No one likes anxiety. At least no one I know. It’s unpleasant at best and debilitating at worst, causing circling thoughts, tension in our muscles, stomach aches, headaches, and a variety of other mental and physical symptoms. No doubt about it, frequent anxiety can interfere with our mental well-being. Thankfully, there are many different coping techniques to help and I’ll be talking about one of these coping techniques today called Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR). With PMR, you tense and relax a group of muscles one at a time within a specific order. The idea behind PMR is to relax your body, and your mind will follow. Various studies have shown the effectiveness of PMR in combating anxiety, insomnia, and more. You can check out such a study here if you’d like 🙂 So let’s get started and kick anxiety in the butt!
Practicing Progressive Muscle Relaxation
First, you’ll want to set aside 15 – 20 minutes to do the full exercise. Find a quiet place you can lay down. As I mentioned before, in the exercise you’ll be contracting and relaxing your muscles in time with breathing. You can either go up the body, starting with your feet, or reverse it and go down the body starting with your forehead. The muscle groups that will be focused on are the feet, the legs, the hands, the arms, the butt, the stomach, the chest, the neck, the shoulders, the mouth, the eyes, and the forehead, in that order or in reverse order. Some like to group muscles together a bit more so you can also do that if you’d like. For example, instead of focusing on the forehead then eyes then mouth, some may choose to focus on the face as a whole. Find what works best for you!
Once you’ve found a quiet spot to lay down, give yourself a few moments to settle. Take a few deep relaxing breaths, as many times as you would like before the start of the exercise. When you’re ready to start the exercise, inhale and tense a muscle group (either your feet or your forehead) as hard as you can for about 5 seconds, but no more than 10 seconds. As you exhale, release the tension in that muscle group.
Relax for a brief period, 10 – 20 seconds, before moving onto the next muscle group (if you started with your forehead, the next muscle group will be the eyes and if you started with your feet, the next muscle group will be the legs) and perform the same action as above. As you move on, notice the tension leaving your body.
Continue to practice this technique and you may find that it helps quite a bit with decreasing anxiety and encouraging relaxation. The first time you try it, you may not notice significant results. It took me a few times to practice before I really felt relaxed afterward, so give it some time and practice it to see if it’s right for you. It’s also important to note that you don’t need to wait until you’re anxious to practice this. This is a great exercise to do while you’re falling asleep at night or even when you’re already relaxed. You may discover that you’re holding tension in part of your body without knowing it.
If you’d like more guidance, I recommend checking out this PDF from anxietycanada.com or watching this YouTube video by Relax for a While.Â