How our awareness of our environment affects muscular tone
Most of us think changing muscle tone requires physical stretching or strengthening. But how we pay attention can instantly change muscular tone.
The "Narrow Focus" Trap
Concentrative Awareness - when we are focused and absorbed on one object or idea and everything else falls away. This is the exact "fixity of attention" Alexander warned against. If we stay in this mode for hours, our chronic, narrow focus keeps our muscles in a state of excess tension and leaves us feeling stiff and exhausted and perhaps in pain or discomfort.
When we concentrate hard (e.g. staring at a spreadsheet, driving in traffic), our awareness narrows down to a single point. This hyper-focused, "tunnel vision" awareness triggers an evolutionary survival response, causing us to subtly brace the neck, jaw, and shoulders without our realising it.
Spatial awareness
In this state, our awareness is not totally consumed in the thing we’re doing at that time. We are aware of the object in front of us or what we’re doing, typing, thinking for example - but we are also aware of our environment around us and what’s in it. The space above us, the floor beneath us, and the space to our left and right, the things around us in our peripheral vision. In other words, we haven’t lost the world in what we’re doing.
When we open up our awareness it lowers excessive muscular tension. We don't have to try to relax our shoulders, for example; the shift in awareness will play a part in this happening automatically.
Type of Awareness ~ Mental State ~ Impact on Muscular Tone
There are two broad types of awareness, and each has a noticeable effect on the body. Concentrative, or narrow, awareness is like tunnel vision: your attention is focal, hyper-focused and fixated on a single object or goal. This state tends to increase excess tension, shortening the neck muscles, clenching the jaw, pulling the head back and restricting the breath. Spatial, or expanded, awareness works more like panoramic vision, drawing on your peripheral sight so that you take in the whole room, including the ceiling and the floor. This broader, more inclusive state reduces unnecessary muscular readiness, allowing the muscles to return to their optimal resting length.
You can experiment with this right now as you read this.
For the next ten seconds, lock your eyes onto a single word on this screen. Stare at it with absolute intensity. Try to block out everything else in the room. Notice what happens to the muscles around your eyes, the back of your neck, and your breathing. You will likely feel a subtle tightening.
Now, keep looking at the screen, but let your attention soften and expand outward. Open up your peripheral vision so you can notice the space to your sides and what objects there are within the space around you more generally, sense your contact with the chair or floor.
With a more expansive awareness, your shoulders may have dropped a fraction of an inch, your jaw may have unclenched, and a spontaneous, deep breath may have even emerged.
Broad awareness as our natural state
From an evolutionary perspective, our ancestors relied heavily on a balance of both broad, panoramic awareness and sharp, focused attention to survive and spot opportunities.
In a wild environment, a caveman or early human could not afford to look at a single leaf or stone with the same hyper-fixation we use to read a text message. If they did, they became someone else's dinner. Instead, their default state while moving through the landscape was a relaxed, periphery-first awareness. This did two vital things for survival:
Predator Detection: The peripheral vision is highly sensitive to motion and shadows. By maintaining a wide field of view, the brain could immediately register a slight rustle in the bushes to the side or a shape shifting in the distance.
Opportunity Spotting: Finding food required broad tracking. A hunter-gatherer scanning a landscape needed a wide visual field to notice a cluster of berries, track animal footprints, or spot a change in the weather pattern.
The narrow phase was a temporary, high-energy state. A hunter would lock onto an animal, for example, make the shot, and then immediately return to a relaxed, wide-angle awareness of the forest.
Evolution gave us the ability to dynamically switch back and forth. The problem with modern life is that we often get trapped in the narrow phase. We spend hours staring at laptop screens, spreadsheets, and phones, which mimics the exact neural tracking mechanism of "hunting" or "being hunted."
One particular thing our narrowed hyper-focused vision does is to tighten the suboccipital muscles (the tiny muscles at the base of our skull) to keep our eyes perfectly stable so we don't lose sight of the "threat,"; they act like stabilizer clamps, freezing our head in place so our eyes stay perfectly on target. This is the beginning of the chronic muscle tension cycle that Alexander wrote about.
When we consciously practice a broader awareness, we aren't learning a new skill; we are simply learning how to stop doing what causes us to narrow and fix our attention in the first place so that we can return more and more to our biological factory settings and a more natural and healthy way of being.
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