The relaxation response: a 10-minute nightly practice

There's a measurable physiological state that's the opposite of stress. With practice, you can turn it on at will.

In the 1970s, Harvard cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson was studying meditation and noticed something striking. People who regularly practiced certain forms of meditation could reliably produce a measurable physiological shift: lower heart rate, slower breathing, lower blood pressure, slower brain waves, reduced muscle tension. The shift looked like the precise opposite of the stress response.

He called it the relaxation response, and demonstrated it wasn't unique to meditation. It could be produced by any practice that combined two things:

1. A simple, repeated mental focus (a word, a phrase, a breath count)
2. A passive attitude — not trying, not judging, just returning to the focus when the mind wandered

This turned out to be one of the more useful pieces of behavioral research for insomnia. Because the relaxation response is the inverse of cognitive arousal — and cognitive arousal is what most often keeps insomniacs awake.

Why it works for sleep

When you lie down at night, your nervous system is supposed to shift from sympathetic (alert, active) to parasympathetic (calm, quiet). For good sleepers, this happens automatically. For insomniacs, it often doesn't. The body stays in low-grade arousal, and the brain follows.

The relaxation response is a way of manually triggering the parasympathetic shift. With practice, it becomes a learned skill — the same way an athlete learns to slow their breathing before a free throw.

Importantly, the goal of the relaxation response isn't to make you fall asleep. The goal is to lower arousal. Sleep, when it comes, comes on its own once arousal is low enough.

This distinction matters because trying to use the practice as a sleep aid often backfires (we covered this in Why "trying harder to sleep" backfires). When you're focused on falling asleep, you're producing effort, which is itself arousing. When you're focused on the relaxation response, you're producing the opposite — and sleep often follows as a side effect.

A simple practice

The basic practice is unfussy:

1. Find a comfortable position. Lying down in bed is fine. So is sitting in a chair earlier in the evening (especially if you're new to it — practicing during the day first makes it easier to use at night).

2. Close your eyes.

3. Pick a focus. A word ("calm," "one," "rest"), a short phrase, or just the sensation of your breath moving in and out. The specific choice matters less than the consistency.

4. Breathe slowly and naturally. Don't force the breath. Just notice it.

5. On each exhale, silently repeat your focus. Or count breaths. Or just feel the breath leave.

6. When your mind wanders — and it will, constantly — gently return to the focus. Don't judge the wandering. Don't try to suppress thoughts. Just notice and return.

7. Continue for 10-20 minutes.

That's it. The technique is simple. The practice is the work.

Two notes that make a real difference

Practice during the day, not only at night. The relaxation response is a skill, and skills aren't built when you most need them — they're built when you don't. Practicing for 10-15 minutes once or twice during the day makes it much easier to drop into the state at night when the stakes feel higher. Many CBT-I programs recommend daytime practice for at least the first few weeks.

The wandering mind is normal. First-time practitioners often think they're "doing it wrong" because thoughts keep intruding. The intrusions are the practice. Each time you notice a thought and return to your focus, you're training the skill. Hundreds of returns per session is normal.

What it's not

A few things worth being clear about:

• It's not a sleeping pill replacement. It's a tool to lower arousal. Sleep follows arousal reduction; it isn't the direct goal.
• It's not the same as "trying to relax." Trying to relax is itself a form of effort. The practice is more about allowing than achieving.
• It's not a one-time fix. Like any skill, it builds with consistent practice. Two days of trying isn't enough to evaluate it.
• It's not religious or mystical. Benson stripped the practice down to its physiological essentials specifically to make it accessible to people who weren't interested in the spiritual contexts where similar techniques originated.

Why this fits into CBT-I

CBT-I is usually built from several components: stimulus control, sleep restriction, cognitive restructuring, and a relaxation practice. They work together. Stimulus control retrains your bed. Sleep restriction concentrates your sleep pressure. Cognitive restructuring reduces the thoughts that fuel arousal. The relaxation response gives you a direct, practiced way to lower arousal in the moment — including at 3am when nothing else is available.

The takeaway

The relaxation response is one of the most studied and most accessible tools for managing the kind of low-grade arousal that keeps insomniacs awake. It takes ten minutes a day, requires nothing to buy, and works better the more you use it. The trick is to practice it as a skill, not a rescue — and to let sleep be the side effect, not the goal.

Lull is a calm bedtime audio app for adults with insomnia, designed to help you fall asleep without overstimulation. Free at lullstories.com.