Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Feeling worse as things get safer is confusing, and it is common. When the guard finally comes down, whatever it was holding down gets felt.
This shows up when someone starts a calming practice, or moves somewhere safer, and instead of relief they get grief, irritability or a wave of old feeling. It usually means the pace is too quick rather than that the practice is wrong for you. Cut the dose right back, five minutes instead of thirty, and let your body get used to a little safety before you ask it for more.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Did We not relieve your heart for you' (Quran 94:1). Relief is described as something done for a person under strain, at a pace that is not yours to force.
أَلَمۡ نَشۡرَحۡ لَكَ صَدۡرَكَ
Did We not relieve your heart for you [Prophet]
Qur’an 94:1read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of the vagus nerve makes the point that it is roughly eighty per cent sensory, carrying a constant stream of information from the body up to the brain, which reframes odd sensations as signals rather than noise. That gives some ground for the idea that more gets through when defence eases. It is a review of anatomy and gut brain signalling, not a study of people feeling worse before they feel better, so treat the link to your own experience as a reasonable guess.
Bonaz B, Bazin T, Pellissier S. (2018). The Vagus Nerve at the Interface of the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis.. Frontiers in neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A body on guard mutes what it feels, so when the guard drops the muted things arrive all at once.
When not to
If the low mood or the flooding builds over several days instead of settling, stop the practice and speak to a doctor or therapist.
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
If nobody helped you learn to settle when you were small, you can still learn it now. Slower and more deliberately, but genuinely.
Being strong, trained or brave does not decide which way your body goes. People who could easily have fought have frozen instead.
Calm is not automatically the goal, and arousal is not automatically the enemy. What you are after is a system that can move between them.