When was the last time you felt truly relaxed? Not asleep, not slumped in front of a screen, but relaxed, with nothing in you clenched.
I remember juggling work deadlines and family responsibilities and barely finding a moment to breathe. I was constantly on edge, and I had stopped noticing it. Tense had become my factory setting. It was only when I stumbled on a few relaxation techniques that the weight began to lift off my shoulders.
Five techniques turn up on nearly every list of ways to relax: deep breathing, tensing and releasing the muscles, imagining a peaceful place, yoga, and mindfulness. They are usually sold as proven, and "proven" is a big word. So here each one is put to the test: what it does in your body, what happened when it was measured, and where it falls short. One of them even winds your body up before it calms it down. By the end you will know which one is most likely to work for you.
One response under all five
In 1971, Herbert Benson and two colleagues wired up people who meditated and watched what their bodies did while they sat with their eyes closed. Their bodies used less oxygen and they breathed more slowly, while wide awake. The team called it "a wakeful hypometabolic physiologic state": awake, with the engine idling.
Three years later, Benson gave it a name that stuck: the relaxation response. It is the opposite of fight or flight. Fight or flight speeds the heart, tightens the muscles and sharpens you for trouble. The relaxation response slows the heart, loosens the muscles and turns the engine down.
Benson's bigger claim was that no single method owns it. Meditation and the prayers of many religious traditions seemed to share a few plain ingredients: a quiet place, something to repeat, a comfortable position, and a passive attitude, letting stray thoughts drift past instead of fighting them. He set the method out for everyone in a short book, . Years later, two of the ingredients were found to matter most: something to repeat, and the passive attitude.
The passive attitude is the hard one. Trying hard to relax works about as well as trying hard to fall asleep.
If he was right, the five techniques below are five doors into the same room. They differ in how quickly they get you there, and in who they suit. When 60 students were given 20 minutes of recorded instructions for one of three of them, all three left people feeling more relaxed than students in a comparison group. Their bodies told a more interesting story, and it starts with the breath.
Breathe
Have you ever noticed how shallow your breathing gets when you're stressed? Under pressure the breath gets quicker and climbs up into the chest.
The best-known fix is the 4-7-8. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, hold for a count of seven, and breathe out slowly through your mouth for a count of eight. When 43 young adults did three short rounds of it, their heart rate and the top number of their blood pressure fell straight afterwards. It worked whether they had slept badly the night before or well. The calming effect on the heart's rhythm was clearer in the rested ones.
Now the twist. Of the three techniques the students tried, deep breathing was the only one that first pushed their bodies the wrong way. Their heart rate and sweat response rose at the start, then settled back to where they began. A likely reason is that breathing on purpose is work at first, and a body that is not used to it can read the effort as alarm. Like a smoke alarm that goes off for toast, it reacts first and checks later.
If you feel dizzy or more anxious when you start, it is no sign of failure. Big, forceful breaths blow off carbon dioxide, and too little of it brings tingling and light-headedness. Keep the breaths slow and gentle, and let the long breath out do the work. How Breathing Affects Your Emotional State has why the breath out is the part that slows the heart.
Tense, then let go
Stress has a sneaky way of showing up in the body: tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, an aching back. Most of the time you do not notice it, and that was the whole point of the man who invented this technique.
Edmund Jacobson, a Chicago physiologist, spent twenty years on one idea: you can be tense while resting, but you cannot be tense while relaxed. Lying on the sofa is rest. Relaxed means the muscles have let go, and he found the two are often not the same.
He also made some of the first accurate electrical measurements of tension in living muscle, the tiny signals a working muscle gives off. You can lie on the sofa for an hour and still be holding the ceiling up with your shoulders. He published his method as Progressive Relaxation in 1929, and a version for everyone else, You Must Relax, in 1934. Emergency Stress Relief: What to Do When You're Completely Overwhelmed has how his work changed the meaning of the word "relax" itself.
Jacobson's method took weekly lessons and daily practice. Joseph Wolpe, who had treated soldiers for what was then called war neurosis in the South African army, cut it down to about 20 minutes. His reasoning was simple: you cannot be relaxed and anxious at the same time. So he had people relax their bodies first, then imagine what frightened them, one step at a time, from the mildest version to the worst. The method was called systematic desensitisation, and Wolpe became one of the most influential figures in behaviour therapy.
Jacobson's trick was to teach the feeling by contrast. You cannot easily feel a muscle that has been half-tight for weeks, but you can feel it after you squeeze it hard and then drop it.
