Practices

How often you actually do it matters more than which version you chose. The people who keep turning up tend to get more out of it, and those who carry on at home get more again.

This is quietly encouraging, because an unimpressive practice done regularly beats an ideal one you manage twice. It also sets the expectation…

Part of why martial arts suit some people has little to do with the kicking. Every session opens with a plan and closes with a look back at what happened and what comes next.

Those brackets at each end are doing quiet work: planning, then reviewing, then planning again, which are exactly the things that are hard to hold in…

Automatic is not the enemy. An out of date automatic is. The aim is to practise the calmer response until it runs on its own, the way the old one already does.

At the start it feels artificial, and it should. You are choosing deliberately what the other response does for free. Give it enough repetitions and…

People who train regularly seem to be set off less easily, not because they care less but because a fitter body reads fewer situations as emergencies.

This one works on the scale of weeks, so it belongs in the ordinary part of your life rather than in the middle of a flare. Two or three sessions a…

Two people who spend time in step really do become more attuned. Nothing passes between your brains while it happens, though, so put the hours in rather than waiting for the wiring.

The phrase about brains wiring together is a picture, and a lovely one. What is actually available to you is ordinary: the same room, the same walk…

There is a listening programme that filters music into the range of the human voice, given in short sittings that add up to a few hours, to make speech easier for the body to take in.

It is delivered by a trained provider rather than downloaded and run at home, usually in small doses with a pause if things stir up. If you have…

This is given in small doses with pauses built in, and the pace is meant to bend around you. Ask for less if you need less.

There are shorter and longer versions, and versions without a human voice for people who find singing in a particular language hard to hear. A…

If your usual trouble is going blank, feeling unreal or watching yourself from a distance, this is the kind of work that tends to reach that.

When you are numb, techniques that ask you to notice what you feel in your body have very little to work with, because the noticing is the part that…

Some people end up fully flipped, awake until three in the morning and unable to surface until evening. That is genuinely hard to reset, and not for want of trying.

Ordinary sleep advice is not built for this. What tends to be needed is help with timing: light at the right hour, a plan to move the whole cycle in…

Trauma sleeplessness usually has two layers: night itself carries meaning, and the body's clock has moved. Both need attention.

If bad things happened at night, lying in the dark listening to every sound is not a bad habit, it is vigilance doing its job. Sleep advice alone…