Relaxation Exercises for Actors: How to Release Tension Before You Act

You’re next. Your name is on the list by the door, and you can feel your shoulders creeping toward your ears. Your jaw is set. Your hands are cold, and the first line of your scene, the one you’ve said a hundred times, suddenly feels slippery.

Someone tells you to relax. That’s like telling someone to fall asleep. It only works if you know what to actually do with your body and your attention, and many actors were never taught that part.

The short version: tension isn’t a moral failing, and you’ll never get rid of all of it. What you can build is a habit of noticing it and letting it go, fast, in the places you hold it most. Below are the two classic methods actors still train with, Stanislavski’s muscle release and Strasberg’s relaxation exercise, plus a two-minute version you can do in a hallway with people watching.

Know why tension gets in your way

Stanislavski made the case with a grand piano. In An Actor Prepares, the teacher, Tortsov, has his students lift one corner of it. While a student holds it up, he asks him to multiply 37 by 9, then recall the shops on the street, then a taste, a texture, a smell. The student can’t. He has to put the piano down and rest before he can answer.

Tortsov’s conclusion is blunt: “muscular tautness interferes with inner emotional experience.” In the same chapter, he lists what tension does to an actor’s instrument: a tight throat makes a good voice hoarse, tight hands move like sticks, a tight face turns to stone and shows the opposite of what the actor feels.

Lee Strasberg built his training on the same idea. Eric Hetzler, a senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, quotes Strasberg in The Conversation: neuromuscular tension makes it hard for thought, sensation, and emotion to be “transmitted and properly experienced.” Relaxation wasn’t a bonus in his classes. At the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute today, every Method class begins with Strasberg’s relaxation technique, and the exercise is done each week.

There’s a memory side too, though it comes from worry rather than muscles. Psychologist Sian Beilock’s research at the University of Chicago, summarized by the university, found that pressure can drain working memory, the “mental scratch pad” you hold information on while you use it. Her studies used tests and sports tasks, not scripts. But if you’ve ever lost a line you knew cold the moment you felt watched, the pattern will sound familiar.

Find where you hold it

Tension is personal. Everyone has a home base, and it’s usually somewhere you’ve stopped noticing. Stanislavski’s Tortsov tells of a gifted actress whose feeling only broke through now and then. The cause turned out to be one tiny habit: her right eyebrow tightened slightly at every hard moment. Once she learned to free her face there, the rest of her body let go on its own.

Strasberg, in the recorded sessions collected in Strasberg at the Actors Studio, named three places he watched for mental tension:

• The temples. He noticed tense people pressing their fingertips there without knowing they were doing it.
• The bridge of the nose and the eyelids. The eyes protect themselves all day, automatically, and that guarding builds up. He released it by letting the lids droop.
• The mouth. Strasberg’s explanation was that we hold back many things we feel like saying, and the mouth keeps that tension.

Voice teachers look in nearby places. The Linklater Center describes Kristin Linklater’s voice progression as starting with softening the habitual tensions in the body, and it includes undoing tensions in the jaw, throat, and tongue. Those are the muscles your lines travel through, so tension there can show up in your sound.

Try a quick scan right now. Is your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth? Are your back teeth touching? Is your brow pulled in while you read this? Whatever you find, that’s probably where it goes when you’re under pressure. It can move, too. Release it in one place and it may show up in another, which is why the controller keeps checking.

Do Stanislavski’s release, then give the body a reason

Stanislavski’s basic exercise is simple. Lie on your back on a hard, flat surface, like the floor. Notice which muscle groups are working harder than they need to, relax each one as soon as you find it, then search for the next. Tortsov’s assistant compares the goal to a cat or a small child lying on sand: lift them up and they leave the imprint of the whole body, while a tense adult leaves only shoulder blades and backside.

The more useful part comes next. Tortsov doesn’t expect you to be tension-free. He calls that impossible and unnecessary. Instead, he wants you to develop a kind of inner observer, a “controller,” that catches extra tension and removes it. He says to let tension come if you can’t avoid it, and then “let your control step in and remove it.” He wants the habit practiced everywhere, while you eat, walk, and go to bed, until it runs without thinking.

He also breaks every pose on stage into three steps: tenseness, relaxation, justification. Any new position comes with extra tension, especially in front of people. You release what you don’t need. Then you give the pose a reason. In the book, a classmate demonstrating on a sofa looks awkward and ill at ease until he lunges to swat an imaginary fly, and suddenly every muscle is doing a clear job.

That third step is what keeps relaxation from turning into slump. Loose isn’t the point. The point is a body that’s only doing what the moment needs.

Try Strasberg’s relaxation exercise

Strasberg thought Stanislavski’s muscle-by-muscle approach was so detailed that a class would never get to acting, so he used a simpler test. Sitting or standing, you look for a position you could fall asleep in, the way you shift around on an overnight train until the pressure comes off. You don’t actually sleep. You keep adjusting until you’re convinced you could if you wanted to.

Then you move to the three areas. Release the temples, then let the eyelids droop, then let the whole mouth area go. In the sessions, Strasberg describes giving this pure relaxation exercise half an hour or forty minutes. He also discouraged actors from rubbing their temples with their hands, because you can’t do that in the middle of Hamlet. The release had to come from attention alone.

