Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Most of the traffic on the nerve joining your gut, heart and lungs to your brain is heading upwards. When your stomach turns or your chest tightens, your body is reporting in.
It helps to treat those sensations as messages rather than faults to be got rid of. Next time your stomach drops before a difficult phone call, try naming it as information: something in you has spotted a demand and is getting ready. You may still make the call. You just make it knowing what the feeling is for.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'We are closer to him than his jugular vein' (Quran 50:16). The image is placed inside the body itself, which is where a good deal of your knowing happens too.
وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of the vagus nerve at the gut and brain interface describes it as roughly eighty per cent sensory, carrying information from the organs up to the brain rather than instructions down. That is anatomy rather than a treatment finding, and it says nothing about what any particular sensation means. It does support the basic reframe: gut feelings travel on a real pathway.
Bonaz B, Bazin T, Pellissier S. (2018). The Vagus Nerve at the Interface of the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis.. Frontiers in neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Sensations feel less frightening once you know they are your body telling you something rather than something going wrong.
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
The tools that reach what words cannot are physical: feet on the floor, a long breath out, pushing hard against a wall, deliberately walking away from something.
Reaching for another person when you are wound up is not a distraction from coping. Contact can turn the alarm down at the source.
Slow breathing on its own does less than slow breathing with a warm feeling attached and something showing you how you are doing.