Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
Before you try anything, give your distress a number out of ten. Do the thing. Then give it a number again.
Even a drop from eight to six is worth having, because you were the one who moved it. That is often the more important result: not the two points, but the evidence that your own state is something you can act on rather than something that happens to you. Keep the numbers rough. It is a rough instrument and it is meant to be.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We know what his soul whispers to him (Quran 50:16). Your inner state is not a mystery even when you cannot describe it well, and a rough number is enough of a description to work with.
وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a controlled imaging study, people higher in everyday mindfulness showed more prefrontal and less amygdala activity while putting a name to an emotion, which supports the old finding that labelling a feeling takes some of the heat out of it. Assigning a number is a crude form of labelling. The study is correlational and about naming rather than rating, so this is a reasonable extension rather than a tested one.
Creswell JD, Way BM, Eisenberger NI, Lieberman MD. (2007). Neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness during affect labeling.. Psychosomatic medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Seeing a number move shows you that you affected your own state, which is easy to miss otherwise.
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 twisting, draw your belly gently in towards your spine. It looks after your lower back, and it is worth feeling for its own sake: you steady the middle before you turn towards anything.
Posture does not only show what you feel, it decides what you can feel. Anger is very hard to reach with a collapsed chest, and grief is hard to reach when you are held rigidly upright.
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.