Welcome to my blog! I’m glad you’ve stopped by. Let’s jump right in to some of the recent insights that I’ve been having during my own self-exploration. That is balance, especially as it relates to tension and relaxation.
 
A lot of my recent insights have been around the idea of tension vs relaxation.
I’ve noticed a pattern:
The times when I’m able to be the most present, perform the best, or remain the most mentally-still under struggle are those when I balance tension and relaxation.
When I have too much tension in a part of my body where is isn’t needed, I find that I am quicker to label things as good or bad and judge myself. I tend to be more impatient and “antsy”. There is far more resistance in my body.
This is a very subtle realization that grows as you exercise this awareness. It started for me by paying very close attention to my body, approaching my physical state with a sense of curiosity and exploration.
Avoid pretending that you don’t notice any tension in an attempt to make yourself feel better. Obliviousness will only lead to dysfunction. Recognize the problem sooner rather than later.
There are two main insights that I’ve had around this idea:

• Tension and Relaxation: Balance and Proper Activation for Maximal Efficiency
• Get Expectations Straight: It’s a Practice

Tension and Relaxation

Big Idea: Nature emphasizes a balance between tension and relaxation.
Basically: Achieve max performance through proper balance of tension and relaxation.
The Principle of Balance has been a concept that has been my primary focus point for the past several months in my own personal development. Particularly around achieving a Minimum Effective Dose.
Previously, I had a tendency to go to extremes in all things, especially when it comes to physical fitness. This has led to a lot stress that I’ve been exploring.
Being someone who lives in the extremes, this realization of balance hit me hard. It mainly started when I approached breath-work with the same mindset of extremes.
There is a subtlety between tension and relaxation. Neither extreme should be your primary point of living (with the exception of brief Discipline Missions). But the amount of tension vs the amount of relaxation isn’t one-to-one.
A little stress can have a huge benefit to the body. Engaging in high-intensity exercises for 30 minutes may lead the body to require rest for many hours after. This balance is very nuanced and highly individualistic, there are many factors.
Success and high performance is achieved when tension is placed on the right things.
Anything can be achieved with proper balance. Learning is about placing attention on what is relevant to move forward at that time. Wheat you place attention on uses your biological resources. The more things that are under tension, the more resources are being used inefficiently.
Consider martial art masters, they have a relatively small frame but can still break bricks with their fists. The key is in the technique and proper activation of the muscles.

Balance Between Tension and Relaxation

• Knowing what should be tense
• Knowing what is tense
• Knowing what should be relaxed
• Knowing what is relaxed

All of these are developed through internal exploration. At first you may be unable to recognize a muscle at all. Overtime you’ll develop an awareness that will continue to grow. For starters, it can help with regular body scans.
Search your body for head to toe, notice anywhere where you feel a contraction. It may feel like a holding onto. Now, try letting go. Do you feel the drop?
This is a practice that pairs very well with meditation. You can make this your meditative practice. It will have benefits from stress reduction to improvement in strength and muscle building. Tension and relaxation is a balance that shows itself in all things. From learning to moving.
What should or shouldn’t be tense depends on the activity and the objective. If you’re doing a bicep curl, tension should be on the bicep. Therefore use your developing ability to recognize what is tense and what is relaxed to ensure no other muscles take over.

A Personal Example That Added to My Insight

 
I have found this particularly useful for developing the muscles of my back. From my own personal exploration I found that when working my back, my biceps would take over. Training to near-failure is vital for muscle growth, but the less obvious point to this fact is what fails and what muscle is growing.
If the target muscle for growth is a muscle of the back, then “failure” should be of that muscle alone. My biceps tend to take over when my back is near failure, making me think I’m ready to add more weight. This leads to me using more and more biceps instead of the muscle I’m targeting of the back.
I find doing slow repetitions (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down) helps to prevent momentum and allows me the time to focus the contraction on the muscle I’m targeting. I can’t lift as much when I do this, but my workouts are far more effective, the target muscle feels exhausted and well worked by the end.
I’ve been lifting since I was 15 years old (I’m now 23), and I’ve applied this technique the past 6 months. I found quicker and more steady gains as a result of this approach.
Another example in my own life that help lead me to the important insight of balancing tension and relaxation. It is all connected.
 

