Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.
Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most instructions to settle assume closed eyes; you can ignore that. Follow something with your eyes, or trace a shape in the air and watch your own hand do it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
who spread out the earth for you and built the sky (Quran 2:22). There is a great deal outside you that is steady, and looking at any of it is a way back into the room.
ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ فِرَٰشࣰ ا وَٱلسَّمَآءَ بِنَآءࣰ وَأَنزَلَ مِنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰ فَأَخۡرَجَ بِهِۦ مِنَ ٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ رِزۡقࣰ ا لَّكُمۡۖ فَلَا تَجۡعَلُواْ لِلَّهِ أَندَادࣰ ا وَأَنتُمۡ تَعۡلَمُونَ
who spread out the earth for you and built the sky; who sent water down from it and with that water produced things for your sustenance. Do not, knowing this, set up rivals to God
Qur’an 2:22read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Pooling 306 experiments, strategies that change what you attend to or how you read a situation outperformed trying to suppress a feeling once it had arrived. Redirecting attention is doing something quite different from clamping down. That is the whole case for giving your eyes a job rather than telling yourself to calm down.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Looking at something real in the room gives your attention somewhere to be other than inside the alarm.
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
Before you walk into a room with someone, ask what you are carrying in with you, and what you are likely to leave behind when you go.
When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.
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.