relaksation

Relaksation is a term used across disciplines to denote the process or state of releasing tension, reducing arousal, and returning toward a state of ease. In everyday language, relaxation describes activities that lower stress and promote calm. In scientific contexts, relaxation characterizes how a system gradually returns to equilibrium after a disturbance.

Cognate forms appear in other languages, such as relaksasi in Indonesian and Malay and relaksasyon in Turkish. The English form derives from Latin relaxare, meaning to loosen or loosen up.

In psychology and health, relaxation refers to techniques designed to reduce physiological arousal and mental stress. Practices include deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery, meditation, and mindfulness. Regular relaxation can lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce muscle tension, and improve sleep and well-being, and is used in stress management and psychotherapy.

In physics, engineering and materials science, relaxation describes the return to a steady state after a perturbation. Examples include relaxation time constants in nuclear magnetic resonance (T1, T2), dielectric or electrical relaxation, and mechanical stress relaxation in polymers under constant strain. In these fields, quantifying relaxation helps model time-dependent behavior of systems.

In numerical analysis, relaxation methods are iterative algorithms for solving nonlinear equations or partial differential equations. Classic examples include the Gauss-Seidel method and the successive over-relaxation (SOR) technique, which can accelerate convergence in certain problems.