Tension Intention and Attention

There is a beautiful trio that encompasses many important concepts into one.
That is the the trio of Tension Intention and Attention. It’s quite poetic.

• Attention is the awareness.
• Tension is the physical manifestation of attention.
• Intention is the motivation behind the attention.

This balance is all about what needs attention right now, and then placing it there, feeling the application, and then providing rest as needed.
Consider the concept of focused vs diffused modes of thinking. Focused mode is simply high concentrated attention. Diffused mode is a relaxed awareness, attention not on any particular thing.
Insights tend to come after a brief period of focus during a time of diffused thinking. For example, having a big idea while relaxing in the shower.
Focused vs diffused thinking is a balance highly acclaimed for its use in learning. Both the tension and the relaxation aspects are necessary for learning. Much like how muscle doesn’t grow in the gym, from the tension, but outside the gym, during relaxation. Both the tension and relaxation are needed for progress. Hence the importance of this balance in life.
The focused aspect strongly relates to my concepts of Deliberate Action and Intensity of Stimulus. And the diffused thinking strongly relates to my concepts of Clarity and Connection.
This balance shows itself all over in life, once you begin looking for it you’ll be amazed at its applications.
Focused vs diffused, tension vs relaxation, struggle vs recover, challenge vs rest, surrendering, chased by lion and then release (i.e. a Gazelle returns to grazing the grass once escaped, unlike an anxious human who would replay the trauma in their head for years after, never letting go).
Trust. Birth and death. Yin and Yang. Rise and fall. It’s all frequency, energy, and waves.
I’m finding this more and more to be the key to optimal performance.
It is all connected.
The implications are PROFOUND. I’m still exploring this myself. You can bet I’ll share my insights as I have them. There’s something huge here. Stay tuned!
 

Dysfunction

Anxiety and other dysfunctions are signs of imbalance. All disease could be tracked back to an imbalance.
Tension and relaxation were not property balanced such that biological or mental resources were poorly allocated and the development of a tumor or some other malevolent growth took over.
Know when and where to apply tension, and when and where to release. Both the muscles of the body and the awareness of the mind. Master this and life is yours.
Sleep problems? Weight problems? Inability to grow muscle? Irritability? Emotional overwhelm? General stress? Difficulty learning? Trouble with relationships? Trouble sticking to your goals?
I find these are all connected by the concept of balance. Particularly the balance of tension and relaxation.
This is an area that is worthy of devoting one’s whole life exploring. Due to its fundamental connection to nature itself, it can be practiced in many different ways. It’s a concept that is abstracted from any single craft or role. You can apply this to being a doctor or to being a janitor.
How you choose to develop this awareness of balancing tension and relaxation is completely up to you. You can find ways to apply this to anything that you do. The result will be more Effective Action and ultimately more success in that field.
This balance gets right to the core of nature. The art of life lies in this balance. To live effectively is to master this subtle nature.
An insight that I’m still in the works of developing is that you can tap into this at any moment, one moment stressed, the next being a full release. I find that the story my mind creates holds me back from this instant change.
The moments in our life that we have the most profound change in the shortest amount of time, likely are those which the sheer magnitude of the insight bypassed the story so much that our understanding of the was able to be instantly changed.
Perhaps it is the ego and our story we tell ourselves of how the world is that prevents us from changing. I think this is to true, given the connection between our expectations from the stories we tell ourselves and our ability to change.
It is the story we tell ourselves and the desire to keep it consistent that pulls us into an illusion. This illusion is what keeps us from experiences profound and sudden shifts in out states of being.
The mind has no tangible concept of time, it is all relative and perceived, this can be seen when you can work on a project and hours go by in what felt like minutes. This holds for any flow-related activity or even being bored, the perception of time is morphed based on how novel our experience is and the state of neurochemistry.
The ego shows itself all over, including here. The ego, our desire to feel special and the motivation for separation, is the source of the formation of this story and our identification with it.
Time itself, and the past experiences we have, all contribute to this story, it is made up. It is an interpretation. See my post titled The Ultimate Guide to Meaning for more on this idea.
Dropping the story allows us to connect with the true source, the energy, the frequency.
I experience changing mental states rapidly as a profound shift in in consciousness, it is entirely a separate mental state. Like sexual arousal, hunger, or illness. Priorities are different, expectations are different, where the energy goes is different.
It feels exactly like a shift in awareness, like a clicking into a different filter through which I’m now viewing the world, a filter completely different from the one I had a few moments ago.
The irritation I was experiencing suddenly is perceived in a different light. I’m having this experience more and more recently as I spend more time thinking about it and exploring. You can too. The simplest I can explain the sensation is a shift in consciousness.
I think that there are mental roadblocks that the ego has put in place that we want to be true in order to keep our story consistent. The below is my experience with these roadblocks, perhaps you can relate?
I have noticed a tendency of my own where I start of having a tough day and then positive moments come that I quickly brush off with an implicit thought of “I’m supposed to be in a bad mood”. It is as if we look for reasons why something worn’t work or why something won’t change.
Maybe this thought contains within it the roadblock that plagues most people from achieving success. And how much this concept plagues an individual determining how much success they are able to achieve.
Other examples of this rationalization include:

