Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
If turning attention inward makes you feel more unreal rather than less, stop turning it inward. Go outward instead: what you can see, what you are grateful for, where you are and what day it is.
The usual advice to notice what is happening in your body assumes there is an inside that feels solid enough to visit. When it feels empty or fake, looking harder at it makes the emptiness louder. Naming three ordinary good things, describing the room out loud, or standing at a window and watching the weather all use the same attention without demanding an interior.
Qur’an and Sunnah
In His mercy He has given you night and day, so that you may rest and seek His bounty and be grateful (Quran 28:73). Gratitude here is pointed at plain outside things, the daylight and the night, which is exactly where to aim it when inside is not available.
وَمِن رَّحۡمَتِهِۦ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ لِتَسۡكُنُواْ فِيهِ وَلِتَبۡتَغُواْ مِن فَضۡلِهِۦ وَلَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
In His mercy He has given you night and day, so that you may rest and seek His bounty and be grateful.’
Qur’an 28:73read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of mindfulness-based interventions for university students found improvements in mental health overall, but effects varied widely and many trials were of moderate quality. Averages hide people for whom these practices do little or worse. That is reason enough to take your own experience seriously and switch to an outward version if the inward one reliably makes things harder.
Dawson AF, Brown WW, Anderson J, Datta B, Donald JN, Hong K, Allan S, Mole TB, Jones PB, Galante J. (2020). Mindfulness-Based Interventions for University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials.. Applied psychology. Health and well-being doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Looking outward exercises the same steadying attention without asking you to find an inside that is not answering.
When not to
If feeling unreal or detached is happening often, work on this with a therapist rather than relying on self-help techniques alone.
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
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.
On a video call, two things still work well: touching your own face gently, and rocking. Both are yours to do, and both are visible enough to be done together.
Before you try anything, give your distress a number out of ten. Do the thing. Then give it a number again.