A Refuge from the World

Someone lowers the lights, and the dozen people around the table close their eyes and breathe deeply.

After a moment of silence, Dr. Margaret Caudill says quietly, "With each breath, you become more and more relaxed."

More moments of silence.

"With each breath," murmurs Caudill, "you go deeper and deeper into your own world." All is stillness in the room.

Finally, Caudill says: "At the count of three, I want you to open your eyes and sit quietly before you come back into the world."

The ten-minute voyage away from the world is part of a weekly program at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital that uses techniques of easing stress to fight hypertension. Begun in September 1982, the program has succeeded in lowering the blood pressure of most of its participants. Besides relaxation techniques (imagine watching your breath go in and out), the regimen involves a low-salt, low-cholesterol diet emphasizing fresh food. (Cost of the program: $750 for eleven group meetings, plus tests and an evaluation session with the doctor.) Trying to meet the standards of the program, one man at the session mildly complains, is so hard that the very effort to cut back on salt makes his blood pressure rise. Caudill quickly reassures him. "We're not here to make you hysterical, pressured people," she says. "We're here to make you be practical and moderate, so don't get so worried about salt that it causes you undue stress."

"If we can't keep our thoughts focused, does that mean we're tense?" another man asks. "Other thoughts will come to you as long as you're alive," says Caudill. "But the idea is you don't get distracted. After a while, you will find that you have a 'quiet center.' "

Later, one woman tells how problems at work were increasing her hypertension. "The stress and tension remained in me. It was something I couldn't control." But Beth Israel's program began to help her handle her emotions. She quit smoking and became much more relaxed on the job. Best of all, she stopped taking the three kinds of medication she once needed for hypertension, and watched her blood pressure drop in just nine weeks from a high 170 over 100 to a normal 120 over 73. The stress she is under may be the same, she says. But, she adds, "it's all in how you manage it." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.