Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
You will stop doing this once you feel better. Write it on your list of things that help, so it is there next time instead of forgotten.
Adherence fades the same way it does with exercise, and the fading is not a character flaw. The trouble is that when you next need it you will be in a state where remembering your options is hard. A short written list, somewhere you will genuinely see it, does the remembering for you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom you are grateful' (Quran 32:9). Forgetting what you have been given is treated as the ordinary human habit, so it makes sense to plan around it.
ثُمَّ سَوَّىٰهُ وَنَفَخَ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِهِۦۖ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَۚ قَلِيلࣰ ا مَّا تَشۡكُرُونَ
Then He moulded him; He breathed from His Spirit into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom you are grateful
Qur’an 32:9read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-review of exercise across mental and substance use disorders found benefit for a wide range of conditions, with the strength of evidence varying considerably by condition. Exercise is the useful comparison here for a different reason: it works, and people still stop doing it. Whether a practice keeps going is a separate question from whether it helps.
Ashdown-Franks G, Firth J, Carney R, Carvalho AF, Hallgren M, Koyanagi A, Rosenbaum S, Schuch FB, Smith L, Solmi M, Vancampfort D, Stubbs B. (2020). Exercise as Medicine for Mental and Substance Use Disorders: A Meta-review of the Benefits for Neuropsychiatric and Cognitive Outcomes.. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Distress narrows what you can bring to mind, so the list has to exist before the bad day arrives.
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
Practise this when you are calm and again when you are wound up. The second one is what makes it available in the moment you need it.
The goal is not to have less energy. It is to have a brake you can feather rather than slam.
If you are the person who steadies every room, ask yourself when a room last steadied you.