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A mindfulness practice every Sunday

Presence ← Presence

Guided practice

Paired muscle relaxation

Tense as you breathe in, let go all at once as you breathe out, then notice the difference. Follow the ring — once you have the rhythm you can close your eyes.

One round through four muscle groups, a bell at each change.

How to do it

  1. Squeeze the muscle group firmly for five seconds as you breathe in — about three-quarters of your full strength, never to the point of cramping.
  2. Let go all at once as you breathe out. Say relax to yourself.
  3. Stay seven seconds, the length of the out-breath, and notice how different it feels.
  4. Move on: face, then shoulders and hands, then stomach, then legs and feet.

The sudden release is what matters. Easing off slowly blunts the contrast — and the contrast is how your body learns to recognise tension at all.

Before you start. Tense firmly, never to cramping or pain. Skip anywhere injured. The ring paces the breath — five seconds in, seven out. Sitting or lying down both work — lying down usually goes deeper.

How often

A full session is ten to twenty minutes, so let it loop rather than doing one round. Daily for the first two weeks — ideally morning and evening — then a few times a week to keep it. Most people notice the difference somewhere in the second week.

Where it comes from

Paired muscle relaxation is a skill from DBT — Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan. It is one of the TIP skills, the crisis survival set: tip the temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, and paired muscle relaxation. They all do the same job — change your body chemistry fast enough to bring intense emotion down when you are past the point of thinking your way through it.

Paired muscle relaxation is the one you have to build in advance. The pairing only works in a crisis if it already exists, which is why it is practised when you are calm.

Underneath it is progressive muscle relaxation, Edmund Jacobson's technique from the 1930s, shortened here to the four-group version that still has research behind it. What DBT adds is the pairing itself: the out-breath and the word relax on every release, repeated until the word alone starts to bring the relaxation with it.