Introduction
In the 1920s, an American physician named Edmund Jacobson noticed something: when people feel stress or anxiety, tension shows up in their muscles without them realizing it. That led him to a question — if you could learn to fully release your muscles, could you bring down the tension in your mind as well? This is where progressive muscle relaxation, or PMR, came from.
Personally, when I try to do something about stress or tension, I tend to look at my thoughts or my feelings first. So the fact that Jacobson looked at the body instead struck me as pretty unique.
That said, it does make sense once you hear it. When I'm tense or stressed, my body does feel stiff. What Jacobson worked out was a way to get at it from that end. If a tense mind makes the body stiff, then loosening the body might help ease the tension in the mind too.
And the interesting part is the procedure. It's a method for relaxing, and yet the first thing you do is deliberately tense your muscles.
Why tense up on purpose?
The method itself is simple. With your hands, for example, you clench them lightly, hold for about five seconds, and then let go all at once. For the next 10 to 20 seconds, you pay attention to the feeling of the tension draining away. Then you work through the body in order — hands, arms, shoulders, face, and so on.
Why tense up first? Because when someone tells you to relax your shoulders, you often have no idea how much force you're holding there in the first place. Or rather, I think most of the tension we carry is the kind we never notice. Shoulders creeping up while working at the PC, teeth clenched, a tight forehead. Now that it's pointed out, all of it sounds familiar.
So you tense on purpose, to create a contrast with the moment you release. The procedure feels less like a stretch to loosen your muscles and more like practice — teaching your body what a released state actually feels like.
The figure usually given is 10 to 20 minutes a day over several weeks, and apparently it's less something you pull out in the middle of a tense moment than something you practice while you're calm.
What's the point of releasing it?
So what do you get out of being able to release it?
The idea goes like this. Mental stress can lead to muscle tension, and that tension can become part of the overall experience of stress. If your body stays tense even after whatever was bothering you has passed, that physical tension may contribute to the feeling of remaining stressed.
That's why releasing the body is worth something. Even so, releasing it doesn't make the cause of the tension go away. The work deadline, the worry at home, the friction with people — all of that stays right where it was. And even when the source of stress is still there, relaxing your muscles may help you feel a little less tense.
Still, telling your mind to calm down is hard, while dropping your shoulders is something you can actually do. When you can't reach a thing head-on, there may be a way to get at it from another side. It's about having one place you can move.
Conclusion
This post is a write-up of what I recently learned about progressive muscle relaxation, partly as a note to myself.
PMR got my attention, though I can't say I've been especially aware of feeling tense lately. But writing this out, it seems likely there have been plenty of times my body was holding tension without me noticing. And in those moments, knowing how to release it might make some difference.
I've tried it a little, and honestly it hasn't clicked yet. But the reasoning makes sense to me, so I'll keep at it for a while.
Thanks for reading.
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