Progressive muscle relaxation teaches you to find tension in each muscle group and let it go, one group at a time. Where it comes from, how to practise it, and why its inventor wanted nothing to do with hypnosis.
Holding, and Letting Go
Written for someone who holds stress in the jaw and shoulders and was taught to tense and release.
Holding, and Letting Go
2:45
You already know this way of working. Holding, and letting go. Noticing the difference. Your body learned it once, and bodies remember. Each time I ask you to tense a muscle, do it gently. About half of what you could. Never to the point of discomfort. The point is not the effort. The point is the contrast. The moment after.
Let's begin with your hands.
Bring your attention to your right hand. And slowly, make a fist. Not too tight. Just enough to feel it. Notice the fingers pressing into the palm. The tightness across the knuckles. The small effort in the wrist. Hold it. And release. Let the fingers uncurl. Let the hand fall open, heavy. Notice what's there now. Maybe warmth. Maybe tingling. Maybe a heaviness, as if the hand is sinking. That is the difference between holding and letting go.
Now your left hand. Curling the fingers, making a gentle fist. Feel the grip. Hold. And let go. Fingers soft, palm open, the hand resting like something set down carefully. Both hands now, quiet. Nothing to grip. Nothing to hold on to.
Your forearms. Bend your wrists gently back, fingers toward the ceiling, and feel the pull along the forearms. Notice that stretch, that tightness running toward the elbows. Hold. And release. Let the hands drop, let the forearms go heavy. Feel the softness spreading, from the wrists toward the elbows. Softer than the hands were, because the hands have already shown the way.
Edmund Jacobson (1888–1983) was a Chicago physician and physiologist who began his work on relaxation as a graduate student at Harvard in 1908. His starting point was physical, not psychological: a startled person tenses, an anxious person stays tense, and a tense body keeps the mind alert. If people could learn to switch off residual tension in their muscles — the slight contraction that remains even when we think we are at rest — the mind, he argued, would quiet with them.
He set the method out in Progressive Relaxation in 1929 and for general readers in You Must Relax in 1934. He spent decades measuring muscle activity with instruments he built himself, looking for the point at which a muscle is truly at zero.
Jacobson’s original course was long. Patients worked on a single muscle group for an hour or more, over many sessions, learning to recognise faint tension and release it — a training that could take months. The aim was not a pleasant half hour but a skill: differential relaxation, keeping only the muscles a task needs and letting the rest go, at a desk, at the wheel, in bed.
In the 1950s the psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe shortened Jacobson’s method to a few sessions and used it as the calm half of systematic desensitisation. In 1973 Douglas Bernstein and Thomas Borkovec published the manual that most therapists, physiotherapists and recordings still follow: sixteen muscle groups, each tensed for a few seconds and then released, later merged into seven groups, then four, then relaxation by recall alone.
The tensing is the part people remember, and it was never the point. It is there to make tension easy to notice, so that you learn what its absence feels like.
Sit or lie somewhere quiet and give yourself fifteen to twenty minutes. For each group, tense for about five to seven seconds — firmly, not to the point of pain — then release all at once and notice the difference for twenty to thirty seconds before moving on.
Go gently around any injury, and skip a group that hurts. When you finish, stay still for a moment, count slowly back up to alertness, and stand up slowly.
Jacobson was explicit: his method was not hypnosis and should not borrow from it. He asked his patients to observe tension, not to imagine calm, and disliked any instruction that told them how they would feel. Relaxation, for him, was something the body does when a muscle stops contracting — nothing to believe in.
That is the honest line between the two. Progressive muscle relaxation works from the muscles up; hypnosis works from images and words down. Ericksonian hypnosis, the kind developed by the psychiatrist Milton Erickson, goes further still from Jacobson: it speaks indirectly, through metaphor and permission, and writes for the one person listening.
The two meet in the middle more often than their founders would have liked. Nearly every hypnotic induction passes through the body — the jaw, the shoulders, the breath — and many hypnotists borrow a round of tension and release to begin.
Quies is not a progressive muscle relaxation course and will not take you through sixteen groups. It is AI hypnosis in the Ericksonian manner: a few questions about how you are right now — a word to choose, a slider, a sentence if you want to write one — and then a session written for that moment and spoken to you.
If you practise PMR, the body will be familiar ground: the session often begins where you do, in the shoulders and the jaw and the breath. Then it moves on from the muscles into images, and asks nothing of you but to listen.
Keep the skill. Jacobson’s method gives you something to use anywhere, at any time, without a voice. A written session is for when you would rather be led.
A session that starts in the body and goes where you need it to.
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Quies is a wellness tool for relaxation and self-exploration. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, or cure any condition. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact a qualified healthcare professional.