How to Unclench

1. The Pain of Clenching

In 2001, Scott Boswell was seven years into his professional cricket career, enjoying one of his best seasons yet and gearing up for the biggest match of his life: a cup final at Lord’s.

"It was," he told a journalist, "going to be one of the best days of my life."

The night before, his coach told him, “Don’t fuck up.” This buried into his mind, and during his first over (for American readers, this is like pitching in baseball) he noticed his muscles start to clench. His fingers became so tense that he wasn’t able to release the ball.

The next over, he bowled wide. His muscles contracted tighter still, attempting to shut out humiliating jeers from the crowd. 

He bowled wide again, and again, and again eight more times… his mouth was dry, he felt like he couldn’t move. By the end, he was barely able to walk three meters to pick up a water bottle and asked his teammate to fetch it. It was one of the worst bowling performances ever recorded on live television. 

Boswell was sacked by his club days later, fell into a depression, turned to alcohol and spent the next ten years recovering.

· · ·

This is an extreme case, and likely you’re not a professional athlete, but what has clenching cost you in your life?

I don’t mean just physical discomfort (although that might be present) but what opportunities have you squandered due to clenching?

I’ve heard stories from students who defensively said words he didn’t mean that ended a great relationship, one whose small intestine tightened like a ratchet as she wrote a resignation letter that didn’t get sent, or an ambitious post-doc whose throat constricted with anxiety during a job interview.¹¹

If you pay attention, in the moments when you are procrastinating on an important task, saying something your future self will regret or compulsively over-thinking, you are almost certainly sitting at the clenched end of this spectrum.²²

And it’s not just the major moments — clenching impacts in subtle ways. If you’re anything like me, it looks like over-thinking a text reply, holding my breath whilst replying to email (so-called ‘screen apnea’), refreshing my Instagram feed, or overlooking creative third doors that would have unlocked serendipitous opportunities.

I received an email recently in which the self-aware sender described his default clenched state in the following way:

"One of my biggest struggles is what I can only describe as the castration of my agency. The ultimate contrast is that I have an MBA, yet I’m driving a bus, which, as you likely know, is perfectly logical from the perspective of a stuck nervous system. My capacity is there, but my system won't let me access it."

I hear stories like this all the time. Perhaps what was most painful for me personally, I remember walking into a subway station in London feeling like a zombie, out of touch with any spark of aliveness, as if there was a pane of glass between my life and my actual experience of life.

And as Annie Dillard once wrote "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

At this very moment you are sitting somewhere on this spectrum, from clenched to unclenched. And the more clenched you are, the fewer options you will perceive (see the interactive slider below)

Once you start noticing it, you can’t un-see it.

If you’re experiencing any kind of physical pain, bracing makes it worse. If you’re watching someone’s voice go high on stage while their posture stiffens, yep, that’s clenching nuking their charisma.³³

The more you pay attention, the more you’ll notice that it’s difficult to feel anything at all when you’re clenched.

Try it for yourself as you’re reading this: deliberately clench your entire body like you're trying to vacuum-seal yourself from the inside. Now, try to feel an emotion: joy, pleasure, or anything at all.

You almost certainly won’t be able to. That’s because clenching drastically reduces the range of options and feelings available. In other words, clenching dulls your aliveness and reduces your perceived options.

Here's Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, describing his experience of the clench tax:

“Clenching seems to be my default response to uncertainty or overwhelm or other difficulties to tighten up against them so as to hold them at bay – when in fact that leads only to paralysis and a sense of sterility.”

· · ·

2. Clenching Is a Prediction

What is clenching? If we do it so much, surely there’s an adaptive reason?

Try this thought experiment: imagine an alien neuroscientist studying your behaviour on an ordinary Tuesday. He understands little about human culture, but he knows that mammals contract their muscles when preparing for danger.

His field report might read something like:

8:12 a.m. Repeated threats detected from a glowing rectangle.

10:43 a.m. Defensive contraction observed in proximity to another member of the species.

4:57 p.m. Muscular defenses activated anticipating critical feedback, apparently preparing to be punched by the future.

He might conclude that Earth is perpetually hostile. Alternatively, he might wonder why human physiology defends itself in absence of an external threat.