• I’m performing so well on this run only because of having had coffee.
• I’m able to relax now because I’m on a walk, in nature, away from that irritation source.

Basically, you rationalize your positive internal states as being due to external reasons. I pride myself in being someone who is really optimistic and have an effective outlook on life. But, there are mental states that I get into still, where it is far too easy to rationalize away the positive to maintain a negative state.
I also think this is also true for positive moods. When you’re in a positive state it may be easier to brush off something that would otherwise be irritating. But I find that this isn’t as easy to do in a positive mood as a negative mood.
Perhaps this is because of our mind’s bias towards survival. Being in a positive mood doesn’t stop the next moment from killing us, so if something comes up, we better be able to switch to a mind state that would promote survival (e.g. pessimism).
This is a really big idea! We’ll explore it more later. Stay tuned!

How to Develop It?

You develop your ability to use this efficiency tool to achieve more success by one simple practice. Build the mind-muscle connection! Whether the muscle is in your mind in the form of awareness, or in your body in the form of physical muscle, nerves, or tissue.
You can use weight lifting as an analogy to develop your understanding of this concept and see how it applied to you. It is the standard lifting of weights, but with the exploration and curiosity mindset primed for the importance of balance.
I’ve personally found weight lifting to have had a compounding impact on my life as a lot of my insights included connections back to contraction and relaxation in some way. A lot of my personal discoveries from lifting weights (having my own home-gym and never having a trainer, i.e. had to explore it all myself) provided example instances of big ideas put into practice.
Basically, I was able to view ideas from another perspective, that of weight lifting, giving me a better, well-rounded, understanding of how an idea can be applied. The result was a deeper understanding of the concept.
So, you too can use exercise of some form to promote your understanding of this balance and how it applies to you (running was a tool that also provided me a different perspective for unique insights!)
Movement of any sort, but those which target a particular muscle directly (hence the concept of Deliberate Action) work the best.
This works because it teaches you the mind-muscle connection that is vital to operating tension in a focused manner. Building the bicep requires concentrated tension on the bicep, minimizing tension of other muscles.
 
 

Get Expectations Straight

Big Idea: You find your balance through teetering between extremes.
Basically: Balance is a skill that is obtained through trail and error. Start and Calibrate.
Notice the experience that I shared above. If I only mentioned my ability to recognize these subtleties of balance and left out the fact that I still have days that I struggle, you may be quick to label me as special or an anomaly. You may think that you can’t do it and that my situation is special. This is NOT true.
Unfortunately this is what most people want you to believe. We all have a desire to feel special, and talking about all the good in our life or posting our highlight moments on social media helps to fulfill our fantasy. But there are grave side-effects.
Everyone has things they are good at and things they are not good at. It all comes down to what that individual has spent their time developing. The nuance comes from the fact that you can’t see into an individual’s mind nor can you see all their past experiences. This is called ambiguity and the brain does what it can to avoid such uncertainty. It’s primary defense mechanism is to create a story, to attempt to fill in the gapes. This could be the the source of Deja Vu.
Below, we will see how reality isn’t always as it seems.
 

