I may be an outlier here. I don't think actual relaxation is possible for the vast majority. Only band-aids. There's one solution, but it is a competitive one, so only a minority can enjoy it.

Consciously experienced psychological stress is a strong function of stress in the physiological sense (chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system -- fight/flight). Robert Sapolsky treats this subject at length in his classic, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras...

Not only does this cover the actual stress we feel psychologically (which is unpleasant, but otherwise harmless), but also the hidden effects that flood our bodies constantly with chemicals that cause long-term damage and increase the probability of many diseases (that's one reason it took so long to understand the biology of stress; it doesn't kill directly and is not a disease or condition, it just lowers our resilience to other things that kill).

Basically, our minds and bodies are adapted to spikes of acute stress separated by periods of natural calm. Like being a lion or gazelle (or to use the animal that's the motif of the book, a zebra) on the savannah. What people call "long periods of sheer boredom punctuated by a few moments of sheer panic."

Outside of a few professions (airline pilots, firefighters), this pattern does not exist.

There is only one guaranteed way to get back into zebra mode: make a ton of money, enough to retire on, and build a large estate to live on, with expansive, natural grounds. Keep the modern world out with a high wall and a gate, and the wall itself hidden from you by trees. Build the house far back at the end of a long driveway to keep street noise out.

Sound familiar? That's how most rich people build their mansions.

So what's with all the recommended methods like exercise, meditation, yoga, mindful breathing etc.? Yup, they can work, but they are temporary band-aid fixes. They can relax you deeply for a while and somewhat lower overall stress levels. Herbert Benson first studied this scientifically in the 70s, and wrote The Relaxation Response

http://www.amazon.com/Relaxation...

What these techniques do is activate a complementary response to the sympathetic: the parasympathetic. The response that kicks in when the body wants to recuperate. In our environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA), we didn't need to do anything in particular. Between lion attacks and alpha-struggle battles with other apes in the troop, we'd basically be relaxed by default.

Today though, our default environment leads to chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system rather than parasympathetic. The lion is always around. Sure, you may feel calmer during and for the 20 minutes following a meditation session (it's about as hard as learning to ignore a lion that's 20 feet away, eyeing you hungrily).

But the moment you plunge back into work or into personal life with all its concomitant worries about bills and status, and it's back to lion-attack responses. We have no appropriate worrying mechanism adapted to chronic, low-grade stress environment, so we use an inappropriate one.

You can't remove the stressors from your environment. You aren't rich enough to retreat to a mansion. So what can you do?

There IS one method that sort of works: voluntarily taking on spiky savannah style risks. By actually putting lion-attack equivalents into your life, you recalibrate your body. That's one reason people get addicted to extreme sports (it induces what Hans Selye called "eustress" in your life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eus... ). Because they allow you to relax at other times.

In essence you are turning William James' diagnosis of the modern condition into the obvious prescription: "civilization is marked by nothing so much as the reduction in the number of proper occasions for fear." Or something like that. So you are breaking out of civilization mode, by taking on risks that are considered abnormal.

But it works imperfectly (unless you are taking on risks that might get you the rich-person mansion) because skydiving every weekend doesn't really pay the bills.

(aside: if you want to get into the philosophy of this stuff, not just the biology and psychology, try Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man)

Be wary of another method that apparently works: simply being stupid and happy-go-lucky and just not caring about everyday worries like career planning, retirement, paying for your kids' college education etc. That's merely kicking the can down the street. It's the grasshopper vs. the ant, and unlike in the fable, most ants aren't actually generous. Stupidity is not a real solution to stress.

So in summary. Do the breathing, meditation, exercise whatever for now, keep those band-aids going. Start putting "get a rich guy mansion" risks into your life for a deeper layer of stress management.

And cross your fingers and hope that you'll actually win that mansion. If you do, retreat there as an alpha, build an entourage around yourself and you'll finally be as free of stress as it is possible to be. Not everybody can win this of course. Unless it's Ricky Gervais' idea of heaven in The Invention of Lying where everybody gets a mansion.

I think this theory is true. Thoughtful, self-made rich people often seem to me to be enjoying very low stress.