The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

Don’t think you can relax your way to happiness. Happiness comes as a result of doing. 691 Don’t dismiss a good idea simply because you don’t like the source. 692

To relax is not to collapse, but simply to undo tension.

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.

Even now I fear that some one of my… hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of [their] life. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.

The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity.

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.

I ask myself, How can I relax? How can I let go of everything that's happened? You need complete trust to do that.

The fact that happiness is associated with relaxation does not mean that it is impossible to be happy in the midst of strenuous effort, for to be truly effective great effort must, as it were, revolve upon a steady unmoving center. The problem before us is how to find such a center of relaxed balance and poise in man's individual life - a center whose happiness is unshaken by the whirl that goes on around it, which creates happiness because of itself and not because of external events, and this in spite of the fact that it may experience those events in all their aspects and extremes from the highest bliss to the deepest agony.

It’s so easy to relax, to cut corners, to let down after you’ve reached your goal, and begin thinking you can just “turn it on” automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there.

You have to give yourself at least three to five seconds of pure relaxation before you respond to some things, and if you say these words in bold slowly, aloud if possible, this practice will change your life. I have been saying this to myself for ten years, and each year it gets easier and easier to let things go, to never give your power away. Tell yourself these words: pause, breathe, and relax.

Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.” — Buddhist saying