Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things:

It’s a great example, because gripping too tightly, as we might with the hands, is a great metaphor for what it’s like everywhere else in your system. There’s a pattern of pervasive over-gripping that, once you start to look for it, you will find everywhere.

There is an appropriate amount of energy required for each activity. Holding a cup, turning a steering wheel, or writing a blog post all need exactly the amount of energy that they need. This may sound like a truism, but if it were so obvious, why do many drivers often realise they are driving with a vice-like grip, with tension running up into their shoulders and jaws?

Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone.

Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero.

This idea is where the concept of non-doing can trip people up, because it doesn’t mean no action. It means no effort, even though the amount of energy required could be large. Or, to borrow from Daoist wisdom:

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu

Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort. Everything nature does is perfectly well-suited to what it does, and it cannot be otherwise. This is why non-doing comes with a felt experience of effortlessness, when it seems like everything is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be.

Consider this quote from Katie Ledecky who, with 14 Olympic medals, is described as “the most decorated female swimmer in history”:

“I felt so relaxed. It just felt very easy, and that's why it surprised me that I had broken my world record.” — Katie Ledecky

Not only that, but trying too hard can reduce performance. Here’s marathoner Ryan Hall:

“… you don't get your best performances by trying harder. When you see the guy who wins the race, he usually jogs out of it waving to the crowd, feeling good. The people who look the worst come in after the top guy.” – Ryan Hall

So why is it so common to effort when it both feels harder and reduces performance?

For one thing, there are all kinds of societal scripts in the modern age that push us in that direction. All those hustle bros captured by Total Work push their grindset worldview, recapitulating the Protestant work ethic for new audiences. The influence of these cultural waters on our psychophysical wiring can’t be overstated.

These scripts team up with one of the core principles of Alexander Technique: Faulty Sensory Appreciation. When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it. Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. If you follow your feelings, you are guided back to that same old familiar where you’re trying too hard without even realising it.

By the way, this phenomenon happens all the time in many other domains, and can be the cause of much trouble.

What all this means is that when you pull back the effort below your familiar baseline, it can feel unfamiliar, like you’re not trying hard enough, and those societal scripts I mentioned before can make this experience hard to stay in, even if you’re now closer to the appropriate amount of energy needed.

The way out of this is to experiment with feeling the unfamiliarity of trying less hard and seeing what it’s like. In Kristijan’s case, he played with this for long enough that his sensory perception updated to reflect what was going on more accurately, and he was able to feel that he had been using too much tension before.

So I invite you to go about your day and practice dropping the effort. See how weird it feels, but notice how the activity is still getting done. See what it’s like to drop the energy too low, where you might become lethargic or your performance drops. Notice the sweet spot as a surprising experience of ease and a kind of elegance: the less you grip, the smoother and more precise the movement.

Happy experimenting!