Life is a Wave. It is Frequency. Just Like Emotions. Life and Death.

Regardless of how well-practiced someone might be in presence, meditation, or any other mindful behaviors, there will still be ups and downs. You’ll have days where the practice comes easy, and days where it will be a struggle.
It all comes down to neurochemistry, your mental state, and biology.
This reveals the fundamental concept of all mindfulness practices. It isn’t about whether you experience no pain or not, or about whether you have thoughts or not, it’s all about how you respond when they come up.
This is a theme that shows itself throughout life.
Example: The sign of a true friend isn’t one that is there and supportive when times go well, say, when you have wealth and success. The true friend is the one that remains when you have lost it all.
When it comes to personal growth or deep meaning. The moments that matter are not those that come easy, but those that come from struggle. Just consider anything in your life that you’re proud of accomplishing, it would likely be something that you had to work for, something that you perhaps doubted your ability at first but overcame.
This pattern shows itself in my concept of Clarity. When planning to accomplish an objective, the preparation that truly matters isn’t the scenario where everything goes well.
It won’t, you can’t even visualize what that would even look like, especially if you have any worthy, sizable objective. Planning for everything going right is called a day-dream.
If you’re on a diet, everything going right might be going to a party and there are no sweets or temptations, all the party members aren’t imposing any implicit pressure by them simply drinking alcohol or eating sweets, and you are able to say no.
When you’re n one mental state trying to make decisions for when you’ll be in another mental state is a recipe for disaster. Sitting on the couch relaxed,it can be easy to make resolutions (e.g. New Years) about running a marathon or achieving some goal you’ve always wanted.
But what actually gets results isn’t the day dream, but the accumulation of individual steps along the way. Not all of those steps will be smooth, there will be obstacles that you didn’t predict, that you COULDN’T predict.
Again, the more sizable the objective is (i.e. the more ambitious it is), the less likely you’ll be able to visualize every step of the way. It will seem very ambiguous, the uncertainty will likely even cause doubt and fear. These audacious tasks are what we ultimately are the most proud of and what develop our character the most.
See my post titled The Ultimate Guide to Challenge to dive deeper into developing discipline and struggling well.
Motivation is an emotion, just like happiness. All emotions are waves, there are ups and downs. You can be “happy” and then punched in the face and that emotion is out the door. In a similar way, you may feel motivated, but then the first obstacle comes up, a friend teases you about your diet and offers you a plate full of cake and ice cream, and motivation is out the door.
It is naive and immature to think that you can use pure will to fight biology without proper practice. It takes preparation and repeated practice to remain mentally in control during these moments.
Maturity is recognizing your triggers and taking action to ensure they don’t derail you completely.
This is exactly what my presentation on Clarity was all about.
Not having a plan is planning to fail.
It can be all too easy to buy into a story that someone is different or special in some way. Instagram, full of “red-carpet” moments, of people in their best light (literally and figuratively), make you think that is how they always are.
Presentation of self is a skill. It is a skill often developed in any sort of marketing scheme. Whether fitness models or real-estate. Things will be made to look better than they are to increase their chances of being sold.
I’ve had this insight in various ways.
For example: I realized over and over that people make claims and statements based off of what they think to be true, despite how confident or sure they sound. They are subject to being wrong.
From my own experience with being in “authoritative” roles, I found myself falling into the trap. When asked about a particular question that perhaps I truly didn’t understand in as great of depth as I should, I still answered, perhaps putting the pieces together in real time, or side-stepping the actual question to avoid a topic that I’m not as knowledgeable in.
But all the while, I’m stating it from a position of authority, as if I know. From the listener’s perspective, what I”m saying might as well be true. But due to this inauthenticity, there is a ton of room for improper translation.
