Why Trying to Relax Makes You More Tense

He told me he plays at fifty percent.

A fiddle player I worked with — a man who has played his whole life and still sits down with the instrument every single day — told me that when he performs he gets to about half of what he can do alone in his own room. It was never the notes; he knows those cold. Something happens to him in the walk from the practice room to the stage, and he could feel it without being able to name it, so we went looking for it together. What we found had nothing to do with the stage itself — it was the size of his attention.

At home, alone, he is just playing — looking around, enjoying it, half-aware of the room and the window and the light coming through it. On stage, the moment a hard passage arrives, his focus snaps down onto that passage the way it would snap down onto the eye of a needle, and everything else in the room disappears. Same hands. Same tune. A different-sized world.

Most of us were taught to fix tension by marching straight at it — roll the shoulders, sit up straight, pull the shoulders back, take a breath and just relax. And when that doesn’t work, which it never really does, we conclude we haven’t tried hard enough. The trouble with trying hard is that you bring that even to the attempt to relax.

I didn’t realize this in the beginning of my own Alexander Technique journey, so I spent years trying really hard to relax. When you command yourself to relax, however, you focus hard on relaxing, which means you bring the very same tight, narrow attention to your shoulders that you brought to the fast run. You aim your tension at your tension, and then you wonder why it wins.

I wrote about this loop in my book, because for a long time I was caught in it myself without knowing:

“Tunnel vision” is a response to creative challenge that plagues many artists. It happens when your focus becomes tight and narrow, and the amount of space you’re aware of becomes very small. When you’re in tunnel vision mode, your mind and body become tight.

Thus tightened, your creative juices dwindle as your Soulforce tries to flow through your now constricted being. To make matters worse, your attention, now hyper-focused, prevents you from even noticing the source of this constriction. So, you try harder and harder to make the flow happen to no avail. This is a vicious cycle that leads to creative death.

The answer to tunnel vision is spacious awareness. Spacious awareness connects you with the space beyond the tunnel. It is a response to creative challenge that balances your habitual hyper-focused attention with an enhanced peripheral awareness. The relaxation and flow it affords make it the ideal state of consciousness for the creative act.

Here’s the takeaway: when you are in tunnel vision, your attention itself prevents you from noticing the source of the constriction. That is why the shoulder rolls never take — you are rearranging a symptom while the cause sits in a blind spot, and the blind spot is made of the very focus you are using to hunt for the problem. Spacious awareness is the way out.

So the fix is not more focus, and it is not less focus either. It is a bigger container around the focus, and I can hand you the same experiment I give my students, so you can feel the difference for yourself right now. Hold up your fingers and pretend you are threading a needle, a real one with a tiny hole, and as you try to thread that imaginary needle, ask yourself: is your sense of space getting bigger, or smaller?

For almost everyone it collapses down to that little hole, and the body collapses along with it, so ask the second question too — are you getting tighter, or freer? You can probably feel the shoulders and the breath narrow right along with the attention.

Now keep your hands exactly where they are, but let your eyes lift off the needle and take in the space above you, the space out to either side, and the space behind your back, which you can sense is there without turning to look. Let your gaze soften and go wide, and then ask the question one more time: what happened to your body? For most people it opens — your whole body softens because you did not so much “try to relax” as stop squeezing your attention into a pinhole.

That is the entire mechanism, and it applies to any activity in life, including playing any musical instrument. A pianist narrows over a fast run, a guitarist narrows into the barre chord, and a singer narrows a half-second before the high note. For any situation, the tension habit is always the same, and so is the way out of it.

Here is how you bring it to real music this week. Take the one part that always tightens you. Play the first note, then stop. In the pause, notice a big sense of space, with space above and beside and behind, and only move on to the next note once you are sure you can carry that sense of space with you. If you lose it partway through, that is not a failure but a good data point, because you have just found your growth edge. Pause, get big again, and go.

This is not an invitation to drift around in a soft, spaced-out haze; you obviously still need to pay close attention to the fine details of what you are playing. What you are after is the balance between them — a central focus held inside a wide awareness, so the focus stops strangling the very thing it is focused on.

The fiddle player did not need to practice more; he was already playing every day of his life. What he needed was to carry the size of his practice-room attention out onto the stage, and to stop narrowing in at the exact moment it mattered most. The first time he held the space all the way through his hardest passage, he laughed, and said it felt like cheating! Only it’s not cheating — it’s only what the body does when you finally stop fighting it.

If you want help building this into your playing so that it holds up under pressure and not only on a calm afternoon, I am opening a small-group version of my Perform Without Pain program. It is the same work I do one-on-one, carried out together in a small circle of musicians. There is a waitlist link below. And whatever you decide about that, try the needle this week, on your hardest part, and see what your shoulders do when the space finally opens up.

Get on the waiting list: soulforcearts.com/pwp