Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Aim low on purpose. Not the best day of your life. I like my cat. I got here on time.
Big positive memories tend to backfire: they are hard to reach on a bad day, and for some people feeling good at all starts a wait for the other shoe to drop. Small ones stay steady. You are practising the shape of the thing, and the shape works perfectly well at low intensity.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Among His signs are your sleep, by night and by day, and your seeking His bounty' (Quran 30:23). Sleeping and earning a living are the examples given, which sets the bar for what counts as worth noticing.
وَمِنۡ ءَايَٰتِهِۦ مَنَامُكُم بِٱلَّيۡلِ وَٱلنَّهَارِ وَٱبۡتِغَآؤُكُم مِّن فَضۡلِهِۦٓۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتࣲ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَسۡمَعُونَ
Among His signs are your sleep, by night and by day, and your seeking His bounty. There truly are signs in this for those who can hear
Qur’an 30:23read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Ordinary exposures do reach this physiology. A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace found time in green surroundings associated with lower salivary cortisol, heart rate and diastolic blood pressure. That is about environments rather than recalled feelings, so it supports the general principle that small ordinary things register in the body, not the specific instruction here.
Twohig-Bennett C, Jones A. (2018). The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes.. Environmental research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A small feeling you can actually produce trains the skill, while a big one you cannot produce trains nothing.
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 point of all this is not that your heart never pounds. It is that when a car pulls out in front of you, you are back to yourself in a minute instead of an hour.
Sound sensitivity is not a fault in your hearing. Under threat the ear opens out towards high and low sounds, the range that carries warning, and that is the range which makes ordinary life feel loud.
The screen tells you nothing and asks you nothing. The plane simply flies better or worse, and the adjusting happens on its own.