There is no formal scientific explanation of what causes these muscular defenses, even experienced meditation teachers find it hard to define. That said, clenching is best thought of as the biological system making a prediction – shrinking the uncertainty aperture on your experience to reduce overwhelm – like sketching a map of a perpetually shifting sensory landscape.⁴⁴

At this point, you might be wondering whether ‘unclenched’ is simply another word for ‘relaxed’. Pay close attention, however, and you can see them as different dimensions: you can be in a deep parasympathetic, low-arousal state (a fancy way to say relaxed) while remaining highly clenched (e.g. depressive or freeze states), or perhaps a glass of pinot will help you unclench, but you might not be lower energy.

You can also be in a high-energy + unclenched state: this is where we typically experience creative flow, pleasure or expansive states like awe and wonder.

Open the theoretical neuroscience rabbit hole A speculative model outlining how clenches get stuck and a proposed mechanism for how trauma is stored in the body NERDY DETOUR (6 minute read) ↓

The most compelling explanation I know of comes from theoretical neuroscientist Mike Johnson, whose vasocomputation model proposes that vascular clenching allows your nervous system to physically hold a prediction in place.⁵⁵

In a recent paper, neuroscientist Ruben Laukkonen tracked brain dynamics during unclenching and showed that unclenching practice (the researchers called it ‘effortless awareness’) leads to what can be measured as ‘criticality’ on the level of the brain. Ruben describes this as:

“A system at criticality is exquisitely poised: neither rigid nor chaotic, neither stuck in what it was nor dissolving into noise. It is maximally sensitive, flexible, and synergistic. It efficiently processes what comes next”

One interpretation is that clenching opposes this flexible, sensitive, flow-like state. We have already made up our minds; our thinking has hardened; we no longer look for a third door.

When I was a kid at school, there was a teacher who was teased for ‘having a stick up her butt’, it wasn’t kind, but they were accurately observing that she had physical tension and also overly rigid beliefs.

Clenching swaps flexibility for short-term stability. By stiffening the body and narrowing available responses, it makes uncertainty easier to manage.

This offers a biological mechanism for the old idea that humans prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.

Some clenches last only a moment, like a flinch. Others become habitual: the same protective response comes even after the situation has changed.

According to Mike's theory, there are two different types of clenching:

1. Short-term clenching: vascular smooth muscle constricts, reducing circulation to nearby neurons and their capacity to update.

2. Long-Term 'Latches': When a clench is held for long enough, the smooth muscle tissue glues itself into a contracted state (latch-bridge mechanism), a state that could last for days, months, or even decades. Partial contraction becomes the new default.

These latches can cause numbness or greatly reduced sensation because the tissue receives less blood.

Latches are harder to release because muscle tissue has been chemically glued into a contracted state. Mike hypothesizes that this is how trauma is physically stored in the body.

It’s likely that addictive substances hook us precisely because they temporarily unclench the vascular system, and people come to depend on that relief.

· · ·

3. What Does Clenching Protect Us From?

TL;DR: clenching is an emotional discomfort avoidance mechanism

∼∼

Clenches often show up as protective behaviour: a perfectionist guarding against critical feedback might hold a tight jaw and neck (though the mapping varies from person to person).

Back in the 1930s, Wilhelm Reich called these patterns ‘character armor’ (his student Alexander Lowen later sorted them into five structures): ‘typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against their emotional excitations’⁶⁶

Here’s another surprisingly deep question: why can't I just decide to unclench when I want to, in the same way that I can choose to unclench my fist? @dfwtee expresses this frustration in an unironically clenched fashion.

Your body is making the adaptive choice.

For example, if, like me, you got angry at teachers as a kid, you were likely punished. Or if you cried on the playground, the other kids teased you.

Because we are social mammals, both experiences can lock in an adaptive clench. The next time anger or sadness arises, we associate this with bad things, so push it back down to avoid more punishment.

Most people have never fully experienced an emotion without clenching against it. If I could put one idea on a billboard for a billion people, it would be this:

Feeling a feeling isn’t what makes an experience unbearable. Our suffering comes from clenching against what we feel.

