Achieve More by Grinding Less: Increase Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft

Grinding less is not doing less; it is dropping the extra contraction

The practical answer from Jonny Miller’s conversation with Michael Ashcroft is this: you can often achieve more by noticing the unnecessary effort layered on top of action, expanding awareness, and letting the appropriate response organize itself.

Michael’s path makes the point visceral. After years in corporate work, a season of eighty-hour weeks, relationship stress, and an overnight panic attack left him dissociated, foggy, and unable to relate to his work laptop as a field of tasks. He describes it as a loss of “couldness” — the felt sense that there is something you could do, say, choose, or change.¹

This guide is not a recap. It 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.

✻1For NSM readers, the aim is not to become passive. The aim is to stop using contraction as proof that you care.

Separate effort from over-efforting

Michael’s core challenge to the grind mindset is not that effort is bad. It is that we often add tension, fixation, and self-monitoring to tasks where those additions do not help.²

He uses simple examples: drinking water, catching a ball, typing, speaking, writing, or lifting a heavy weight. The system already knows how to coordinate many actions. The conscious narrator can set an intention, but when it tries to micromanage every part of execution, it can interfere with the thing it wants.³

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: not healthy ease, but shutdown, apathy, avoidance, or “nothing I do matters.”
• Aliveness: engaged, available, responsive, and 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 is not discipline. It is friction.
4. What would appropriate engagement feel like? Not lazy, not forced — committed and available.

Research on motor learning points in a similar direction, cautiously. Meta-analytic work on attentional focus suggests that, for many motor tasks, focusing externally on the intended effect of movement tends to support better performance and learning than focusing internally on body parts.⁴ That does not prove every creative or emotional task should be “effortless.” It does support Michael’s practical claim that conscious micromanagement is not always the source of better performance.

Expand awareness before you solve the problem

Michael defines awareness as the field of things you are able to notice. Attention moves within that field. When pressure rises, awareness often collapses onto the object: the camera, inbox, blank page, conflict, metric, or goal.⁵

That collapse can feel like productivity because it is intense. But it also reduces options. You may 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.

Michael describes this as a way to interrupt the habitual response pattern. In Alexander Technique language, the familiar pattern can feel “right” precisely because it is 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.⁶

For NSM readers, this links naturally with interoception and exteroception: sensing inside the body and sensing the environment. If you cannot notice the clench, tunnel vision, or collapse, you cannot choose a different response.

Use “couldness” to recover choice

A useful word from the episode is 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 often 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 do not 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 Jonny connect this to the space between stimulus and response: not as an abstract quote, but as a trainable capacity to notice the groove before you are fully inside it.⁷

That is why “grinding less” is not passivity. In Michael’s frame, aliveness includes intention, attention, agency, and the capacity to respond appropriately. You are not drifting. You are more available.⁸

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.”

The aim is not to manufacture a special state. The aim is to remove enough interference that the appropriate next action becomes easier to find.

Practice non-doing with the “unscrunch”

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 the mental move of release.⁹

Then comes the subtle version: while you are sitting, writing, speaking, or walking, gently “unscrunch” even when you did not think you were scrunching.

This matters because much of the grind is too familiar to feel. You may not notice that you are:

• tightening your eyes to think;
• holding your breath to write;
• pushing your face toward the screen;
• clenching your belly to stay in control;
• turning “letting go” into another thing to force.

Michael’s warning is important: unscrunching is not another command you impose on the body. It is closer to putting something down. Jonny’s adjacent cue is “soften 5%,” often followed by a spontaneous exhale when the body receives the invitation.¹⁰

Academic research on Alexander Technique is still developing and should not be stretched into broad medical claims. But 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.¹¹ That fits the spirit of this practice: use awareness to reduce unhelpful interference, then observe what changes.

Let ambition feel alive, not dangerous

Near the end, Jonny asks Michael about healthy ambition. Michael’s answer is especially useful for people who have 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 would not necessarily hurt him again.¹²

That is a nervous-system distinction:

• Old ambition: “If I do not 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 is not merely to optimize personal productivity. It is to help people increase agency, goodness, and aliveness, then apply those capacities to the world.¹²

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 does not mean caring less. It means removing effort that does not help the task.
• Over-efforting often shows up as narrowed awareness, muscle tension, breath holding, urgency, and self-monitoring.
• Expanded awareness can restore 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

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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.

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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. Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 23:05–25:16. ↩
3. Michael Ashcroft and Jonny Miller, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 25:54–31:10. ↩
4. 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. ↩
5. Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 14:01–19:06. ↩
6. Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 32:07–35:12. ↩
7. Michael Ashcroft and Jonny Miller, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 31:10–38:11. ↩
8. Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 52:34–56:46 and 58:16–1:00:40. ↩
9. Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 1:08:39–1:12:42. ↩
10. Jonny Miller and Michael Ashcroft, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 1:12:42–1:13:39. ↩
11. 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. ↩
12. Michael Ashcroft and Jonny Miller, Achieve More, Grind Less & Increase Your Aliveness with Michael Ashcroft, 1:22:48–1:25:37. ↩