Achieve More by Grinding Less: Increase Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft

The extra contraction is the problem, not the effort itself

Most people who show up burned out in my programs are doing a reasonable amount of work. The problem is the extra layer: jaw clenched, breath shallow, attention fixated, internal narrator running commentary on whether they're doing it well enough. Michael Ashcroft calls this over-efforting, and he found the edge of it the hard way. Years in corporate energy work, eighty-hour weeks, a relationship grinding down, until a panic attack left him dissociated and staring at his laptop like it was written in a language he'd forgotten. He describes losing what he calls "couldness": the felt sense that there's something you could do, say, choose, or change.¹

The practical upshot of our conversation: you can often achieve more by noticing the unnecessary effort layered on top of action, expanding awareness, and letting the appropriate response organize itself.

This guide is a way to use the episode:

• distinguish necessary effort from over-efforting;
• widen awareness before you try harder;
• use "couldness" to recover choice under pressure;
• practice unscrunching as a concrete form of non-doing;
• let ambition become more alive without turning it back into grind.

✻1The aim here is to stop using contraction as proof that you care.

You already know how to drink water without straining

Michael's challenge to the grind mindset is simple: we layer tension, fixation, and self-monitoring onto tasks where those additions contribute nothing.

He keeps the examples deliberately mundane. Drinking water. Catching a ball. Typing, speaking, lifting something heavy. Your system already knows how to coordinate these actions. The conscious narrator can set an intention, but when it tries to micromanage every part of execution, it interferes with the thing it wants.

A tactical distinction:

• Effort: energy, attention, skill, practice, and appropriate engagement.
• Over-efforting: extra jaw tension, shallow breathing, narrowed vision, urgency, "I must force this," and constant internal commentary.
• Collapse: shutdown, apathy, avoidance, or "nothing I do matters." (Not healthy ease.)
• Aliveness: engaged, available, responsive, able to act without being trapped in the old groove.

Before pushing harder, ask:

1. What is the actual task? Write the paragraph, make the decision, lift the bar, have the conversation.
2. What extra contraction am I adding? Look for face tension, breath holding, gripping, rushing, or mental self-attack.
3. Does that contraction help the task? If not, it's friction pretending to be discipline.
4. What would appropriate engagement feel like? Committed and available, without the squeeze.

Research on motor learning points in a similar direction. Meta-analytic work on attentional focus suggests that for many motor tasks, focusing externally on the intended effect of movement supports better performance and learning than focusing internally on body parts.² This doesn't prove every creative or emotional task should be "effortless." It does support Michael's practical claim: conscious micromanagement is not always the source of better performance.

Expanded awareness restores options you forgot you had

Michael defines awareness as the field of things you're able to notice. Attention moves within that field. When pressure rises, awareness collapses onto the object: the camera, the inbox, the blank page, the conflict, the metric. That collapse feels productive because it's intense. It also reduces options. You lose the room, your body, other possible moves, and the sense that you could pause or change course.

Try this before a demanding task:

• Keep looking at the object of work, but notice the space around it.
• Let peripheral vision come online without forcing your eyes wide.
• Include the room behind you, above you, and to both sides.
• Notice sound as a field rather than as one thing to block out.
• Remember that you could stand up, breathe, ask a different question, or stop.

In Alexander Technique language, the familiar pattern feels "right" precisely because it's familiar. A more useful pattern may feel strange at first. The skill is to stay with the unfamiliar long enough for your system to discover that another option exists.

For Nervous System Mastery readers, this connects directly to interoception and exteroception: sensing inside the body and sensing the environment. If you can't notice the clench, the tunnel vision, or the collapse, you can't choose a different response.

"Couldness" is the antidote to feeling trapped

A word from the episode that I keep returning to: couldness. The moment-by-moment felt sense that you could do something else.¹

This is different from actually doing something else. You might still send the email, finish the set, continue the conversation, or stay with the difficult emotion. But the experience changes when you remember that you could move, pause, soften, speak, leave, ask for help, or choose a new tactic.

Low couldness sounds like:

• "There is no good move here."
• "I have to finish this exactly this way."
• "I cannot stop now."
• "If I loosen my grip, everything will fall apart."
• "This is just who I am under pressure."

Higher couldness sounds like:

• "I can keep going, but I don't have to grind."
• "I can feel this without obeying the old track."
• "I can choose the same action intentionally instead of reactively."
• "I can include more of the room, more of my body, and more possible next moves."

Michael and I connected this to the space between stimulus and response: a trainable capacity to notice the groove before you're fully inside it.

Grinding less, in Michael's frame, is the opposite of passivity. Aliveness includes intention, attention, agency, and the capacity to respond appropriately. You're more available, not less engaged.

Practice

Run the 90-second grind-to-aliveness reset

Use this when you notice fixation, blank-page pressure, metric checking, conflict reactivity, or the feeling that you must force your way through.

