Autogenic training is a relaxation technique in which you silently repeat a series of phrases about physical sensations, like heaviness in your limbs or warmth in your hands, to shift your body into a calm, restful state. Developed in the 1930s by German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz, the method is built around six standard exercises that each target a different physical system. The word “autogenic” means “self-generating,” and that’s the core idea: rather than relying on a therapist or external tool, you learn to trigger your own relaxation response using nothing but focused attention and simple verbal formulas.
The Six Standard Exercises
Every autogenic training session follows the same structured sequence. Each exercise introduces a new physical sensation while building on the ones before it. By the final exercise, you’re silently cycling through all six sensations in a single sitting. Here’s what each one targets:
- Heaviness: You focus on your limbs feeling heavy, starting with one arm and gradually expanding to both arms and both legs. The phrases are simple: “My right arm is heavy,” then “My left arm is heavy,” and so on. This targets muscular relaxation.
- Warmth: You repeat the same progression but with warmth: “My right arm is warm,” building to “My arms and my legs are warm.” This is designed to increase blood flow to your extremities.
- Calm heart: You add phrases like “My heartbeat is calm and regular” to bring awareness to your heart rate without trying to force it to change.
- Breathing: Instead of controlling your breath, you use the phrase “My breathing breathes me,” encouraging a passive awareness of your natural rhythm.
- Warm abdomen: You repeat “My stomach is soft and warm,” which promotes relaxation of the abdominal muscles and digestive system.
- Cool forehead: The final exercise adds “My forehead is cool,” creating a contrast between the warmth in the rest of your body and a sense of mental clarity.
Each new exercise stacks on top of the previous ones. So by the time you reach the cool forehead stage, a full session includes all six sensations in sequence. This layered structure is what separates autogenic training from a simple body scan or breathing exercise.
How It Affects Your Nervous System
Autogenic training works primarily by activating your parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for rest, digestion, and recovery. The mechanism is closely tied to the slow, passive breathing the exercises encourage. When you breathe slowly with a longer exhale than inhale, signals from the brain’s breathing center spill over into nearby areas that regulate heart rate. This increases activity through the vagus nerve, which connects your brain to your heart, and the result is a measurable decrease in heart rate.
Studies on the technique have documented drops in blood pressure, pulse rate, cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone), and even cholesterol following regular practice. In one study of fire service workers with PTSD, autogenic training significantly decreased the heart’s sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nerve activity while increasing parasympathetic (rest-and-recover) activity. These aren’t just subjective feelings of calm. They’re measurable shifts in how your cardiovascular and hormonal systems operate.
What the Evidence Says
A large meta-analysis pooling results from clinical outcome studies found medium-to-large effects for autogenic training across a range of conditions. The strongest evidence, drawn from randomized controlled trials, showed positive results for tension headaches and migraines, mild-to-moderate high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, asthma, chronic pain disorders, Raynaud’s disease (poor circulation in the fingers and toes), anxiety disorders, mild-to-moderate depression, and functional sleep disorders.
When researchers compared autogenic training to doing nothing or to a basic control condition, it consistently outperformed them with medium effect sizes. Interestingly, when compared to other psychological treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy or progressive muscle relaxation, the differences were small or nonexistent. That suggests autogenic training is roughly as effective as other well-established relaxation methods, not dramatically better or worse. The “unspecific” benefits, meaning improvements in mood, cognitive performance, quality of life, and general physiological markers, tended to be even larger than the condition-specific results.
Autogenic Training for Athletes
Athletes have increasingly adopted autogenic training, particularly for sleep and pre-competition anxiety. A pilot study with university athletes tested a nine-minute audio recording based on autogenic training formulas, played every evening for two weeks. Sleep quality, measured by a standardized questionnaire, improved significantly in the group using the recording compared to the control group. The researchers noted that autogenic training had already been shown to help with competitive anxiety and athletic performance, and that sleep improvement was an additional, practical benefit athletes could gain from the same technique.
The protocol was simple: athletes listened to the recording each evening, avoiding sessions right after physical activity. This kind of low-effort, audio-guided format makes it accessible even during a demanding training schedule.
How to Practice
Traditional autogenic training follows a progressive learning model. You don’t start with all six exercises at once. Instead, you begin with the heaviness exercise alone, practicing it for one to two weeks until you can reliably produce that sensation of limb heaviness. Then you add warmth, then the heart exercise, and so on. The full sequence typically takes several weeks to learn, with each new exercise layered on top of the ones you’ve already mastered.
Individual sessions are short. Most protocols call for about 10 to 15 minutes of practice, done two to three times per day in the learning phase. You can practice sitting in a comfortable chair or lying down. The key posture requirement is that your body is fully supported so you don’t need any muscular effort to hold yourself up. Close your eyes, silently repeat the formulas for your current set of exercises, and focus passively on the sensations. “Passively” is the operative word: you’re not forcing warmth into your hands or trying to slow your heart. You’re simply noticing what happens when you direct your attention there.
Once you’ve learned all six exercises, a full session follows a clear arc. You start with “My right arm is heavy” and work through each set until you finish with “My forehead is cool.” Each formula gets repeated silently several times before moving to the next. After the final exercise, you “cancel” the session by taking a deep breath, flexing your arms, and opening your eyes. This cancellation step prevents grogginess and brings you back to full alertness.
Who Should Be Cautious
Autogenic training is generally safe for most people, but the exercises that direct attention to the heart and breathing can be uncomfortable or anxiety-provoking for people with certain conditions. Those with serious cardiac problems should discuss the heart-focused exercise with a healthcare provider before practicing. People experiencing active psychosis or severe dissociative symptoms may find the inward focus destabilizing. And because the warmth exercises increase peripheral blood flow, people with conditions affected by vascular changes (like active bleeding disorders) should approach with care. For most healthy adults and those with the common conditions it’s been studied for, like anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and mild hypertension, autogenic training is a low-risk, self-directed skill that gets more effective the longer you practice it.