There is a word for clenched excitement: fear.

You can run the experiment for yourself. Next time you’re afraid of something, raise your hands above you like you're celebrating and hop up and down on the spot. Exclaim “I’m excited, I’m excited, I’m excited,” five times and notice what happens.

There’s a whole section coming on how to unclench, but if I was to distill it down to a single question it would be:

‘If you couldn’t feel clenched right now, what emotion would you have to feel?’

---

Here’s an example of what this looks like when emotion surfaces from beneath the clench (bodyworker Garry Lineham working on LeAnn Rimes)

PLAY VIDEO00:39

Here are five specific examples of common behaviour patterns that arise due to clenching, along with the emotions that are being resisted against, and the ‘brilliant logic’ that keeps the strategy of the clench in place.

---

I viscerally remember the first time I experienced what it was like to deeply unclench into an intense emotion.⁷⁷

Back in 2017, my former fiancée took her own life by overdosing on her anti-anxiety medication. As I was walking towards her memorial bench on a windy pebble beach, I could feel a flood of grief about to roll through, as if triggered by an avalanche upstream of my consciousness.

I sank onto my hands and knees and allowed myself to be taken by it. Contrary to what I had anticipated, the grief didn’t crush me. Instead, it opened into an overwhelming, primal sense of loving interconnectedness.

At first the experience confused me. I believed that grief was simply bad, yet what I felt was deep love and raw aliveness.⁸⁸

· · ·

4. Feeling Good is Our Default State

So if clenching leads to making decisions that you will likely regret later, then how do you become someone your future self will thank you for?

The mechanics of feeling really good are weird. You may believe that parts of your life need fixing because you don’t have enough money or the right partner. That story comes from cultural conditioning: an idea that we must somehow earn the right to feel good.

By now it’s a trope: a founder sells their company and falls into an existential crisis, or an Olympian wins gold and sinks into depression.

Fame and success simply amplify one’s internal state. Putting more points on your scoreboard of choice rarely creates lasting contentment. Or as Jim Carrey put it:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.”

So what is the answer to lasting contentment and happiness?

Philosophers have debated this for thousands of years, but I believe there is an answer, one that runs counter to what most people believe.

The default Western view is that feeling good must somehow be earned by adding things to your life. However, it is my direct experience that feeling good is our default state when we remove the clenching.⁹⁹

This simple practice raises the ceiling of happiness far higher than most of us imagine. The experience of deliberately unclenching feels like sliding into a deliciously-toasty Japanese onsen with an expansive view that you can’t help but go ‘ahhhhhhh’.

Dedicate a few hundred hours to the practice and your baseline of happiness becomes not a little higher but, according to serial unclenchers like Nick Cammarata, 30–50 times higher. And these unclenched states can become default traits.

I’ve also noticed that unclenching seems to cultivate the virtues I care about: courage, kindness or discernment.

This is because there is no longer a scarcity mindset around feeling good. If you truly believe in your ability to relax into a sense of fundamental wellbeing, then you stop managing the world around you to make you feel a certain way.

You may be feeling some healthy skepticism. It’s an enormous claim, and language often fails to convey the scale of an inner experience. Here’s an exchange between Shinzen Young and a student who asked whether his practice was worth the effort.

· · ·

If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer--I'll take the one day of enlightened living. IT'S THAT GOOD, DUDE.

All the best,
Shinzen

· · ·

II. The Unclenching Loop

If you only take away one thing from this essay, let it be this: unclenching is a trainable skill.

If you run self-guided experiments and track what you learn (I call these loops), you will almost certainly make real progress over time.

No one taught us how to unclench. Self-help offers clichés such as ‘Let go or be dragged’ and ‘What you resist persists’, but there aren’t many practical guides out there. That said, most people get the hang of it pretty quickly.

I offer these practices with a caveat: unclenching is not yet a hard science. But we do need one.¹⁰¹⁰

One counterintuitive principle: intensifying a clench and cycling through clench and release seems more effective than sending a single ‘release’ signal.

You can try this by following your breath. Pay close attention and you may notice a slight clenching on the inhale and softening on the exhale. After a few minutes, the breath often becomes quieter and the exhale easier to release.

