3 Ways to Practice Relaxing Under Pressure

The key word in the title is “practice”.  You can “learn about” relaxing your physical body and managing your energy from a book or a video, but unless you tryout new actions and turn them into practices, not much will change for you.  The focus of the practice here is relaxing under pressure.

All of us experience pressure in our work and in our lives. Think about “the big game”, “the big sale”, the “impending deadline”, or just fitting in with a new crowd.  These are commonalities we can all relate too; and, each of us has a unique set of situations and/or relationships that show up to us as pressure filled. This is because these pressures are not absolute, they have to do with how we coped physically and psychologically with our unique challenges during our formative years. More on this later, but let’s get into the promised ways to practice relaxing under pressure.

1. We all know breathing is one of the keys to relaxing.  But how often do you practice using your breathing to relax?  One simple way to begin practicing is to notice when other people are in situations that would make you feel pressure.  For example, many of us have difficulty relaxing while public speaking.  In this case, the next time you witness someone else public speaking, take note of what is going on in your body and your breath.  Is your heart beating a little faster than normal?  Take a deep breath in through your nose and let it out through your mouth.  Not to big, you don’t want to hyperventilate, but take a few of these deeper breaths. Do this in intervals until your heartbeat seems back to normal. 

Doing this once will mostly just draw your attention to what’s going on in your body when you feel pressure.  Doing it every time you are in this situation, as a regular practice, you will notice that you can relax and calm yourself sooner, and the initial signs of pressure will likely decline.  This practice can even be done when watching whatever it is that makes you nervous on a screen, so anyone can create many opportunities to practice.

2. Now you are ready to get your whole body involved. A second practice for relaxing under pressure is to hold expansive bodily postures.  Two simple ones you can easily find on YouTube are the Tai Chi postures: Tai position or Holding the Ball (various Yoga positions would work as well).  For this practice, your form does not have to be exact, so just pick an example and roughly mimic it.

When you first get into either of these positions, you will notice the effort it takes to hold your muscles in these positions.  The key to relieving this “pressure” is to relax your muscles.  As you do this and stay in the position, your bones, tendons and ligaments will pick up the slack. You can experiment with minor adjustments that make it easier to relax in the same basic position. 

You may only last 20 or 30 seconds the first time you try.  This means you are still relying on your muscles.  With practice, you can learn to relax in these positions for several minutes at a time.  When you can successfully relax in one or more of these positions for two minutes, you are ready for a more advanced practice. 

You may be wondering, what do these postures have to do with the things that make me uptight?  The answer is that the feeling of pressure is a mind/body phenomenon, and you will not be able to change it without getting out of your head and into your body to produce relaxation.  Without sounding repetitive, this will take practice.  But notice, these are things you can do in a short period of time almost anywhere. If you are committed to learn to relax under pressure, there is really no excuse not to practice several times a day.

3. Now we want to combine our relaxed breathing and our relaxed postures with the situation that gives us that feeling of pressure.  In his book, The Art of Learning (2007, Free Press), former world class chess master and tai chi push hands champion Josh Waitzkin describes a practice he calls “building your trigger” (Josh uses the word “trigger” differently than we do at Leader Lab, but this is Josh’s technique). 

The idea is to combine a few things that reliably make you feel relaxed into a routine that you complete just before you enter a situation that has historically been stressful (or just exhausting) for you.  Any meditative activity that already calms you down (moving or still) should be part of it, combined with your new skill of deep breathing and relaxing into expansive postures. Your routine can include listening to some music that relaxes you or even a snack to boost your energy.  In the beginning the routine may require 20-40 minutes to complete, BUT WITH PRACTICE, you can compress the routine into a couple minutes or less to make it practical.

As mentioned earlier, what makes you feel pressure is unique and has to do with how you coped physically and psychologically with your unique life challenges in your formative years.   Because of this, feeling completely relaxed in these pressure situations may also require some exploration of the stories you’ve embodied to make sense of and feel reasonably safe in the world. But simply using the practices is a great place to start and should make a noticeable difference.

Imagine if the situations that made you least comfortable in your life thus far became situations that you sought out, because you knew how to relax yourself under pressure, and you realized that even if you faltered, you could trust yourself to see it through and be stronger the next time. Everything discussed in this article is part of the practice of embodied leadership, for leading in your work and leading your best life.  Did I mention that it takes practice?

Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash.