How to Practise Progressive Muscle Relaxation for Insomnia
You’ve been in bed for twenty minutes. You’re tired — genuinely tired — but your shoulders are up near your ears and your jaw is clenched around nothing in particular. The mind isn’t the only thing that won’t let go.
Physiological arousal and cognitive arousal are related, but they’re not the same thing. You can slow your thoughts and still find your body holding onto the day’s tension. For people with insomnia, that physical residue is real — elevated muscle tone, a slightly increased heart rate, a nervous system that hasn’t finished coming down. Telling it to relax doesn’t do much. The instruction has nowhere to land.
Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) approaches this differently. Rather than asking your body to release tension directly, it asks you to create tension first — deliberately, in one muscle group at a time — then let it go. The contrast between tense and released is what teaches the body to recognise relaxation. Edmund Jacobson, the American physician who developed the technique in the 1920s, built it on a simple premise: physical relaxation produces mental calm. Not the other way round.
It has a solid evidence base. A landmark review by Morin et al. (1999) published in Sleep — the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s comprehensive assessment of non-pharmacological insomnia treatments — rated PMR an effective intervention for chronic insomnia. It remains one of the most consistently recommended relaxation techniques in clinical practice, and is frequently incorporated into CBT-I treatment packages.
How to practise
The following instructions are drawn from the VA Whole Health Library’s clinical PMR protocol (Mirgain & Singles, 2016, updated 2023), one of the most widely used clinical references for this technique.
Find a comfortable position lying down. Loose clothing helps. Set aside 15 to 20 minutes, more if you’re new to it.
Sync your breath with the movements: breathe in as you tense each muscle group, breathe out as you release. This rhythm does a lot of the work on its own. Don’t hold your breath.
For each muscle group: tense for five seconds — firmly, but not so hard it strains or cramps — then release all at once. Pause for 10 to 20 seconds and notice what relaxation feels like in that area before moving on.
Work through the body in sequence. Starting from the feet and moving upward is a common approach:
Feet and calves — curl your toes downward, then point them toward your head on the next pass. Thighs — press them together or lift slightly. Buttocks — tighten and hold. Abdomen — draw it in. Hands — clench both fists. Forearms and biceps — bend at the elbows, tense the arms. Shoulders — shrug toward your ears. Neck — gently press your head back into the pillow. Face — scrunch the forehead, close the eyes tightly, clench the jaw gently, press the lips together.
If any group causes pain or cramping, reduce the tension or skip it entirely. The goal is awareness of contrast, not maximum effort.
After moving through the full sequence, lie still for a minute. Notice the difference between how your body feels now and how it felt when you started.
A few practical notes
PMR typically takes several sessions before it feels natural. The first attempt often produces more awareness of how tense you were than any obvious relaxation. That’s useful information, not failure.
Once you’ve practiced the full sequence regularly, an abbreviated version becomes available: tensing just the hands, face, and shoulders can be enough to trigger the whole-body release response. Some people eventually get there with a single muscle group. That condensed version is worth working toward — it’s a tool you can use in two minutes rather than twenty.
If your mind is also running — not just your body — PMR pairs well with guided imagery. Use PMR first to address the physical layer, then move into imagery. They address different things.
PMR is a complement to the core behavioural work of CBT-I, not a replacement for it. If you’re dealing with persistent insomnia, relaxation techniques alone are unlikely to resolve it — they reduce physiological arousal, but they don’t address the sleep drive and conditioned wakefulness that keep chronic insomnia running. That work requires a structured program.
The body already knows how to let go. It does it every night when sleep finally arrives. PMR doesn’t teach it something new — it just creates the conditions where that release can happen a little sooner, without waiting for exhaustion to force the issue.
If you’re ready to work on the deeper patterns behind your insomnia, I offer a free initial consultation.