1. Run Your First Loop

In AI, loops optimize a system. In research, loops run the scientific method. Here, the same logic applies to your mental and emotional life.

Try the 60-second unclenching loop Five simple steps to notice what unclenching feels like in your body OPTIONAL EXPERIMENT (60 seconds) ↓

Every loop has the same four steps: notice a clench, try a move (soften it, or tighten and release it), track what changes, then keep what worked and drop what didn’t. Here's a basic loop you can run in 60 seconds.

1. Make a clenched fist with your hand → unclench/open it → notice how that feels.

2. Hold your hands up on either side of you, so you can just about see them in your peripheral vision. Relax your gaze and then very gradually move them backwards until they fade from your view.

3. Drop your lower jaw away from your upper jaw by about one-eighth of an inch so the teeth aren't touching.

4. Notice a different part of your body that feels tight (maybe the face or belly) → see if you can relax in the same way.

5. Hang out here, track how you feel and whether you spontaneously yawn or sigh, which indicates that your system is unclenching.

As you learn the basic moves, you can continue to look for increasingly subtle layers of clenching (eventually also including your perception and awareness) and run experiments when it doesn't come easily.

2. Self-Exploration Mode

Just like sleep, you can't force it (this is another type of clenching), but you can create the conditions for unclenching to arise.

Parts of your brain (specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and hippocampus) constantly track signals of safety inside and outside the body. Psychedelic researchers call this ‘set and setting’.

The common thread with all of the experiments below might be summarized as 'cultivating a secure attachment with reality'.¹¹¹¹ In plain English: teaching your body that nothing bad happens when it stops bracing, especially in uncertain moments.

I once noticed that I felt clenched about a big decision I would need to make in a few months. After some self-reflection, I realized that I didn’t trust my future self to figure it out when the time came. Once I saw that and relaxed into self-trust, the clenching and anxious thought loops faded.

As you clench less, you become more curious. The aperture of experience opens up because you make fewer assumptions about what your senses are telling you.

Or you can run this quick experiment for yourself: notice how your body feels when you state a belief you’re certain about. Complete the sentence “I know for sure…”

Now imagine you have been parachuted into this moment from another planet. Forget what you know about yourself, where you are, and where you came from. Read these words without prior expectations or beliefs. The more sincerely you enter a state of wonder, the less clenched you may feel.¹²¹²

One helpful starting point is:

‘Curious attention will dissolve your tension.’

Alongside curiosity, four other qualities help with unclenching.

The acronym I created for them is CRISP: Curiosity + Relaxation + Intimacy + Safety + Playfulness.

Say each word to yourself and notice what it feels like to inhabit that word fully. What are the sensations associated with each word? Then cycle through the five words at a pace of roughly one word every minute or two.

You can also use questions to dissolve mental clenching. For example, set a timer for five minutes and ask yourself: "Who am I when there is no problem to solve?"

You might notice yourself spontaneously sigh or readjust your posture when a vigilant part unclenches.

You will likely find that the sensation begins to shift or move. If it does then gently track or “surf” it, staying present with the feelings as they arise.

Allow the process to unfold and view your own role as learning how to get out of the way and undoing any active efforting in the process.

You can also invite your awareness to shift away from any story or thoughts (although they will likely still be there) and move the spotlight of your attention to sensations inside your body.

Perhaps you feel queasiness in your lower belly, or tightness in the band around your diaphragm (below your rib cage). Maybe you sense tingling in your chest, neck, and throat area. Focus on an area that feels like it has the most aliveness or contraction.¹³¹³

If you sense there might be an emotion present you can try listening to either the somatic surfing or the reparenting protocol guided sessions below.

---

Tap or click one of the cards below to try one of the guided practices and experience a micro-unclenching for yourself.

PMRProgressive Muscle RelaxationNSDRNon-Sleep Deep RestSomatic
SurfingReparenting
ProtocolAmplify
Joy

Swipe to explore · Tap to open

3. Unclenching in Human Connection

Playing the unclenching game both reveals clenches more quickly and makes them easier to soften.

When I argue with my wife, good intentions and questions of fault become irrelevant if I’m clenched: I know the conversation will end badly. Most arguments amount to two people saying, ‘I’m clenched, and it’s your fault.’

