Muscle Relaxation Techniques

Question: What are some reasons for learning the technique described in this handout?

Answer: Getting your muscles more relaxed can help you not feel so anxious or angry. It can prevent or lower headaches. It can help you to feel less “stressed.” It can improve all sorts of other bodily reactions to stress.

Question: Why does relaxing our muscles help us to feel less stressed?

Answer: One of the effects of stress or arousal or activation is that our muscles get tighter. It’s thought that sensing loose and relaxed muscles gives feedback to our brains that let us know we’re not in danger, that things are OK.

Question: What is meant by muscle tone, or muscle tension?

Answer: The actions of our muscles are not all-or-none. Our nerves send signals to lots and lots of muscle cells in any given muscle. At any given time, some of those units are pulling, while others are taking it easy. The higher the fraction of muscle cells are working to create a pull, the higher the degree of tone or tonus or tension in the muscle.

Question: Can our muscles be working to create tension, without our even noticing?

Answer: They can, and in fact they are, almost all the time. Our neck muscles are keeping our heads from flopping over. Our face muscles are giving us some facial expression or other. Our shoulder muscles are keeping ourselves from slumping. When we’re standing up, even when we’re still, some muscles are working to keep us from falling over. And so forth!

Question: If we want to reduce the tension in our muscles to a very low state, in order to get more relaxed, what’s a preliminary skill that is worth working to develop?

Answer: The skill of purposely tensing muscles is very strongly related to the skill of relaxing them. A great skill to cultivate is the ability to make any muscle in your body tense, without needing to move or push on anything in order to do it.

Question: So the purpose of a muscle is usually to pull on a bone so as to make the bone move. How do you make a muscle tense without moving?

Answer: You do this by letting one muscle pull the bone one way, and another muscle pull it the other way. For example, many of us have had the experience of “making a muscle” in the upper arm. You tense your biceps (the one that tends to bend your arm at the elbow), but you also tense the triceps (the one that tends to straighten your arm out at the elbow). The two of them work against each other, creating tension, and making both muscles stand out and feel hard. When you quit doing that, the muscles become softer and more relaxed. The signal that you send to them that says, “OK, you can quit flexing, you don’t need to pull against each other any more,” is the muscle relaxation signal your brain sends that you want to get very skilled at sending. And you get skilled at sending this signal by first getting skilled at sending the opposite signal.

Question: How do you make muscles tense in places other than the upper arm?

Answer: Let’s talk about the neck muscles. If you put your hand on your forehead and push your head against your hand, you can feel the tension in the muscles in the front of the neck. If you put your hand on the back of your head and push your head back against it, you can feel the tension in the muscles in the back of the neck. Now if you take your hand down and try to pull your head forward and back at the same time, you should feel tension in both the front and back of your neck.

Let’s talk about some muscles in your face. If you try to lift your eyebrows up, as if you’re surprised, and at the same time try to move them down, as if you’re frowning, you create tension in the muscles of your forehead and around your eyes.

Let’s talk about your jaw muscles. If you open your mouth just a little, and at the same time try to bite down and open your mouth wider, you can feel the tension in the muscles that move the jaw.

Your shoulder muscles: You create tension by trying to shrug your shoulders up, and at the same time pushing them down.

Your deltoids, “lats,” and “pecs”: While your arms are hanging down at your side, try to press them into your side, and at the same time move them out from your side. Your deltoid is the muscle at the top of your arm that you get a shot in, that tries to move the arm away from your side (and eventually lift it up). Your “lats” are those on your back, and your “pecs” are those on your chest, that tend to move the arm downward when it’s out at your side.

Your “abs” and the extensors of your back: If you sit up straight, and try to bend over at the waist, while at the same time opposing that by trying to arch your back, you are tensing both the muscles on your belly and those that run up and down your back.

Your forearms: Hold your hands as if you’re going to claw at something. Try to grasp your hands into a fist, and at the same time try to straighten out your fingers to make a flat palm. This creates tension in your forearms.

Your “glutes” and your hip flexors: If you are sitting, try to lift your bent leg up, while at the same time trying to press it down harder against the floor. Your “glutes” are the ones on the back of your hip that press down, while the hip flexors are the ones on the front that pull up.

Your upper legs: With your leg bent, try to straighten it out, while at the same time trying to bend it further. The muscles on top or front of your thighs (the quadriceps) get tense from the first of these, whereas the muscles on the bottom or back of your thighs (the hamstrings) get tense from the second of these.

Your lower legs: Try to push down with the front of the foot, as if you are getting up on your tiptoes, and at the same time, try to pull the front of your foot upward. The first of these tenses your “gastrocs” on the back of your lower leg, and the second tenses the soleus muscle on the front of your lower leg.

Question: What do you recommend doing with this information?

Answer: I recommend going around the body and performing each of these efforts where you get muscles to pull against each other, so that you tense and relax just about all the muscles of the body. Pay attention to what sort of signals you send to the muscles to get them to tense, and especially pay attention to what you do at the end of that tension, the signals that you send to tell the muscles, “OK, you can be at ease now.” Feel what it feels like to send the relaxation signal to any given group of muscles that you have tensed.

Question: Is this tension of all these muscles supposed to be relaxing?

Answer: No. This is just meant to teach your brain to know how to relax any given muscle group of your body.

Question: What’s the relaxation procedure, then?

Answer: Once you’ve gotten proficient at tensing and relaxing, you’re ready to do the relaxation technique. This doesn’t involve tensing. It just involves getting in mind a muscle group, and sending the “relax” signals to it without first sending the “tense” signals. If there was tension in the muscle group to begin with, you will feel the muscles relax. If the muscles were pretty relaxed to begin with, you just send signals to them to relax further; sometimes you can feel them get even more relaxed than they were.

Question: What’s the rhythm of this?

Answer: You spend a few seconds deciding upon the next set of muscles to focus on. Then you spend a few seconds sending relaxation signals to those muscles. Then a few more signals deciding on the next muscle group, and a few more seconds sending relaxation signals to those.

Sometimes people like to time this with the rhythm of their breathing: for example, while inhaling, think of a muscle group, and while exhaling, relax those muscles. You can time the rhythm to that of breathing if you like, and not if you don’t like!

Question: How long do you keep this up?

Answer: Some people have benefited greatly from using only 3 or 4 seconds of muscle relaxation, numerous (e.g. 50) times a day! If you do it for 2 minutes, once a day, you’re probably above average for practice time. Many people recommend 10 or 15 minutes a couple of times a day. The most important answer is, do it long enough for it to have some effect, but not so long that it becomes unpleasantly boring. (However, some magical mental transformation of “boring” experience to “relaxing” seems to be central to lots of meditation and relaxation techniques. People can sort of hypnotize themselves into the attitude that low stimulation and repetition are good, not aversive.)

Question: What’s a good way to avoid physical restlessness while practicing muscle relaxation?

Answer: I think that one of the barriers to effective relaxation is that much of life forces us to sit for much longer than our bodies were meant for. For that reason, I think that getting a few minutes of exercise, strength-building or cardio or both, makes relaxation more pleasant and easier.

Question: Do people use biofeedback to help with muscle relaxation?

Answer: Yes. Clinicians can buy electromyogram (EMG) machines where you can paste electrodes on the skin along a muscle, and the machine will give you a number telling how tense the muscle is. But these machines are not cheap. And we all have something of a feedback device built in: we can feel how tense the muscle is without a machine – we have sensory nerves that bring such information to our brains. This information is especially good if we spend some time consciously assessing how tense muscles are.