Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Not every kind of quiet is calm. Settled feels warm and present. Shut down feels flat, far away and oddly fine.
Learning the difference in your own body is worth the trouble, because the two states need opposite things. If you are settled, stay there. If you have gone numb, a small movement, cold water on your hands, a bit of noise or company will do more for you than another minute of stillness. The tell is usually whether you can still feel interested in anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'you, soul at peace' (Quran 89:27). Peace has a settled soul in it rather than an absent one, and that is exactly the difference worth learning.
يَٰٓأَيَّتُهَا ٱلنَّفۡسُ ٱلۡمُطۡمَئِنَّةُ
‘[But] you, soul at peace
Qur’an 89:27read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of chronic stress and the body's main stress hormone found that long running stress often produces flattened output rather than the raised levels people expect, with the pattern depending on the kind of stressor and how long it has lasted. So a quiet reading is not automatically a healthy one. It measures hormone patterns rather than how a person feels, so take it as support for the idea and not proof of it.
Miller GE, Chen E, Zhou ES. (2007). If it goes up, must it come down? Chronic stress and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in humans.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Naming which state you are in stops you treating a shutdown as though it were rest.
When not to
If the flat, far away feeling lasts for days, or you lose track of time, take it to a doctor or therapist rather than managing it alone.
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
A child who does not feel safe cannot filter the room. The pencil scratch, the scraping chair, the fan and the rustle of a coat all arrive at the same volume as the teacher.
If your response to being hurt was to go blank rather than fight or run, look at how old you were and how big they were. Blank may have been the only thing left.
None of this makes thinking useless. Making sense of what happened, and changing what you concluded about yourself, does work that no breathing exercise touches.