When I relax my defensive stance, however, the argument often resolves into deeper connection than we had before it began.

Outside active conflict, connection lets us borrow calm from another body. In one study, researchers put 110 people under threat of electric shock: alone, they clenched; holding a stranger’s hand helped little; holding the hand of someone familiar made a big difference. Co-regulation allows us to borrow nervous system safety from another.

At the most basic level, you can experience this when you hug or cuddle a partner, close friend or even a pet: you will notice yourself almost instantly unclench.

After a tough day, or when I have clenched myself into functional freeze, a few minutes of spooning with my wife brings me back to myself. This gift is usually more effective than words.

Across nine cohorts of Nervous System Mastery, we’ve found that students who report life-changing outcomes are almost always those who engage in our Relational Dojo practice. This practice can be summarized as unclenching while in connection with another.

There are several flavors of structured human connection loops.¹⁴¹⁴

They all follow the same principle: practicing with another person makes unclenching easier and more sustainable.

You can also vividly imagine someone you care about, wish them well, picture them thriving, then intensify the image and the feelings it evokes.

I personally prefer practicing in person when possible. However, I've been pleasantly surprised by how powerful practice over Zoom can be.¹⁵¹⁵

Why is human connection so powerful? In part, because it helps shame dissolve, and shame is often what keeps a clench in place. Take a look at the famous Good Will Hunting scene below, where Sean stays connected with Will until Will’s clench opens and he makes contact with the grief beneath it.

Connection also reduces a core pitfall of self-exploration: it is surprisingly easy to bullshit yourself without external feedback, and eventually you reach limits of exploring solo.

4. Laughter: An Ancient Unclenching Technology

A friend of mine says that "you can tell how much work someone has done on themselves by the depth of their laughter." Anyone can tell the difference between nervous or awkward laughter and a full, hearty belly laugh. The latter has less tension, less clenching, less defending.

Unsurprisingly, laughter involves cycles of clenching and releasing tension in the body. If you think of someone who is taking themselves too seriously, you will probably picture a curmudgeonly man in a tight suit with RCF (resting clench face).

By contrast, someone like the Dalai Lama seems moments from laughter. I can’t verify this, but I would bet that his belly ranks among the world’s most unclenched.

Also, consider stand-up comedy: hundreds of strangers paying one person to trigger involuntary spasms of the diaphragm. My suspicion is that the enormous comedy industry is, among other things, a cultural technology for collective unclenching.¹⁷¹⁷

· · ·

5. Leverage Temperature Change

Temperature change, often called contrast therapy, efficiently creates the conditions for unclenching.

In Finland, there are an estimated 2.4 million saunas for 3.28 million dwellings. That's one sauna for every 1.4 homes. (probably not unrelated that Finland ranked #1 in the World Happiness Report for the ninth consecutive year.)

The Finns have a word for the steam that rises when water hits the stones: löyly, from an ancient root meaning breath. An old proverb says to behave in the sauna as you would in church. By the third round, your system has a vivid experience of completing an activation cycle. The heat stimulates vasodilation (blood flow) + exertion followed by cooling and a parasympathetic rebound.

You can amplify the effect by actively unclenching during hot-cold rounds. After a cold round, sit, remain as still as possible, close your eyes, and unclench. The experience can become psychoactive and deeply enjoyable.¹⁸¹⁸

III. Unclenching Traps

1. The Trap of Not Feeling Much

Many people, particularly here in the Bay Area, navigate the world almost entirely through intellect (a left-hemispheric perspective, as Iain McGilchrist would say). Clenching has become the water they swim in.

They may not notice the clench because it is their only reference point, and the world pays them well for the abstract thinking that it enables. As Ken Robinson joked, the body becomes a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you’re in this category, start with the beliefs or rumination loops that create unease, then notice how they arise alongside tension in the body.

Begin with experiments that bring you into your senses and sharpen your sensitivity to anything that happens below the neck (this allows you to catch subtler clenches over time).

2. The Trap of Feeling Too Much

Increased sensitivity is a superpower that requires an increased capacity to be with the intensity.