We walk through a ten-minute home version, with a long, easy “ah” for tension in the chest and throat, in our guide to what Strasberg actually taught. Do the long version at home, a few times a week, when nothing is at stake. That practice is what makes the short version work later.

Use the two-minute version before you go on

You won’t get forty minutes in a casting hallway or between setups. You’ll get two, with people around. This sequence is our own condensed version of the ideas above. Most of it is invisible to anyone watching.

1. Plant both feet flat on the floor and let the chair, or the wall behind you, take your weight.
2. Take three or four slow breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth, about 30 to 40 seconds in all. The NHS breathing exercise for stress suggests counting 1 to 5 in and out if it helps, and repeating for at least five minutes. Here you’ll only have time for a few breaths.
3. Scan your home base first, the one you found above. Let it go on an exhale.
4. Do Strasberg’s three areas in order: soften the temples, let your eyelids get heavy, then let the whole mouth area go (unclench your back teeth; let your tongue rest).
5. Let your shoulders drop, then check your hands. They’re easy to miss, so open and soften them on purpose.
6. Give your body a reason. Stand up, or step away from the wall, and think about what your character wants from the first person they see, so your weight has somewhere to go.

If you only have twenty seconds, do steps 3 and 6. Release your one place, then aim yourself at the scene.

Don’t expect miracles from a few breaths. In a 2021 randomized study of 60 undergraduates, progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, and guided imagery each raised how relaxed people felt after a single 20-minute session, compared with reading a magazine. But deep breathing first raised a skin measure of arousal and took a while to settle back, which is why the short version leans on the release steps. And even 20 minutes didn’t measurably change heart rate, so treat two minutes as a reset, not a cure. In our experience, relaxation is a skill that builds with practice, not a switch you flip once.

Keep releasing inside the scene

Here’s the part warm-ups often skip. Tortsov says actors tend to strain hardest in their big moments, so those are exactly the moments to relax most. That doesn’t mean playing them small. It means letting the feeling run through a body that isn’t clenching against it.

Shakespeare put the same note in Hamlet’s mouth, in his advice to the players. The text is exactly as it appears in the Project Gutenberg edition:

HAMLET. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2 (Project Gutenberg)

Try it as an exercise. Pick a speech with a real peak, from our monologue collection or a scene in the plays library. Say it once and notice where you tighten as it builds. Then say it again, and right at the peak, let that one place go while you keep the intensity in your thought and voice. You may find the peak gets clearer, not weaker.

Watch your attention, too. Later in An Actor Prepares, Tortsov tells a student who still can’t settle that “strained attention shackles you every bit as much as muscular spasms.” If you’re working so hard at relaxing that you’ve gone tight again, you’ve only moved the effort. Put your attention back on your partner and the problem your character is trying to solve.

Practice relaxing where it gets hard

Releasing tension on your bedroom floor is the easy part. Doing it while you’re speaking your lines, with someone waiting for your cue, is the actual skill. The University of Chicago summary of Beilock’s work points the same way: practicing under moderate stress helps people get comfortable performing when the pressure is real.

So build the controller into your line work. Each time you finish a run, ask yourself where you tightened. Was it the jaw before a hard line? Your hands when you weren’t sure of the next cue? Fix that one place on the next run, and nothing else.

Offbook is a good place to do this when no one’s free to read with you. Its realistic voices read every other character, and it listens through your microphone and plays the next cue when you finish your line, so you can rehearse the whole scene at a natural pace and catch the moments you clench. You can also slow down or speed up how fast your scene partners talk, so you can practice staying loose as the tempo climbs.

If the tension comes with a racing heart and shaking hands right before an audition, our guide to audition nerves covers that moment specifically. And if you want a full routine around these exercises, add them to the start of our 15-minute actor warm-up.

Questions actors ask

What is the Strasberg relaxation exercise?

You find a position, sitting or standing, that you could fall asleep in, without actually sleeping. Then you release three areas Strasberg linked to mental tension: the temples, the eyes from the bridge of the nose into the eyelids, and the mouth. His full version took half an hour to forty minutes.

Where do actors usually hold tension?

Common places are the jaw, tongue, throat, shoulders, brow, and hands, but it’s different for everyone. Strasberg watched the temples, eyes, and mouth. Do a slow scan from feet to head a few times and notice which spot always shows up. That’s your place to check first under pressure.

Should I be completely relaxed on stage?

No. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski calls freeing the body from all tension impossible and unnecessary. The goal is to drop the extra tension, the muscles working for no reason, while keeping the energy the scene needs.

How long before a performance should I do relaxation exercises?

Practice the long version on ordinary days, when nothing is at stake, so the release comes quickly when you need it. Before a show, use a short release inside your warm-up, then the two-minute version just before you go on.

Will relaxing make my performance flat?

Not if you finish with Stanislavski’s third step, justification. Release what you don’t need, then give your body a clear reason to move, usually what your character wants right now. Relaxed energy is directed energy, not low energy.