Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.
The counting slows the breath to roughly the rate that suits the heart best, and the tracing gives your eyes and hand something to do, which is quietly the more useful half. Keep your eyes open and follow your fingertip. Four or five squares is usually enough. If holding the breath feels bad, drop the holds and just breathe along two sides.
Qur’an and Sunnah
and make the mountains to keep it stable (Quran 78:7). Something plain and unmoving holding the ground steady is a fair picture of what a counted breath does.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An integrative review explains heart rate variability as a marker of how flexibly the body can adapt to demands placed on it, which is the reasoning behind paced breathing at around six breaths a minute. It is an explanatory review rather than a trial of square breathing. So the rationale is well founded even though this exact pattern has no special evidence over any other slow one.
Shaffer F, McCraty R, Zerr CL. (2014). A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart's anatomy and heart rate variability.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Slow, even breathing steadies the heart's rhythm while the tracing occupies attention that would otherwise go to the panic.
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
Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.
Keep one strong smell for when you have gone flat, lemon or peppermint, and one soft smell for when you are wound up, something like lavender. Smell asks nothing of you, which is its whole advantage.
Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.