Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
When you are far from settled, aim for the next step rather than for calm. Rattled is a real improvement on numb.
There is a rough order to these states: shut down at the bottom, revved up in the middle, settled and connected at the top. Coming back tends to happen in that order rather than in one jump. So if you are flat and far away, the useful target is movement of any kind, a short walk, cold water on your hands, a phone call, rather than serenity.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Moses said 'Lord, lift up my heart' (Quran 20:25) before facing something frightening. He asked for enough steadiness for the next thing, not for the fear to be gone.
قَالَ رَبِّ ٱشۡرَحۡ لِي صَدۡرِي
Moses said, ‘Lord, lift up my heart
Qur’an 20:25read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta analysis combining heart rate variability with brain imaging found that this heart measure tracks activity in the networks that regulate emotion and threat, supporting its use as an index of how well someone is regulating. So there is a real physiological signal underneath talk of states. The ladder of states is a clinical way of organising the picture, not something that meta analysis tested.
Thayer JF, Ahs F, Fredrikson M, Sollers JJ, Wager TD. (2012). A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies: implications for heart rate variability as a marker of stress and health.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Asking for a state that is two steps away usually fails, and failing at it leaves you worse off than before you tried.
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
Slow breathing on its own does less than slow breathing with a warm feeling attached and something showing you how you are doing.
Stand on one foot for half a minute, a hand on a chair if you need it, and put all your attention into the foot on the floor.
Not all stillness is the same. One kind is braced and wide awake. The other has gone soft and far away.