Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
After movement, take a moment on five things: the quality of your mind, of the sensation in your body, of your breathing, of your mood, and of your energy.
Doing this after moving rather than before gives you something to notice, since the body has just changed. Over time it builds a vocabulary. People who could only say fine or bad start saying things like heavy in the arms but clearer in the head. If you work with someone, taking it together gives you both a shared baseline, so that later in the hour you can both tell something has shifted.
Qur’an and Sunnah
by the soul and how He formed it (Quran 91:7). An oath is sworn by the soul and its making, which is a high value to place on attending to your own state.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a controlled brain imaging study, people higher in everyday mindfulness showed more prefrontal and less amygdala activity while naming an emotion, in line with the idea that labelling a feeling takes some of the heat out of it. The study measured a trait people already had rather than training them, so it cannot show how much this kind of practice would change matters. It supports the value of naming rather than any particular five point format.
Creswell JD, Way BM, Eisenberger NI, Lieberman MD. (2007). Neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness during affect labeling.. Psychosomatic medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Words for what is happening in you are the difference between having a state and being able to work with it.
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
Attention problems often travel with anxiety or low mood, and those two eat working memory as well. Settling that layer can make everything else look quite different.
Practise with the noise on, at least some of the time. The quiet room is not where you are going to need the skill.
Five minutes chosen for the state you are actually in beats twenty minutes of open sitting. Pick the one labelled stressed, or cannot sleep, or about to walk into work.