I think of the scene in Man of Steel, where young Clark Kent’s superhuman hearing switches on in the middle of class. It is so overwhelming that he hides in a janitor’s closet, and his mother talks him down through the door: ‘Focus on my voice. Make the world small.’ With time, he learns to be with the high stimulus and realises that it’s a gift.

This sensitivity may enhance your intuitive decision making and lower your tolerance for bullshit. It may even become harder to stay in a job you hate or a relationship that isn’t working because you feel the cost so acutely.

Notice what happens when an emotion feels like too much. Do you retreat into thought loops of blaming others or yourself? Do you dissociate? It's good to know what your patterns are so that you can work with them in real time.

The best skill that those on the more sensitive end of the spectrum can cultivate is grounding, which will build nervous system capacity over time. For this, practices like orienting, extended-exhale breathing and non-sleep deep rest (yoga nidra) are all extremely helpful, and part of what we teach in the Nervous System Mastery toolkit.

Also on a practical note: being in a low-arousal environment (soft surfaces, warm lighting, plants or nature in view) can also make a substantial difference.

3. The Trap of Avoiding Your Emotions

I mean, I get it. It's scary. It feels like there might be an endless torrent of tears and you don't know who you'll be on the other side.

But to paraphrase Anaïs Nin, your life will expand or contract in proportion to your courage. And just twenty seconds of courage can go a long way.

Something I notice is that most people are comfortable expressing either their sadness or anger, but rarely, both. And often many people I work with default to sadness (rather than anger) and need to re-learn how to welcome their anger specfically.

A Cheat Sheet for Feeling Anger How to prepare, feel anger safely, and avoid the common failure modes PRACTICAL GUIDE (15–25 minutes) ↓

#1 Anger Is Essential

If you don’t allow your anger, you will find it difficult to say no, set boundaries or advocate for your needs. Essentially, people won’t trust you, you’ll fall into people pleasing tendencies and likely accumulate resentment over time.

#2 Signs of Clenched Anger

If you notice resentment of others, if you have an active inner critic (anger turned inwards), if you feel a lack of aliveness or dullness (as if you’re living behind a pane of glass) or if you find it difficult to say no to others’ requests.

#3 How to Prepare

Set aside 15-25 minutes, find a private space (unless you have a friend or loved one who is open to holding space and witnessing). Ground yourself, drop into your body, and if you can, connect to the care/presence that the anger is protecting — and specifically where you feel the anger in your body.

Prioritise safety and remove any sharp objects, hard surfaces etc.) Optional but helpful: play an activating track or song

#4 How to Feel Anger

Once you’re connected to the sensation, there are three approaches to try:

1. Setting a boundary or saying ‘no’, which can be done either pushing as hard as you can against a wall with sound/growling etc.

2. The ‘it’s not fair/tantrum’ which can be done lying on your back (on a mattress) and pounding the bed/pillows with your fists.

3. Using a tennis racquet or striking with your forearms onto a pillow whilst making loud sound or saying ‘fuck you’ (surprisingly effective but careful on the vocal chords)

Watch out for shame/judgement arising as you’re doing this, you can try the phrase ‘I am loved in my anger’ or ‘I love my anger’ (whatever feels most supportive to you). Typically, especially in the beginning, either it'll feel fake or the anger will come out kinked. That’s great. You can keep acting angry until it feels real.

You will likely oscillate between being in your head/story and connecting to the somatic sensations. This is also totally fine + normal. Also lower pitched sounds or growls (from lower down in the belly), tend to be just as effective but not cause vocal chord impact in the way that higher-pitched screams can. With practice, the heartfelt sensations of anger will be easier to access, as will the deep sense of care that it comes from.

You will know when something has shifted, as there will typically be either relief, or another emotion will surface (potentially heartbreak, or helplessness) that the anger is guarding against.

#5 Failure Modes to Avoid

1. Being aggressive towards others. If you’re blaming someone else, you’re not taking responsibility but projecting how you feel onto someone else.

2. Disembodied raging/screaming which may feel cathartic but likely won’t create the associations of safety you’re looking for. Rather let the movement arise from the core of your body (often the belly).

