• Relaxation training overview and exercise tips

Summary: In this exercise, you’ll practice activating the relaxation response to reduce stress. During the exercise, you’ll focus on making contact with different body parts and noticing sensations. It is normal for your mind to wander away to other things like thoughts or memories during the exercise. If it does, bring your attention back to focusing on the bodily sensation. If your mind wanders away one hundred times, bring your attention back one hundred times. As you learn to activate the relaxation response, and with regular practice, you’ll find it takes only a few minutes to experience relaxation. Eventually, you can perform the exercise without listening to the instructions.

Summary: Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a technique designed to reduce stress by systematically tensing and then relaxing different muscle groups in the body. In the exercise, you’ll tense different muscles for a few seconds and then relax them. Tensing and relaxing different muscles throughout your body can help increase your awareness of physical sensations and promote a sense of calm and relaxation.

Summary: In this exercise, you’ll work on inducing a pleasant sensation of heaviness in your extremities, like what you experience shortly before falling asleep. You’ll also work on generating soothing warmth, helping you shift from stress to relaxation. In the exercise, you’ll get phrases—verbal directives—to say silently five times each. It turns out that our bodies will listen to what we tell them. During the exercise, your attitude is important. This is the kind of training where the more you try to relax, the less it will happen. So, the best approach is to have the intention to relax but remain detached from any results. It’s only a matter of time until you feel relaxed.