Start at your toes. Curl them tight for a few seconds, then let them go completely, and notice the difference.
Work slowly upwards. Calves, thighs, buttocks, stomach, hands, arms, shoulders, and last the face, where the jaw and the forehead hide a surprising amount of tension.
Stay on the letting go. The squeeze is only there to make the release easier to feel. It's like giving your body permission to finally relax.
This one passed the body test cleanly. When the students did it, their heart rate and sweat response fell steadily from the start, with no rise first. It suits anyone who finds sitting still with their thoughts the least relaxing thing in the world.
The toes-up routine is the training, not the goal. A method called applied relaxation builds on it until the release comes in moments, at the first sign of tension, at a desk or in a queue. When 277 adults with raised stress, anxiety or low mood learned it over ten weeks, their symptoms fell more than in people who were not taught it. Most of that edge had faded a year later. The better coping and the brighter mood mostly held.
Go somewhere else
Have you ever wished you could escape from everything for a few minutes? Guided imagery is that escape, done on purpose.
Find a quiet spot and close your eyes. Picture a place where you feel safe and calm: a beach, a quiet forest, a secret hideaway of your own.
Fill in every detail. The colours, the sounds, the temperature of the air, what is under your feet. The more senses you bring, the more completely your mind goes there.
Stay a while. Let the stress slip away as you enjoy this mental vacation, then come back slowly.
It sounds like daydreaming with ambition. The body takes it more seriously than that. In the students' test, imagery was the other technique that calmed the body steadily from the first minute, just like the muscle work.
It held up in a far tougher place too. In one hospital, 130 people having bowel surgery were split into two groups. One group got the usual care. The other also listened to recordings of guided imagery for three days before the operation, while going under, during the surgery itself, in recovery and for six days after. The imagery group had less anxiety and less pain, and needed almost half as much strong painkiller after the operation.
If you can picture a beach while someone is operating on your bowel, you can probably manage it on the train home.
Or go there for real. In 1982, Japan's ministry for farming and forests coined a word for it, shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. In 24 forests across Japan, 280 young men, all university students, spent one day in a forest and one in a city, walking for about a quarter of an hour and sitting and looking for about as long. In the forest, their pulse, their blood pressure and their cortisol, the stress hormone, were all lower, and the calming side of the nervous system was more active.
If pictures do not come easily, there is a version made of words. In the 1920s, Johannes Schultz, a German who was working on hypnosis, noticed that hypnotised people often felt a heaviness and a pleasant warmth in their arms and legs. So he tried it the other way round: could imagining heavy, warm limbs bring the calm on by itself? He presented the method in 1926 and published it in 1932 as autogenic training. Its first exercise is a sentence you repeat to yourself while the arm follows: "My right arm is heavy." It is a sixth door into the same room, for anyone who thinks in words more than in pictures.
It has been put to the test, too. Across 60 controlled tests from 1952 to 1999, autogenic training helped to a medium degree with tension headaches and migraine, mildly high blood pressure, anxiety, mild low mood and poor sleep. Against other talking treatments it mostly did no better, which puts it in good company rather than ahead of it.
Stretch, the old way and the new
Yoga isn't just about flexibility. It moves the body, slows the breath and pulls your attention into what you are doing, all at the same time.
It is also younger than its reputation. The old yoga texts were about breath, focus and meditation, and described anything from two to 84 postures. The flowing sequences of poses taught in classes today took shape in the twentieth century. A teacher in Mysore named Krishnamacharya, working from the 1930s to the 1950s, folded standing poses from gymnastics into yoga. Modern books list up to 2,100 poses.
Two of the best-known poses show it. Downward dog is not named in the medieval yoga texts, and child's pose is not described before the twentieth century. Similar poses for both appear in a Danish gymnastics manual, Niels Bukh's Primary Gymnastics, published in 1924, and his system had reached India by the 1920s. Your downward dog may well have a Danish passport.
None of that makes yoga worse. It does mean you can judge it by what it does, whatever its age.
For back pain, it disappoints. In 228 adults with long-term low back pain, twelve weeks of yoga classes beat a self-help book, but did no better than twelve weeks of plain stretching classes.
For mood, it did better than its rival. When 34 healthy adults spent twelve weeks either doing yoga or walking, with the effort matched, the yoga group improved more in mood and anxiety. Levels of GABA, the brain's own calming messenger, rose with it. That was a small group, so treat it as a hint. The Invisible War Inside Your Body (And How to Win It) has what yoga does to cortisol.
