Areas › Your body › Feeling from the inside
An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.
Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down, walking into situations that should raise a flag and feeling nothing at all. If that is you, it is worth keeping a rule or two you follow whether or not you feel uneasy, until the signal comes back.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true (Quran 17:36). A strong feeling still has to be checked, and so does the absence of one.
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across 55 studies, the expected link between anxiety and sharper detection of one's own heartbeat turned out weak and inconsistent. Anxious people are not reliably better readers of their bodies. That undercuts any simple story in which the level of alarm you feel tells you how accurate your sensing is.
Adams KL, Edwards A, Peart C, Ellett L, Mendes I, Bird G, Murphy J. (2022). The association between anxiety and cardiac interoceptive accuracy: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Calibration can drift either way, so a quiet body is not the same thing as a safe situation.
When not to
If your safety is currently at risk and your own sense of danger is not helping you judge it, borrow someone else's read rather than relying only on your own.
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 inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?
If something will not shift, pair it with the breath: 'I am' as you breathe in, 'letting go' as you breathe out. Let the out breath be the longer one.
Picture what you feel as weather. A clear morning, a wind picking up, a storm sitting on the far hills. Weather is real, and weather moves.