Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
You do not need a diagnosis to be worth teaching this to. Something that takes seconds, costs nothing and travels with you is worth having before you need it.
Practise it on an ordinary day, sitting on the bus or waiting for the kettle, so your hands already know it when the day is not ordinary. That is really the whole argument for the simple tools: not that they are powerful, but that they are actually available when the powerful ones are out of reach. Teach it to the people around you too.
Qur’an and Sunnah
who provides them with food to ward off hunger, safety to ward off fear (Quran 106:4). Plain provisions against fear are treated as a mercy worth noticing, not as something only the desperate need.
ٱلَّذِيٓ أَطۡعَمَهُم مِّن جُوعࣲ وَءَامَنَهُم مِّنۡ خَوۡفِۭ
who provides them with food to ward off hunger, safety to ward off fear
Qur’an 106:4read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis in healthy people, rather than patients, found mindfulness-based stress reduction reliably lowered stress, with a consistent effect across the studies pooled. So settling practices are not only for people in crisis. That study was of a full programme rather than a thirty second technique, so read it as support for the general habit and not for any one shortcut.
Chiesa A, Serretti A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A method you have already practised is one you can still find when you are distressed.
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
If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.
After movement, take a moment on five things: the quality of your mind, of the sensation in your body, of your breathing, of your mood, and of your energy.
Ask who you are today and what body you are living in today, and let the answer be different from yesterday's. You are more fluid than solid.