This doctor pioneered the idea of relaxing and doing nothing—to be more productive
Edmund Jacobson wanted you to chill three hours a day
In 1940, a woman sat on a couch with electrodes attached to her lips while she read a book. The wires were attached to a machine that looked like an all-wave radio, where impulses were displayed on a screen. Dr. Edmund Jacobson, a slender man with slicked back dark hair and a long, sloping nose, analyzed the rate of the woman’s muscle movements. They were jagged and far-ranging, which could only mean one thing: despite the fact that the woman had spent two hours every day for the past six years resting, she was not in fact relaxed. She needed Dr. Jacobson’s method. The modern human, Jacobson said “doesn’t know how to let go.” Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, he would teach them.
We have been seeking out rest since time immemorial, everywhere from caves to Swiss sanatoriums. Long before the “cult of mindfulness,” Jacobson heralded the strain of modern life. The world according to Jacobson was a nerve-wracking cacophony. Radios blared. Cars honked. People flocked to crowded cities, to work in businesses where the pressures had never been higher. At night, to blow off steam, they played bridge, he said, “like their lives depended on it.” Or they gathered at raucous cocktail parties, surrounded by clinking glasses and ribbons of laughter. But until Jacobson, relaxation had never been systematically studied. He would change the way we talked about kicking back, his work popularizing the word “relax.” His theories would redefine the way we live our daily lives, and even how we measure success.
Jacobson intended to pull our noses away from the grindstone and the bridge table so that we might follow his method — a rigorous routine of doing nothing. The process involved thoughtfully scanning one’s body for signs of tension, and tightening and releasing muscles. We couldn’t exactly roll back the clock to a “simpler time” (Jacobson was prone to reveries about early Native American life), but we could do things to mitigate our daily stress. The catch? The method took about three hours.
Jacobson was born in Chicago in 1888. He studied physiology at Harvard starting in 1905, specializing in muscle tension. His mentor, the renowned philosopher, psychologist, and physician William James, urged him to study “the whole man.” After being fired by a different mentor for reporting data that was inconsistent with the mentor’s theories, Jacobson began studying physiological responses to stress on his own. He found that when he tried to startle subjects with a loud noise after they had engaged in a relaxation exercise, they didn’t show the same response — in fact many were entirely undisturbed. It was the first systematic study of relaxation.
He came to see stress as a simple mechanical issue. Since nerves were connected to muscles, you could relax one and the other would respond in kind. “It might be naive to say we think with our muscles,” he said, “but it would be inaccurate to say we think without them.” He and other scientists like him were putting forth a revolutionary idea: The mind was not ephemera, but inseparable from the body. Relax the body and you might just relax your self.
“At first mention, the picture of a person sitting at home, not even bothering to converse, or smoke, or mix a cocktail may seem appalling,” Jacobson admitted. But doing nothing would cure everything from suicide, exhaustion, early-death, breakdowns, and just your run-of-the mill rattled nerves.
He appeared to be living proof of his own theories. A 1935 article reported that Jacobson looked “as though he might be the tense active type. Yet there is an air of quiet repose about him.”
His treatment of subjects was a tad severe, however. As he measured their responses, he would never tell them they were doing a good job, under the thinking that praise might actually cause them to relax, rather than his method doing so. He would however, occasionally interrupt them to tell them the ways in which they were failing to relax — not exactly relaxing.
Our heritage of a country of puritan workaholics had made us measure success in terms of one thing: productivity. Ironically, this pressure often resulted in less productivity. As Jacobson explained, we didn’t use our time very well. Even Frederick Winslow Taylor, the efficiency expert who systematized labor in order to squeeze more work out of us, acknowledged that we needed to take breaks (of course, in order to be more productive). But Jacobson had higher ideals in mind, he said, “In the rush of the present day, man has in part forgotten how to live.”
Jacobson awakened us to “the world beneath our skin.” It was an optimistic idea: we might not be able to control the world, but we could control our bodies. This theory couldn’t have come at a better time — the world seemed to be falling apart. The year his mind-numbingly technical book Progressive Relaxation came out, the stock market crashed, ravaging the nerves of the American populace. In 1934, he published the aggressively titled, You Must Relax — the lay version of his earlier work. In the popular book, he had whittled down the time requirement to an hour, rather than three. The book was a sensation, with newspapers across the country trumpeting the news that people should really just chill.
Since his death in 1983, Jacobson has likely been steadily rotating like a pig on a spit in his grave. Scrolling through Instagram and Twitter feeds in our off-time bears no relation to the monk-like repose he imagined. Very few devote three hours to relaxation every month, let alone every day. Jacobson had lamented the practice of grabbing a quick bite at a lunch counter saying, “Quick eating is a characteristic of those who are tense.” For those of us who dine at our desks, even the thought of dropping into “a lunch counter” seems an extravagant expenditure of time. But considering that he advocated for the American adoption of the siesta, the “nap rooms” that have become de rigeur at startups likely would have won the Jacobson seal of approval.
So quick, stop what you’re doing and do nothing!
