Have you heard of the Alexander Technique? I hadn’t heard of it either, until my freshman year of college when I was in a lot of pain and having a ton of anxiety. One of my music professors suggested I take a semester of lessons with the Alexander Technique teacher on staff. Even though my schedule was very full and I wasn’t really sure what I was signing up for, I registered for weekly lessons. Here’s what came next and how it changed the course of my life.

I showed up for my first lesson and the professor explained that she would use gentle manual guidance in various activities. She said that as she guided me through activities, my job was to do nothing at all, at least for now. This was a very strange idea! I was the student who wanted to do everything right. In fact, I wanted to do everything perfectly. Eventually, with a very light and supportive touch, she guided my hand out to the side and asked me not to help her lift it. I agreed and refrained from helping. Or so I thought.

“What would happen if I let go of your arm?” She asked. I assumed that it would fall to my side, and said so. Through the tension in my arm that she could feel, but that was too habitual for me to detect, she knew that wouldn’t be the case. When she decided to let go of my hand, it stayed right where it was! Even though I thought I was letting her do the work of moving my hand, I had been helping her all along. With amazement and curiosity, I laughed. Why did it feel like I was “doing nothing” to help when I was really using quite a lot of muscular tension to suspend my arm in the air?

I’ve since learned that the reason we cannot detect many of our muscular patterns is because they have become habitual. They’ve long since become “muscle memory” and can be completed on “autopilot.” Once something becomes automatic, it feels right to us. When something feels right, we hardly notice it, if we do at all. I had gotten so used to moving my arms with excess tension that it felt normal to overwork in this way. Because my brain paired a certain amount of tension with that movement, I was unable to let my arm be moved with less tension. The excess tension happened immediately when my arm was moved, even by someone else!

I learned that daily stress, anxiety about getting things perfect, and the ways I was using myself throughout the day (“my posture”), had led me to create similar unconscious habits not just in my arms but throughout all of my musculature. With continued practice of the Technique, I learned to detect the excess tension, stop it from interfering with my activity, and rewire my brain for more effective and conscious control. I’ve learned to play, move, and express with more ease and freedom and to notice when I’m doing something with myself that I didn’t mean to.

Quickly, I understood why the Alexander Technique is widely used to help with posture and movement. It took me just a little longer to realize that that’s just the beginning of its potential for self development. The Alexander Technique is a unique educational method that helps with impulse control and ultimately guides us to reduce our stress levels. How?

Since my brain had come to match a certain amount of tension with the idea of moving my arm, every time I began to move my arm I would immediately revert to that amount of tension. That was the habit. To learn to use less tension, I would need to change my thinking and somehow stop myself from reverting to my old habit. This is where impulse control comes in. Early on in my lessons, someone could have said “raise your hand” and I would have immediately thrown my arm into the air with my usual amount of force. I would have had an automatic reaction to the impulse to do as they asked.

The Alexander Technique uses a set of procedures that helps re-educate the way we respond to stimuli. During a lesson, my professor would ask me to raise a hand. It was my task to once again do nothing. I would hear her request and refuse to respond in my habitual way by throwing my arm into the air. This was a refusal to reinforce the old habit. I would then give a mental direction (an intentional thought) to myself to let my arm be free from excess tension. (At this time, I had no idea what it felt like to move with less tension. Over time, the hands-on guidance from my teacher helped me experience this new type of movement). Only if I could continue to not give in to the old habit of overworking my arm, I would let it rise into the air. Allowing movement to happen in a non-habitual way felt novel, as if my arm floated up on its own. It was amazing to learn that movement with so much ease and awareness was possible.

While my “posture” became much more open and upright and I learned to prevent many pains I was used to having, my true love of the work came from learning its deeper implications. It was stunning to learn that not only could I free myself from habitual muscular patterns, but that I also could free myself from patterns of thought and behavior that had been with me for decades. I dove into the study of impulse control and began to notice all the things I do and think habitually, because they feel right, without stopping to consider the manner in which I am doing them.

Just like I can learn to rewire my reactions to stimuli to move, I can rewire my reactions to thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. As adults, we have habitual responses to most things in life. We would all agree that some are helpful while others get us into situations we don’t mean to be in, sometimes repeatedly. I began to notice that certain stimuli triggered habitual thoughts or emotive response for me. While I previously may not have considered how I used my thoughts to respond to something, I now knew that I could stop and decide if I needed to change something before acting. I was developing the ability to discern new intentional responses to impulses from my previous reactionary or habitual behaviors.

As you can imagine, it was incredible to learn about myself this way. As I continue on this path, it still takes time and patience. It means that when I become aware of a new habit I have the ability to decide whether it is helpful or if I should work towards rewiring it to something healthier. It gives me the ability to observe myself, my emotions, and my thoughts with more neutrality and patience so that I can make clear decisions and construct a life that is thoughtful and meaningful. It doesn’t get me any closer to being “perfect,” as my younger self would have wanted, but it gives me access to more curiosity, freedom, and endless opportunities to learn.

How might you interact differently with the world if you had an expanded capacity to notice the way you respond to stimuli? What if you could become aware of the subtle muscular patterns that result from an emotion you are feeling? What if you empowered yourself to be more accurate in your words, your behaviors, and your ability to understand by learning to detect when you’ve done more than you need to?

Check out the Alexander Technique page to learn more.