Progressive Muscle Relaxation: The Best Way to Calm Your Body Before Sleep

Did you ever feel like you forgot how to just relax? Progressive Muscle Relaxation can help you with just that.

There you are. You’ve finished a long day of work and chores, one day of many that came one after the other. Finally, you’re ready to kick back and just enjoy a nice evening to yourself. Maybe you want to cook something nice, watch that show that’s been on the back burner for a while now, or simply go out with a few friends and do something different for a change.

And yet… you can’t seem to get into it. Your body doesn’t start relaxing. It stays locked in, ready for the next challenge to appear. You try to make it relax and let loose for a bit, but it doesn’t respond. You feel restless and alert, but also tired and drained.

In the end, even if you do some of the things you had planned, you don’t get to fully enjoy them. You feel awkward, in a half-tense, half-relaxed kind of way. You don’t enjoy things as much as you used to, and you go to bed kicking yourself for it: “Why is it so hard to enjoy the things I used to like?”

If that sounds familiar, boy, do I have good news. Not only will I tell you why this happens, but also how Progressive Muscle Relaxation can help you (starting today) finally get back to enjoying things again.

Quick Answer: Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) is an evidence-based relaxation technique where you tense and then relax different muscle groups throughout your body. It helps reduce physical tension, lowers stress, and can make it easier to fall asleep by activating your body’s natural relaxation response.

What Is Progressive Muscle Relaxation?

Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) was first developed by physician Edmund Jacobson in the early 1920s and later formalized in his 1929 book Progressive Relaxation. Jacobson was looking for ways to help people relax without relying on medication, and after years of research, he arrived at a surprisingly simple idea.

Finally, the great south African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe perfected it into a 20 min exercise.

Basically, he proposed that your body can’t be physically tense and deeply relaxed at the same time. That’s it.

You can absolutely be tired while still feeling tense. In fact, many people are. Sleep studies have shown that people can carry significant muscle tension even while they’re asleep, which can affect sleep quality. But when your muscles genuinely relax, your brain often follows.

This has to do with the two branches of your autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.

The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for preparing your body for action, what’s commonly known as the “fight-or-flight” response. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense up, and your body gets ready to deal with a challenge.

The parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite. It’s responsible for your body’s “rest-and-digest” response. Your heart rate slows down, your breathing becomes calmer, your muscles begin to loosen, and your body shifts into a state where it can recover, digest food, and eventually fall asleep.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation works by deliberately activating that second system. By tensing and then relaxing different muscle groups, you’re sending your brain a simple message: the danger is over, it’s okay to relax now.

In other words, instead of trying to convince your mind to relax, you start with your body and let your brain catch up, which is MUCH more effective.

How Does Progressive Muscle Relaxation Work?

Stress and muscle tension tend to feed off each other.

When you’re stressed, your muscles will tighten. Back pain, clenching your jaw while you sleep (bruxism), a stiff neck, tight shoulders. All of them are common signs that your body is tense and preparing to deal with a threat. The problem is that when those muscles stay tense for hours (or even days) your brain can interpret that tension as a sign that something is still wrong, keeping you in a cycle of stress and alertness.

That’s why we say they feed off each other.

However, PMR helps break that cycle.

By slowly tensing and relaxing different muscle groups, you become more aware of how much tension you’re actually carrying. Most people don’t realize just how tense they are until they consciously let those muscles relax.

As your muscles release that tension, your body begins shifting from its “fight-or-flight” response to its “rest-and-digest” response. Your breathing slows, your heart rate settles, and your nervous system starts moving into a calmer state.

Thanks to this, it becomes much easier for your mind to stop treating every thought like an emergency. Instead of staying on high alert, your brain gets the message that it’s safe to slow down and relax.

Therefore, you are now ready to enjoy the things you used to like to its fullest.

Benefits of Progressive Muscle Relaxation

So, here’s all the good things PMR gives ya:

• Reduced anxiety and threat levels
• Faster onset of sleep
• Improved sleep quality and higher chance of uninterrupted sleep
• Lower stress and cortisol levels
• Reduced muscle tension
• Can make bruxism disappear
• Improved body awareness (helpful for athletes)
• Promotes overall relaxation

It’s also the de facto tool for dealing with panic attacks. Just think about it, when you are starting to have a panic attack there’s a feedback loop between catastrophic thoughts and your body becoming more and more tense, making it hard to breathe properly and giving you that “I’m suffocating” sensation.