The result is ineffective explanation. The individual listening, who doesn’t know any better, has been led astray and doesn’t even know it.
I’ve learned recently that showing vulnerability and genuineness, is important for effective communication. The ego is the motivation for that separation from being in an authoritative stance. Ego distracts away from truth, ego will gladly create some false story to pamper your identity.
Truth should be the target that we continuously seek. Stating what you know, why you THINK it is true, and the things you’re not sure about, while even mentioning questions or concerns the asker raised as being very useful, are VITAL feedback for effective learning. It communicates many things.
One: An effective thinking process for addressing problems or concerns.
Two: It encourages the exploration of questions and stimulates deeper thinking.
And three: It shows that even those in authoritative positions don’t necessarily know it all and therefore shouldn’t have their words taken for gospel. It is important to be skeptical and search out multiple sources.
The point here is that reality is not as it seems. Be aware of your prejudices and tendencies to view nature in a potentially false light (which often occurs in relation to biology).
Those who make something look easy, are not special. They simply had the right experiences, insights, support, and all that in the right order to be at the level that they are at. This is to basically say, they are well-practiced.
This is where things can get tricky and it goes to reinforce the point of our mental biases getting the best of us. You may find it easy to label a very intelligent person a “genius”, attributing their intelligence to an innate born ability. But even those highly intelligent are likely only that way due to certain experiences, insights, support, and all that in the right order.
Someone who is 13 years old and seems like a prodigy perhaps has a whole decade of effective and efficient thinking under their belt. During these young years there are also lots of extra time on the individual’s hands and plenty of environmental support available, especially if they are in a family that promotes the craft.
A family that is absorbed in the craft themselves adds to why “genius” is often attributed to genetics, since it seems like “it’s in the family’. But really it is just the supportive environment that encourages certain behavior.
Perhaps at 3, the individual noticed something at a very impressionable point that led to them seeing the world in a way that led to an avoidance of pain or the obtainment of pleasure. The brain would take careful notice of this and reinforce it, encouraging similar behavior in the future. This could just be something subtle, a reward from a parent, perhaps even implicit, as the child soaks in the environment.
This “pivotal thought” could have started the course of the brain now viewing the world through a different filter, with this new experience, everything seen from this point on now is int he light of this new understanding.
But this new filter helps to remove irrelevant details that most would be distracted by (e.g. parents giving sweet treats or other distractions that morphs what the child’s brain may deem “important”).
This leads to more and more moments where pain was avoided or pleasure was obtained due to this effective view of reality (e.g. in a house full of engineers and you become more able to make sense of the actions that these people are taking,)
This simply leads to a compounding effect promoting a more and more clearer view of reality, fit for the environment they’re in. Simply due to the Principles of Initial Conditions and Compound Impact, the mental model of the world that this individual creates will be one that is far different than most, to the degree that a decade later, at age 13, they seem like a “born genius”.
Whether it is 3, 13, 23, or 53, you can improve at anything far more than you think in far less time than you may think is necessary. You can do this by applying the appropriate Big Ideas from my Effective Living series. For example: Clarity, Awareness, Deliberate Action, Intensity of Stimulus,
The point here is that the environment plays a larger role on what you are capable of than the “hand you were dealt”. It is simply ineffective to sit and look for excuses as to why you can’t do something. You are doing yourself no good.
The creation of the story that there is some external thing outside of your control being the cause of why you’re not better is a comforting story. you don’t have to take any action, you were just dealt a bad hand. But that is exactly the kind of story that the ego amplifies and feeds on. It is a vicious cycle that holds most people back.
 