3. Overriding yourself ~ the goal is to re-pattern your system so that anger is safe to express, and that you are loved in your anger.

Core takeaway: to the degree that you can ground and feel connected to yourself (or connected to what you deeply care about that the anger is protecting) before/during/after the anger practice, is the degree that the anger will, over time flow more naturally.

I've spent the last few years exploring emotional territory that I previously wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot barge pole. Anger, shame, helplessness, terror… and time and time again these deeply contracted places open up into profoundly meaningful experiences where I feel more connected, more integrated, and more fully myself.

Above all I would offer to take it slow, be gentle and trust that you will be brave enough to meet the moment when you’re ready.

4. The Stoicism Trap

This is one I see often (and it was me for a long time). Aspiring stoics or long-term meditators, often those practicing with vipassana or forms of mindfulness, have figured out a way to witness emotions from arm’s length. This can often lead to peace, but also a state of feeling less aliveness and being triggered by seemingly small things.

I call this the fake equanimity trap. It’s seductive because it feels like an improvement on being trapped in the existential washing machine. Here’s the key difference: mindfully witnessing an emotion is very different to moving towards it with care and compassion.

Imagine how you would treat your son or daughter if they came to you with a big emotion. You wouldn’t (I hope) just passively observe them from a distance, you’d give them a big hug. Well it’s no different with your own internal feelings.

5. The Over-Efforting Trap

As my friend Michael Ashcroft likes to say, 'The Appropriate Amount of Effort Is Zero': the act of ‘efforting’ is itself a form of clenching. Trying harder to unclench is therefore a common pitfall.

There is a chasm-wide distinction between setting a strong intention and over-efforting. At a high level, action can happen naturally, without trying.

Examine your frame of reference. If you approach the practice thinking, ‘I need this to work’ or ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this?’, that frame is itself a form of clenching.

When the body feels safe and relaxed, the clench opens at its own pace. You can create the conditions, but you cannot force the timing.

Applying our white-knuckled achievement-based orientation toward improving ourselves is part of a wider frame that itself unclenches with time. The growing pushback against optimization culture suggests the cracks are already showing.

You cannot force yourself to let go. Instead, let go of forcing yourself.

Part of the reason that this softens is that with time, we tend to identify less as a separate self in need of fixing (cue buying all the self-help books) and more as something growing at its own pace.

Just as you wouldn't think to judge an oak sapling for not being a 300-foot-tall tree, we are all at our own particular vantage points, growing at different paces and on different trajectories.

· · ·

The Ultimate Unclenching Movie Scene: in one of the greatest Disney scenes of all time, Moana applies a brave C.R.I.S.P. move towards the lava monster Te Kā, allowing it to soften and revealing the generative life force beneath.

6. The White-Knuckle Midwit Trap

Yes, clenching hard, especially in the beginning of a career, can get a lot of shit done.

But it is the “midwit” approach to productivity, and it often ends in burnout years later. I’ve worked with dozens of formerly clenched founders and executives.

Changing the source of your motivation usually involves a transition period. You may feel as though you have lost your edge; I liken this to the process of ‘deschooling’.

Deschooling is the decompression period children undergo after leaving mainstream education. They may do little for weeks or months before their curiosity returns. Then they become super-learners, devouring books and starting projects for fun rather than on command.

Unclenching can be a powerful performance enhancer.²⁰²⁰ Take Stephen Nedoroscik, the “pommel horse guy” of the Paris Olympics: after five hours of waiting to compete, he sat with his eyes closed, doing breathing exercises and visualizing his routine, then stood up and won bronze.

Or Alysa Liu, whose father poured $1m+ into her career at age 13. The extreme control and regimen helped to mold a teenage prodigy, but came at the cost of her agency, curiosity, pleasure, or any life beyond skating. So at 16 she got tired of being under the clenched grip of her father and quit for two years to travel, study, play, and learn.

Eventually, her curiosity for skating returned. She agreed to come back only on her own terms: no strict control of her food, and a say in the music and choreography.

A few years later, in February 2026, she won Olympic gold in Milan at age twenty, joyfully crushing her competition and treating the ice as her canvas.