By using Progressive Muscle Relaxation to treat panic attacks, you can do away with them and never have to suffer them anymore.

How to Do Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Alright, let’s get to the meat of the article. Get yourself into a private, cool room. Put your phone away from you with notifications off. Make sure you’ll not be disturbed for the next 15-20 minutes.

Here’s how to progressively relax your muscles:

Step 1: Take a Few Slow Breaths

Start moving your attention from your mind to your body. Doing so while breathing is very effective. You’ll notice that your head is probably restless, swirling with thoughts about what you have to do after and such. Move that attention to how the air goes in and out of your body.

Step 2: Work From Your Feet to Your Face

You are going to start feet first and go upwards.

Choose one foot and tense it as much as you can (without risking cramping!) and keep it that way for 5 seconds.

Once that’s done, relax, and REALLY pay attention to that shift from tension to looseness happening in the muscles there.

Take a full, deep breath now.

Cool. Repeat this 2 more times.

That’s it. Now do the other foot.

Once that’s done, you may continue with the next body part. This is the order to follow:

• Feet
• Calves
• Thighs
• Glutes
• Stomach
• Hands
• Forearms
• Upper arms
• Shoulders  (careful here)
• Neck  (careful here)
• Face

Step 3: Stay With the Feeling

Take another minute simply noticing your body.

Now that you have finished the whole thing, really take in how your body feels right now. 95% of times you’ll feel very relaxed. I’ve even had people fall asleep mid exercise due to how relaxed they felt and how tense they had been before.

Enjoy this sensation. This way the brain REALLY takes note and goes “Huh, being relaxed feels great. I should do more of this” Thus, your baseline tension will start decreasing day by day, to a point where you’ll stop wasting so much energy being tense all the time and have more for the activities you do want to carry out.

Common Mistakes

Things that diminish your gains or can just make things worse:

• Tensing too hard  – you can cramp or injure some small muscles in certain places (shoulders, neck)
• Holding your breath  (this makes it harder to relax)
• Rushing (this is a big one. Count up to 5 painfully slow so the mind doesn’t rush you through this and leave you feeling more tense than before)
• Skipping muscle groups (no shortcuts)
• Expecting immediate results (a single session done well i.e. slowly and methodically will get you results)

When Is the Best Time to Practice PMR?

It’s a good idea to practice this in the mornings, just before you start your day so you approach it with a better predisposition and less tense. In work breaks if you are having a really long and rough day, after work to make sure your body is primed for R&R, and before sleeping to help with setting the body for sleep mode.

How Often Should You Do It?

20 minutes per day every day if you really want to feel the results. I guarantee you in a single week, you’ll feel completely different.

Does Progressive Muscle Relaxation Really Work?

Here’s a few links to organizations and journals endorsing and recommending PMR. It really is a simple, great tool to have

1. Efficacy of Progressive Muscle Relaxation in Adults for Stress, Anxiety, and Depression: A Systematic Review (2024)
2. Progressive muscle relaxation technique improves sleep quality and mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (2026)
3. EBSCO: Progressive muscle relaxation (2024)
4. Effectiveness of Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Deep Breathing, and Guided Imagery in Promoting Psychological and Physiological States of Relaxation (2021)

Who Should Avoid PMR?

This is more of a “consult your physician first” if you have gone through recent surgeries, are recovering from injuries, or have muscle-related medical conditions like fibromyalgia.

Final Thoughts

Progressive Muscle Relaxation is one of my bread and butters. In my opinion, everyone should learn this. It doesn’t require any special know-how, super clear and methodical, and you can practice it almost anywhere. Like any skill, it becomes easier and more effective with regular practice. You can even use parts of it while in stressful situations like arguments or exams (tensing and relaxing your hands, feet or abs). You don’t have to do it perfectly to experience benefits – what matters most is putting in the work and finally teaching your body how to properly relax again.

Now, if you feel that stress, anxiety, or sleep problems have become a regular part of your life, to the point where PMR only touches the tip of the iceberg, then change things up. Use new resources to deal with the problem. Working with a mental health professional is just that, and can help you build a personalized toolkit of solutions (including techniques like Progressive Muscle Relaxation) that fit your needs and help you feel in control of your life. Contact me here.

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