Reducing Stress by Relieving Muscle Tension in Adolescents

Abstract

Introduction: In recent years younger individuals are seen to develop more physical problems, such as bad posture, physical conditions, and headaches. These issues then lead into psychological problems, one of these leading problems is stress. Lots of prior research on older individuals have been done to see how to improve stress by relieving muscle tension but none on adolescents, especially upperclassmen high school students. So, this study aims to see how relieving muscle tension in students can impact the students’ stress levels. Methods: The study focuses on the connection between muscle tension and stress, in order to see the correlation we compared yoga and a peanut massage roller (PMR) to see which had the most significant impact in the participants. Since there is no control group this research was quasi-experimental; it was conducted in the spam of 3 weeks, on 9, 11th and 12th graders from a Northern Virginia high school. The participants were put into one of the 3 groups. Group A focused on only yoga, B did only the peanut massage rollers, and C was a combination of both. They also did a perceived stress scale survey before and after each exercise to measure their stress levels. Results: At the end of the 3 weeks, we found that the pre-SD/mean and the post-SD/mean support the claim that relieving muscle tension can reduce cortisol levels in adolescents too. Specifically, group B had the best outcome because the mean wasn’t too high or too low and the SD was the highest, which meant they had the most variation throughout the 3 weeks. Conclusion: Overall, we saw that reducing muscle tension does in fact help reduce stress levels in adolescents and using a peanut massage roller is the most effective way to achieve that.