7. The Unclench Everything Trap

Unclenching has an optimal pace, yet the temptation to force it is strong. I have been guilty of this.

Titration works wonders: move gradually, leaving time to integrate and recover.

You can force some clenches open with psychedelics or holotropic breathwork. But without safety, the clench will return once ordinary consciousness resumes.²¹²¹

For most people, life will give you plenty of opportunities to notice where and how you clench. If that is not the case (perhaps you are living in a monastery), I would recommend one of the following: entering a long-term intimate relationship, starting a business or having kids. All three are superb arenas for unclench training.

IV. What Does Unclenching Progress Look Like?

01Default 02Novice 03Practitioner 04Adept 05Master

Swipe for next level

Level 1: Default Mode

Default Mode Stage → running on default mode where reactivity runs the show. You don't realise you're in a game. Others perceive you as emotionally volatile, distant or shut down.

Internal narrative → "why is the world so unfair? What did I do to deserve this? It's the fault of [external person or situation]"

Relationships → attract partners that mirror reactive tendencies. Reactive tendencies clench against intimacy, meaning that lasting fulfilling relationships are challenging.

Strategies → addictive coping strategies provide temporary relief from clench-induced suffering, but don’t last. There will likely be many crutches, either in the form of substances or behaviors (porn, sugary food etc.)

Core Challenge → there's insufficient curiosity about what's happening internally. The pain hasn't yet been enough to provoke real change. Unfortunately, often it takes a burnout, breakup, personal loss or a health crisis to create sufficient humility.

How to Progress → empowering practices and discipline help at this stage to increase a sense of 'self-authorship' as well as sincere inquiry along the lines of asking 'how might I be complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want'.

← Back Next level →

---

1. Your Relationships Have Greater Depth

Running unclenching loops can make you more approachable and better able to turn arguments into productive conflict.

Why? Because you’re more able to let in the everyday heartbreaks of any meaningful relationship.

You may even seem more inviting; strangers may start more conversations with you. Perhaps the ‘introvert’ was a clenched extrovert all along.

Art of Accomplishment founder and executive coach Joe Hudson talks about the Groundbreakers 'facelift': after a week participating in their intensive off-menu retreat, participants look as if they've had a facelift because so much tension has been resolved from their default expression.

2. Where Did My Inner Critic Go?

As an n-of-one, I’ve spent the past decade running versions of unclenching loops, although I did not call them that at the time. My inner critic has shrunk from an abusive roommate who dominated most days to a presence in less than one percent of my lived experience.

This is hard to describe, but my thinking has softened. Thoughts feel dialled down, as though they are happening in another room that I may choose to enter. Much of the time my experience is more like having a helpful friend offering the occasional idea or suggestion. I once spent 10 days in a dark room because I now very much enjoy my own inner dialogue.²³²³

3. Increased Agency

Running unclenching loops creates a high agency virtuous cycle, although it takes some agency to run one in the first place (as opposed to blaming external circumstances).

Specifically, it develops your ability to run the loop, try different experiments and escape local-optimum traps.

Many agency bottlenecks begin as attempts to avoid emotional discomfort, which then trigger further avoidance and low-agency patterns.

You may also feel a greater sense of integrity in the system. There are fewer internal tensions created by conflicting parts (part of me wants this, another wants that) and as a result decisions come more naturally.

4. You Become the Person Your Future Self Would Be Proud Of

Imagine that at midnight tonight, the universe forks: two identical versions of you wake up tomorrow. They have exactly the same body, memories, relationships, bank balance and circumstances.

The only difference is that version B of you clenches ten percent less and dedicates time to running unclenching loops. Nothing changes overnight, but with time version B takes on more challenging conversations, is less likely to get stuck in rumination and finds that connection in relationships feels more effortless. Over a year or a decade, the difference compounds.

Version B takes bigger risks, steps into more difficult conversations, and knows there is a default background of ease available in any moment, whatever else is going on. This is the path to becoming the person your future self would be proud of.

THE END

p.s. if you made it this far, congratulations! You’re likely a very good fit for this workshop that I'm running on September 17 (last year we had to cap at 1000 people).

p.p.s. if you found this valuable, consider forwarding onto a friend: howtounclench.com

· · ·