JDBC thread hogs processor while query executes.

I'm developing a mutli-threaded Java application on Linux and am finding that when I execute an sql statement the thread that executes the statement just waits for JDBC to return with the results, and does not give up the processor to let other threads have a go while it is waiting. This is crippling my application as some statements are taking up to 1 second to return, and in this time none of the other threads are able to run. How can I get the thread that runs the query to go into the blocked state? With Network IO it will always block when waiting for input, how can I get the same with JDBC?