What I Find That Helps

After knowing where tension is when it isn’t needed, you can begin applying more advanced techniques to release it.
I tend to hold a lot of tension in my jaw and lower abs. I find that this causes my breathing to become more shallow which, in turn, causes a stressed response in my body. This is a cycle that can quickly get out of hand.
I’ve learned the importance of building the awareness first so that I can notice before things spiral down. As mention in my post on Deliberate Action, presence and quality are easier to carry from moment to moment than having to recoup it after losing it.
The following are a quick overview of a few things I’ve found helpful:

• Have a Permissive Moment
  • If I am in a high state of irritability or angst, allowing myself just 1 minuet (set on a timer) of doing whatever my body wants, helps a lot. This is particularly powerful for calming my breath. This is a cue to let go by first stop resisting.
    • Dropping the resistance is often enough for the body to get into a better rhythm.
  • Give yourself a time-frame to indulge in whatever dysfunctional pattern you might be engaging in (e.g. irritation or negative thoughts).
    • It is often the desire to not have these negative patterns that make them persist. The desire often takes the form of resistance through thinking “this shouldn’t be”, which only perpetuates that state.
    • Allowing yourself to feel whatever is there helps to let it go.
• Visualize the Release
  • This is basically the use of the mind-muscle connection to see a point in your body from tension to relaxation. It is like the opposite of flexing or the opposite of contraction during a lift.
    • It is a gentle setting down, a drop, or a letting go.
• Obtain a State of Thoughtlessness
  • Empty the mind of all thoughts.
  • Any thought during a moment of struggle increases the likelihood for a negative thought to come up. This is simply due to the brain’s bias towards survival and it employing its strategies to get you to avoid the struggle to promote survival.
  • Practice mindfulness to help improve this skill. Which is what it is, a skill.

I find fully relaxing requires full absorption. To change from one mental state to another rapidly requires complete commitment. The story we carry brings with it residue from one moment to the next.
This residue is what makes rapid state change difficult, it is the ego’s desire to remain consistent and therefore predictable. If you need to recall an important idea from memory, allow yourself to speak freely, relax the mind by releasing tension.
The cue I use is full commitment. No holding back, whatsoever. No grabbing on or resisting. Just a letting go, a moving freely, an utter relaxing.
Like the ultimately state shift, from awake to sleep, the feeling is like falling asleep. It requires trust and a complete surrender. The past problems need forgotten and an utter presence and stillness is needed.
It is like trying to go from an aroused state to a non-aroused state. Thinking about it will only make it worse, you must fully absorb yourself in some other task. All of your attention there, no thought of holding on, no “checks” to see if the desire is still there. A full letting go and an utter trust.
This is very subtle and it is where consciousness begins to fail. Like depression and anxiety. Where more thinking gets you into trouble. It is very subtle.
There is a lot more to be said here, but I’ll save that for another time. Stay tuned!
 

Summary

Big Idea: Learning the subtlety between tension and relaxation promotes optimal performance.
Basically: Balance in all things. Discover it. Master it.
Life is full of subtleties. These are so easily overlooked as the distractions of modern life exploit our biological biases. It is like a donkey being led to a destination by the means of a carrot hanging above its head.
Learning these subtleties is not obvious and the payoffs are ambiguous. They are highly individualized. I would go as far as saying all spiritual practices are about this balance and exploration of subtleties.
Addressing the subtleties is a wonderful way to to explore your existence, to learn more about yourself, and to improve at whatever your field of interest is. Balance is a principle of nature and therefore shows itself in all things. If you prime your mind for it, you will recognize it in areas that you never expected.
Furthermore, because of the fundamental aspect of this principle, abuse or ignorance of it will lead to dysfunction.
Because we are conscious, we must learn how to live.
 

Your Call to Action

Thank you for reading!
New PROFOUND insights every week! Subscribe to remain up to date.
Balance has played a big part in my life in times of healing and recovery from stress. The exploration of this concept is leading me to many profound insights. What areas of your life do you need to find more balance? In what ways have you had your own insights in the importance of balance? I’d love to hear from you. Share in the comments section below!
Learn more about the author here!
Don’t put off contemplating what the insights from this article mean, find a quiet location and think deeply about what it might mean for you. Just 10 deliberate minutes can make a large difference, set a timer, do it regularly and you will notice the changes within a few weeks. You improve your ability to think and therefore make effective decisions by spending more time deliberately thinking about the relevant subject. Consider applying journaling and meditation to see more profound changes, these are just more deliberate and concentrated forms of quiet and focused thinking. Slow down, find stillness.
I am always looking to improve my reach and the impact that I have with my writing, please provide your feedback in the comments below.
Share with those who need this and “Follow” to Join the MaxedOut Community and receive our latest insights that can improve your life.
New deep, understandable, and thorough content weekly!
 

Featured Image is by Myriams-Fotos on pixabay