he will need repeated visits to his massage therapist for relief.  Fortunately for Peter, he finds a creative way out of his situation and his newfound laid-back persona reads in the freedom of his movement and posture.  The final lesson of “Office Space” is that ultimately, lifestyle change is the only surefire way to achieve permanent relief from stress related muscle spasm.

In the meantime, please don’t touch my stapler.