Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.
It fits inside an argument, a shopping queue, the second before you send a message you will regret. The value is not the breath itself, it is the gap. You have put a moment between what happened and what you do about it. Practise it a few times when nothing is going wrong, so that it is there when something is.
Qur’an and Sunnah
remember your Lord inwardly, in all humility and awe (Quran 7:205). An inward turn nobody else can see is treated as real practice, which is exactly what a ten second pause is.
وَٱذۡكُر رَّبَّكَ فِي نَفۡسِكَ تَضَرُّعࣰ ا وَخِيفَةࣰ وَدُونَ ٱلۡجَهۡرِ مِنَ ٱلۡقَوۡلِ بِٱلۡغُدُوِّ وَٱلۡأٓصَالِ وَلَا تَكُن مِّنَ ٱلۡغَٰفِلِينَ
[Prophet], remember your Lord inwardly, in all humility and awe, without raising your voice, in the mornings and in the evenings- do not be one of the heedless
Qur’an 7:205read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Pooling 306 experiments, a meta-analysis of emotion regulation found that strategies changing what you attend to, or how you read a situation, worked better than trying to suppress a feeling once it had arrived. The looking step is doing the first kind of work rather than the second. That review pooled laboratory tasks, so it supports the principle rather than this particular four step sequence.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A short pause is enough to let something other than the first impulse arrive.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Rest one hand on your forehead and the other on your chest. After a few minutes, move the forehead hand down to your belly. Eyes open or closed, whichever you prefer.
If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.
When you have gone numb rather than frantic, try a long low sound on the out breath. Voo, drawn out until the breath runs out, so your lips and chest buzz with it.