Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
Cross your hands to the opposite shoulders and stroke slowly down to your elbows and hands, like a hug you are giving yourself. Three to five strokes, unhurried.
Then, if you want the rest of it: from the middle of your forehead out to the temples and along the hairline to the ears, from the crown down towards the ears, across the cheeks to the ears, and finally palms pressed together. Speed matters more than getting the route right. Slow enough that it feels like being soothed, not brushed down.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Take my shirt and lay it over my father's face' (Quran 12:93). Soft cloth drawn across a grieving face is the Qur'an's own image of comfort delivered through the skin.
ٱذۡهَبُواْ بِقَمِيصِي هَٰذَا فَأَلۡقُوهُ عَلَىٰ وَجۡهِ أَبِي يَأۡتِ بَصِيرࣰ ا وَأۡتُونِي بِأَهۡلِكُمۡ أَجۡمَعِينَ
Take my shirt and lay it over my father’s face: he will recover his sight. Then bring your whole family back to me.’
Qur’an 12:93read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of C fibre mediated touch describes how slow gentle stroking of hairy skin activates a distinct class of nerve fibres that feed into the brain's map of the body's condition rather than into touch discrimination. That is a real physiological basis for why the pace of the stroke matters. It explains the mechanism rather than showing that this particular sequence relieves distress.
Björnsdotter M, Morrison I, Olausson H. (2010). Feeling good: on the role of C fiber mediated touch in interoception.. Experimental brain research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Slow stroking of the skin is read by a particular set of nerves as affection, which is not how quick contact is read.
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
People who are sure they could never lie still for an hour tend to be asleep within ten minutes of getting on the table. Being unable to fidget seems to do it.
You are not trying to get calm here. You are trying to find out what is actually going on in you, and whatever turns up is the useful part.
Telling someone what a treatment will actually be like improves how they respond to it. What it feels like, how long, what is normal afterwards.