Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
For coming down, something sweet taken slowly tends to help more than anything you chew: sipped through a straw, or let dissolve on the tongue. Nobody around you can tell you are doing it.
Slow sucking soothes in a way that goes right back to the first weeks of life, and it is quiet enough to use in a meeting, on a bus, in a waiting room. A smoothie through a straw, a boiled sweet, warm tea in small mouthfuls. The invisibility matters more than it sounds, because people actually use the strategies that do not announce themselves.
Qur’an and Sunnah
who provides them with food to ward off hunger, safety to ward off fear (Quran 106:4). Food and safety are named in one breath, which is close to what a small sweet thing is doing for a frightened body.
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
In a randomised trial with 84 outpatients with borderline personality disorder, twenty weeks of dialectical behaviour therapy skills training on its own, distress tolerance skills included, reduced suicidality and distress. Small sensory self soothing acts sit inside that skill set, but the trial tested the whole package rather than any single piece of it. The evidence is for the toolkit, not for the sweet in particular.
McMain SF, Guimond T, Barnhart R, Habinski L, Streiner DL. (2017). A randomized trial of brief dialectical behaviour therapy skills training in suicidal patients suffering from borderline disorder.. Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Slow steady work for the mouth is read by the body as a sign that nothing urgent is happening.
When not to
If food is a difficult area for you, take this one from another sense instead.
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
In muscle relaxation you are usually told to let go slowly. If slow leaves you fidgeting, let go all at once. The version you will keep doing is the better version.
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.
When you have gone flat and far away, chew something noisy or blow something: pretzels, raw carrot, bubbles, a slow puff at a candle flame. It lifts you without tipping you into panic.