Learn to deeply relax in minutes, and feel better fast

There’s more to relaxing than kicking back and enjoying the day.  Relaxation, I recently discovered, is a skill set with survival value. To get yourself relaxed,  I mean deeply relaxed, you need something called Progressive Muscle Relaxation. PMR is potent stuff, and luckily,  it’s as easy to learn as riding a bike and you don’t have to worry about getting hit by a truck. 

Scientists have defined life as a series of experiments, mostly failed, preceding death. Progressive Muscle Relaxation is an experiment I tried to help me sleep 8 hours a night. If it hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be writing this. It’s also made me feel relaxed, not just relaxed, totally deeply sublimely relaxed. It’s reduced my stress and anxiety levels and helped my body function even better than it had been. But, enough about me. 

You’re probably more interested in what you’ll get if you continue reading. Here’s what you’ll learn: What is PMR? What will PMR do for you?. How do you do it?  And why does it work? If you already know the answers to these questions, adios muchachos.  

What is PMR? 

Progressive muscle relaxation is a therapy that requires you to tighten and relax muscle groups progressively, one after the other. You can begin by relaxing and flexing your  hands, then your arms, then your shoulders until you’ve progressively tensed and relaxed your entire body. It usually takes me 15 to 20 minutes, but you can take as much or as little time as you need. 

American physician and polymath Edmund Jacobson created PMR in 1908. He discovered that progressively tensing and relaxing muscle groups can produce a bevy  of  benefits with little risk or cost. He spent the next 75 years proving his theory worked. 

Jacobson discovered the best way to relax a muscle was first to tighten it and then slowly release it. He found that focusing his attention on how a muscle group felt when tensed and then slowly released let him feel the difference and deeply relax his body. He discovered that by progressively relaxing one muscle group at a time, he could deeply relax his mind and the whole enchilada. 

Jacobson wrote 13 books between 1929 and 1983 and more than a hundred research papers. He taught his patients to do PMR. The practice became popular and then faded. It’s recently gotten popular again because we can now learn it for free on the same annoying devices that make us so stressed and anxious in the first place. 

PMR doesn’t require a medical doctor or drugs, and it’s much easier to learn than other deep relaxation techniques like meditation. Oh, yeah, and like mindfulness, you can do it anywhere any time you need to feel better fast.

How will you benefit from learning to relax?

PMR has been studied for over a hundred years. Scientific research has found the practice to mitigate many physical and mental conditions—including stress, stress, and more stress, anxiety, and general anxiety disorder. PMR improves sleep, sleep, and sleep.  It relieves depression. It reduces migraine frequency, relieves asthma, treats diabetes, relieves chronic pain and acute pain, lowers blood pressure, reduces cholesterol, and lowers heart rate.

The scientific studies linked to above show the effectiveness of PMR at a statistically significant level. But they don’t answer the most crucial question: How PMR will benefit you. In the studies referenced above, some subjects benefited tons from PMR, and others did not. That’s pretty much the case with all scientific research involving health or medical outcomes. The studies test a sample population for a condition or exposure, not a specific individual. You are an individual. To determine how PMR will help you, you have to do it.  

Here’s what one individual, Farhad Manjoo, writing in The New York Times, said about  practicing PMR daily, it “ can be more or less instantly life changing. For me, deliberate muscle relaxation immediately reduces fatigue, stress and anxiety. It creates a kind of allover refreshed feeling that can be attained nearly anywhere and at any time. And it gets more effective the more I do it.”

So how do you do it?

Here’s how to do PMR

Begin by making a fist with your right hand and tightening it. Focus on the tightness in your hand and forearm. Then slowly relax your hand and focus on the gradual physical sensation of release. Inhale while making the fist and exhale while letting it go. Make your exhale longer than your inhale. Now lift your right arm, flex your biceps, and follow the same procedure you did for your hand. Tighten your biceps and then release while focusing focusing focusing on the sensations in the affected muscle group.  Use this basic procedure to move through your whole body. 

You’ll notice that as you relax each muscle group, your whole body will relax. The first time you do PMR, you may not receive all the benefits because PMR is a motor skill that takes time to develop. The effects of daily dosing are cumulative. After a few weeks of daily practice, I found I could relax my entire body anywhere, anytime. I could move from high tension to deep relaxation in minutes. My muscles had learned after decades of being too tight to totally relax. PMR provided another welcome surprise by letting me slip into a meditative state. 

As you might expect, you can find many YouTube videos and apps to help you learn PMR. The video embedded above worked for me. If this video doesn’t do it for you, try this one or this one. And there are plenty of other choices to google. 

Why does PMR work? 

There are many reasons why PMR works. Here are the top candidates I’ve discovered. All four of these benefits converge to explain why PMR is a powerful way to loosen up. 

Cumulative effect

The effects of PMR are cumulative. The more you progressively relax your muscles, the more effective it becomes. When you first try PMR, you have to overcome a lifetime of tension built up over many years. After decades of accumulated stress and anxiety, your muscles are tight. Because it’s happened slowly, you are unaware of the tension in your muscles. Performing daily PMR teaches you to release tension and turn your body into a bowl of spaghetti.

Conflict Resolution

PMR mimics the basic paradigm of human pleasure. You tense a muscle and relax it. This one-two punch is a secret human joy. It may not be so much a secret as something we have all decided not to mention. Pleasure results from the build-up of conflict followed by resolution. 

 You create conflict when you tense a muscle group. You relieve tension when you relax it. You can experience many of life's basic pleasures by employing this model. It is biology 101. When you're hungry, you eat. When you’re thirsty, you drink. If you want to make eating and drinking more pleasing, create more tension by delaying gratification. Other biological acts follow suit. You have to pee, you hold it, and you create tension. Relieve it, and voila, you feel good. It works pretty much the same way with all biological functions. There's sneezing, belching, farting, and of course, f**king.

This template of tension and release  is also the basic model we use to tell stories. Create stress and relieve it. Every scene in every movie, TV show,  and video uses the formula. Tension is created and then released. 

Breath technique

The way you breathe affects the way you feel. Breathe slowly into your belly and more slowly out  and your body naturally relaxes. Longer exhales than inhales is a trick used for thousands of years by yogis, meditators, and athletes. The science supporting it is new but solid.  When you inhale, your heart rate accelerates. When you exhale, the vagus nerve secretes acetylcholine, which causes your heart rate to slow and your body to relax. If you want to relax, whether doing PMR or not, make your exhales longer than your inhales and breathe into your diaphragm.

The present 

Flow, being in the zone, meditation, relaxation response, ancient yoga, biofeedback, and mindfulness require your  complete focus in the present moment. PMR requires the same. Focus entirely on the present moment.  Not the past, not the future, but the here and the now.  Why is that such a big deal?

Over millions of years, if humans, and for that matter all animals, wanted to survive and avoid being someone’s supper, they had to be present. People who spent too much time worrying about yesterday, or thinking about tomorrow, didn’t pass their DNA into the future. As if that weren’t enough motivation to stay grounded, the present is a pleasant place to be.      

Being present had survival value. Even today, people who spend time in the here and now can find it life changing. 

Take the PMR challenge!

I practiced PMR for 15 to 20 minutes before bed every night for the last month. Here’s what I experienced. Leg and foot cramps that have plagued me for years are gone. The painful tightness that had lived on the right side of my torso for five months is gone. My sleep improved to 8 hours per night, a feat I once thought impossible. And it’s allowed me to meditate. Can enlightenment be far behind? But, enough about me. What will it do for you? Only one way to find out. Take the PMR challenge. Do PMR 15 minutes a day for four weeks and let us know what benefits you discover.