loosen (someone) up

loosen | American Dictionary

loosen
verb
us/ˈlu·sən/

loosenverb (MAKE NOT ATTACHED)

[ I/T ]
to become or make something less firmly fixed:
[ I ]The screws holding the light fixture have loosened, and it’s dangling from the ceiling.
[ T ]fig. When immigration laws were loosened, the number of immigrants shot up.

Examples of loosen

loosen
Once that tie is loosened, anything can be brought in.
The criteria for private preemption should be loosened in appropriate, limited cases.
The bootstrap allows inferences to be made directly from the actual data, while loosening the parametric assumptions that may not hold in a particular case.
Nailed either to small hand cards, or to large cylinders in carding machines, this process loosened matted wool without combing it straight.
All the other links in the middle are now loosened and will fall.
To offer an example, if a person's mental health stability is questioned, their credibility is loosened.
He also loosened the rules governing authorization for investigations and their duration.
Eligibility criteria have been loosened and coverage increased so as to accommodate older workers with limited prospects of reemployment.
Arguably, democracy loosened the constraints imposed on interest groups and provided them with more effective avenues to voice their concerns.
Minimizing soil loosening during crop establishment will also contribute to a significant reduction in soil erosion in tropical smallholder cropping systems.
In this emblematic incident, disease spreads once such control is loosened.
The girl, who is now unnamed, loosens her limbs.
The conventions were loosened, and yet retained as far as the kind of halo they brought with them was serviceable.
Therefore, it is crucially important that bureaucratic principles are loosened.
Eventually physical chemistry was loosened from chemistry in the same way that, somewhat later, chemical physics was emancipated from physics.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.