So a few gentle poses at home are enough to get you to the room. Those two Danish imports are still the classic pair: one stretches the whole back of the body, the other lets you fold up and rest your forehead on the floor. Breathe slowly through both. A non-slip keeps downward dog from becoming downward slide.
Come back
Everything around you pulls your attention somewhere else. Mindfulness asks for the opposite: one thing, now.
Sit quietly and close your eyes. Rest your attention on your breath, the air coming in and going out.
When your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back. It will wander. Coming back is the exercise, not a sign that you are doing it wrong. A dumbbell that keeps going back down is not a failed lift. It is the lift.
Start with five minutes. Longer sessions can come later, once five feels easy.
The modern version began in an unlikely place. In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn opened a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts for patients the usual treatments had not helped. His first results came from 51 people with chronic pain, mostly in the back, neck, shoulders or head. After ten weeks, 65% had at least a third less pain, and half had half.
There was no comparison group, so some of that may have come from attention, hope or time. Still, it was a striking start, and his course has since spread worldwide. 5 Practical Ways to Cultivate a Positive Mindset has how it measured up later against other activities.
He later wrote the course up in a book and named it after a line from Zorba the Greek. Asked whether he has ever been married, Zorba says of course he has: wife, children, house, everything, the full catastrophe. His editor worried that "catastrophe" in the title would put readers off. Full Catastrophe Living came out in 1990 and became a bestseller around the world anyway. The whole course is still in it: .
Why bring the mind back at all? 8 Practical Tips to Break Free from the Daily Rut has the finding: when people were asked through their phones at random moments what they were doing and thinking, their minds were somewhere else almost as often as on the task, and they were usually less happy for it.
The newer twist is kinder to daydreamers. When 337 people were asked the same questions six times a day for a week, they also said whether their thoughts were pleasant or unpleasant. Much of the unhappiness turned out to come from what the mind wandered to, not from the wandering itself. Wander somewhere pleasant and the mood held up. Wander back to the argument at work and it fell.
So mindfulness is not about switching thoughts off. It is about noticing where your mind has gone, and choosing whether to stay there.
Which one is yours
Each of the five has calmed people when it was put to the test. When 27 sets of results on relaxation training were pooled, they showed a medium-to-large drop in anxiety. Meditation did best, longer training did better than short, and volunteers did better than others.
The last two are the useful part. Time spent practising matters, and so does wanting to be there. The technique you picked yourself, and keep coming back to, is the one that gets the practice. The best technique in the world is no use while it sits in your bookmarks.
Practice may even reach your blood cells. When people listened to a recording that brings on the relaxation response, blood taken straight afterwards showed genes for energy production and insulin release seeming to turn up, and genes tied to inflammation and stress seeming to turn down. The changes showed up within a single session in beginners who had practised for eight weeks, and were stronger in people who had practised for years.
If your stress sits in your body, start with tensing and letting go. It calms the body steadily, and it gives restless people something to do.
If your mind is the busy part, try the happy place, mindfulness or autogenic training. Imagery gives the mind somewhere better to go, autogenic training gives it words to follow, and mindfulness trains it to come back.
If you want something you can do anywhere, use the slow breath, with the long breath out, and be patient with the first minute.
If you sit all day, try yoga or plain stretching, and do whichever one you will keep doing.
If you cannot sit still, try tai chi, slow movement led by the breath. Across 40 sets of results covering 3,817 people, regular tai chi went with less stress, anxiety and low mood, though the results were too mixed for firm conclusions.
Practise when you are calm. A technique you have used twenty times on an ordinary evening is ready when the bad day comes. A technique you are trying for the first time in the middle of panic often is not, and Why Your Nervous System Fights Some Stress Techniques, linked below, has what to do if one makes you feel worse.
One breath at a time
The relaxation response was there all along. Your body already knows how to slow the heart, loosen the muscles and turn the engine down. Each of these doors is a way of asking it to. Tense was my factory setting. It does not have to be yours.
Pick the one that fits where your stress sits, and try it tonight, before you need it. If you cannot choose, lie down, curl your toes, let them go, and work your way up.
Start small, take it one breath at a time, and watch the tension fade.
Want the whole beginner's kit? Stress Management 101: Simple Techniques Anyone Can Master in Minutes — the two-minute reset, five minutes of mindfulness, and which tool to reach for when.
Did a technique make you feel worse? Why Your Nervous System Fights Some Stress Techniques — the anxiety that rises during relaxation, the dizzy breaths, and how to work with your body instead.
Know someone who is always on edge? Send them this, and let them pick their door.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, stress or anxiety, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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