Doing Less

by Diana

Part 1 of 2

One of the books we study during the ITM training course is Freedom to Change by Frank Pierce Jones. I wrote a little about Frank here, including his introductory remarks about the Alexander Technique:

The Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing; how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change.

Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change.

Let’s focus on that first sentence. “The Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do.”

Just ten words. Why didn’t he stop at eight? Why didn’t he say ‘The Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new’? Because that claim would be false. The Alexander Technique (AT) does teach you something new. I haven’t been in a single AT class in the last twelve years where teachers and students alike weren’t learning. But it doesn’t teach you something new to do.

It’s a truism to say that we all have problems. But what is the cause of those problems? Is the cause within our control, or not? Is it possible that some of those problems are self-generated? The knitter whose hands and wrists ache simply because they hold their needles with so much tension. The office worker who sits stiffly and uncomfortably throughout the day and as a result suffers from pain or fatigue.

I want to be clear that I am not talking about people whose issues are caused by a medical problem. Such a problem would require a medical solution. But what if the problems we experience were within our control?

AT looks at one subset of problems: the problems we cause ourselves by the way in which we go about our activities. To quote the late, great Don Weed “I’m pretty sure if you stop causing your problem, you won’t have it any more.”

So what is it that we’re learning in AT classes? Most of the time we’re relearning how simple movement can be, and how the complications we add make life more difficult for ourselves. In learning how to analyse activities, reason out and apply a more rational strategy, we’re learning a skill that can be applied to any area of life. What we’re not doing is giving you anything extra to do.

There’s a podcast I like to listen to called Cautionary Tales. It’s a great listen for anyone interested in AT. The host (Tim Harford, economic journalist, author and BBC radio presenter) finds dramatic stories of events from history, analyses exactly what happened, where errors occurred and why, and how future disasters could be avoided if we learn the lessons of the past.

There was an episode recently, titled ‘Do Nothing, Then Do Less’, that examined our human bias to look for additive solutions instead of doing nothing, or even taking something away. Let’s look at an example from each of these categories.

In a penalty shoot-out, statistics show that the goalkeeper would save more goals if he or she simply remained standing in the middle of the goal. By doing nothing, they would have more success. But they are under pressure to be seen to be doing something: to be making an effort to prevent the other side from scoring.

There’s a well-known experiment with a Lego bridge. Subjects are presented with an unbalanced bridge, and are asked to make it balance. Invariably they try to achieve this by adding more bricks. They add more bricks even when they are reminded that they can take bricks away; even when they are charged a fee for each extra brick they use. Yet what is the simplest solution? It turns out that taking away one brick from the original configuration would make the bridge balance.

This is the attitude we apply to our own problems. The knitter with hand and wrist stiffness looks for special hand stretches for knitters to alleviate the discomfort. The sedentary office worker looks for a high-tech chair to reduce the discomfort of sitting.

But here’s another option: what if you didn’t cause your problem in the first place? Instead of acting in a way that causes problems, and then adding time-consuming or expensive solutions, you could learn to perform your activities in a way that didn’t cause these problems. Imagine the freedom to knit for an evening without the cost of aching. Imagine being able to sit comfortably and actively in any chair, because you are bringing your reasoning intelligence into the activity.

That’s the gift of AT. The freedom to act without the consequences that flow from the distortions and complications we tend to add into our activities. It’s what makes AT classes come alive with laughter and learning, leaving you with more self-knowledge, more freedom, and far less to do.

(See part 2 here.)