1. Name the task. Say: "The thing I am doing is…" Keep it concrete.
2. Name the extra effort. Notice jaw, eyes, throat, shoulders, belly, breath, hands, and the tone of your self-talk.
3. Expand the field. Keep the task in view while also including the room, peripheral vision, sounds, and the space behind you.
4. Restore couldness. Silently list three true options: "I could pause. I could write badly first. I could ask for help. I could keep going more gently."
5. Unscrunch once. If helpful, briefly scrunch your whole body, then release. Pay attention to the quality of the release, not just the relaxation afterward.
6. Choose the next honest move. Return to the task with one lighter instruction: "Let the next sentence come," "lift the bar," "ask the question," or "listen first."

You're not manufacturing a special state. You're removing enough interference that the appropriate next action becomes easier to find.

The "unscrunch" trains the mental move of putting something down

The most concrete practice in the episode is Michael's "scrunch / unscrunch" exercise. First, exaggerate the doing: tighten your muscles, squeeze your fists, scrunch your face, and clearly feel that you are doing tension. Then release all at once. The point is to study what release actually feels like as a mental move.

Then comes the subtle version: while you're sitting, writing, speaking, or walking, gently "unscrunch" even when you didn't think you were scrunching.

Much of the grind is too familiar to notice. You may not realize you're tightening your eyes to think, holding your breath to write, pushing your face toward the screen, clenching your belly to stay in control, or turning "letting go" into another thing to force.

Michael's warning here is important: unscrunching is not another command you impose on the body. It's closer to putting something down. An adjacent cue I use in Nervous System Mastery work is "soften 5%," often followed by a spontaneous exhale when the body receives the invitation.

Academic research on Alexander Technique is still developing and should not be stretched into broad medical claims. Mechanism-oriented work has proposed that Alexander training may involve attention, intention, inhibition, body schema, and changes in postural tone; related studies have observed differences in dynamic regulation of axial tone among trained teachers and after shorter training in small samples.³ These are mechanistic clues, not broad outcome promises. They fit the spirit of this practice: use awareness to reduce unhelpful interference, then observe what changes.

Ambition can feel spacious instead of dangerous

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Michael about healthy ambition. His answer landed especially hard for people who've burned out and become afraid of their own drive. His previous ambition had hurt him, so part of the current work was learning to trust that ambition wouldn't necessarily hurt him again.

A nervous-system distinction:

• Old ambition: "If I don't grind, I will fall behind or fail."
• Collapsed anti-ambition: "Ambition is dangerous, so I should want less."
• Healthy ambition: "I can feel the size of what wants to happen without being possessed by it."

Michael's current dream extends well beyond personal productivity. He wants to help people increase agency, goodness, and aliveness, then apply those capacities to the world.

Use that as a check:

1. Does this goal make my world smaller or larger?
2. Do I become more available to life as I pursue it, or less?
3. Can I feel the ambition in my body without turning it into urgency?
4. What technical debt will this strategy create if I keep using it for five years?
5. What would committed, spacious involvement look like this week?

For complementary guides on ambition without burnout and state-aware decisions, see the continue-exploring list below.

Key takeaways

• Grinding less means removing effort that doesn't help the task. The caring stays; the contraction goes.
• Over-efforting shows up as narrowed awareness, muscle tension, breath holding, urgency, and self-monitoring.
• Expanded awareness restores options before you try to solve the problem.
• "Couldness" is the felt sense that you could do something else, even if you intentionally choose the same action.
• The "unscrunch" practice trains the move of releasing unnecessary doing without forcing relaxation.
• Aliveness combines awareness, intention, agency, responsiveness, and the ability to be fully here.
• Healthy ambition lets you feel the size of what matters without turning your nervous system into a grind machine.

Free assessment

Take the free nervous system assessment.

If over-efforting, urgency, or shutdown make it hard to access spacious action, the assessment can help you map your current nervous-system patterns and choose a steadier next step.

Take the assessment →

Continue exploring

• Read Functional Breathwork: Use Interoception to Regulate Your Nervous System for practical ways to match breath practices to state.
• Read The Art and Science of Interoception for more on noticing internal signals before they drive behavior.
• Read Focus on What Matters Most for another guide to ambition, recovery, and the fuel behind work.
• Read Mental Resilience, Cognitive Canaries & High-Stakes Decision Making for a system-oriented approach to state-aware decisions.

References

1. Michael Ashcroft and Jonny Miller, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 04:18–10:19. Guest-bio details were cross-checked against Michael's personal site, https://michaelashcroft.com/, and Expanding Awareness, https://expandingawareness.org/. ↩
2. Chua, Jimenez-Diaz, Lewthwaite, Kim, and Wulf's meta-analyses found advantages for external attentional focus over internal focus in many motor-performance and motor-learning contexts. This supports cautious experimentation with attention and intention; it does not mean internal sensing is never useful. See "Superiority of external attentional focus for motor performance and learning," Psychological Bulletin (2021), https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000335. ↩
3. For cautious research context, Cacciatore, Johnson, and Cohen propose that Alexander Technique may work through attention, intention, inhibition, postural tone, and body schema: "Potential Mechanisms of the Alexander Technique," Kinesiology Review (2020), https://doi.org/10.1123/kr.2020-0026. Cacciatore et al. also found greater dynamic modulation of axial postural tone among Alexander Technique teachers and changes after short-term training in a small low-back-pain sample; the sample sizes and context mean these findings should be treated as mechanistic clues, not broad outcome promises. See Human Movement Science (2011), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2010.10.002. ↩