slightly “on” even when we consciously believe that we are fully relaxed. To help combat this and truly relax those muscles, the best thing you can do is fully tense them up first. Sound strange? Philip Gehrman, PhD, clinical director of Penn Medicine’s behavioral sleep medicine program at the Penn Sleep Center in Philadelphia, says, “Progressive muscle relaxation is a relaxation exercise in which you systematically tense and then relax all the muscle groups of your body. It helps promote overall physical relaxation, which has a number of benefits on its own.”
