Practices

An immune system that stays switched on with nothing to fight can begin turning on healthy tissue. It is doing its job with the wrong target.

That is a kinder account than the ones people are usually handed, which tend to imply they brought it on themselves by not coping. None of this is…

Digestion runs on the resting side of your nervous system, which is one reason long stress and gut trouble travel together so often.

People with reflux, irritable bowels or years of unexplained stomach pain are often told the two things are unrelated, or that it is stress in the…

Heart rate variability is not about how fast your heart beats. It is about how much the gaps between the beats vary as you breathe.

People often assume a slow heart rate must mean a healthy one. You can have a perfectly normal rate with a rigid, unvarying rhythm, and the rigidity…

A better definition of resilience than never being knocked over: how quickly you come back once you have been.

It is kinder and it is more accurate. Nobody is judged on whether the alarm went off. What tells you something is whether you are still shaking two…

The unsettled pattern is not simply a smaller rhythm. It is a jagged one, swinging up and down without much order to it.

Which matches how it feels from inside: fine at eleven, flooded by half past, flat by two. If that is you, the aim is not to iron the swings out into…

If you want to breathe more slowly, add one count at a time over weeks. Four in and four out this month, five next month, and no hurry after that.

Very slow breathing can bring on air hunger, that feeling of not getting enough, and for some people it tips straight into panic. Good reason to…

The point of all this is not that your heart never pounds. It is that when a car pulls out in front of you, you are back to yourself in a minute instead of an hour.

People who take permanent calm to be the goal end up reading every jolt of adrenaline as proof they are still broken. That is a miserable way to live…

Yoga, breath practice, loving kindness, gratitude, forgiveness work, tapping, rubbing your own shoulders: they all seem to move the same dial. Choose whichever one you will actually keep doing.

It is a strangely mixed list, and the mix is the point. If practices that look nothing alike arrive at similar places, then the argument about which…

There are implanted devices that send small pulses along the vagus nerve, used for epilepsy, rheumatoid arthritis, depression and other conditions. Breath practice is a slow, unplugged cousin of the same idea.

Worth knowing mostly for what it implies. One nerve, nudged electrically, is used for an inflammatory disease and for a mood disorder, two things we…

Some routes ask you to do something: breathing, moving, stretching. Others ask you to receive: music, warm water, somebody else's voice. Keep one of each, because which one you can manage depends on the day.

When you are shut down and heavy, an active practice can be more than you are able to start. When you are wired and watchful, lying still while…

When somebody tells you a practice will calm you, treat that as a hypothesis about you rather than a fact. Try it and watch what actually happens.

Promised effects set people up to fail. When the promised calm does not turn up, the usual conclusion is that their body is broken, rather than that…

When you cannot settle yourself, borrow somebody else's steadiness. Sitting near a calm person, even without talking, is a real thing to try.

Choose by effect rather than by closeness. Some people you love leave you more wound up than you started, and some people you barely know are easy to…

Connection settles people, but the right amount of it varies enormously. Some settle with a house full of family and some with one person and no talking at all.

If closeness costs you something, plan around that rather than pushing through. Shorter visits, sitting side by side instead of face to face, a walk…

A regular sitting practice is training rather than a treat. What you practise when things are calm is what your body can find when they are not.

The state people describe in mindfulness and the state of feeling safe in your own body overlap almost completely. That is a good reason to keep the…

Yoga, slow breathing with feedback, neurofeedback and listening programmes are all aiming at the same target. Pick the one you can actually get to and keep doing.

Because they share a mechanism, they are largely swappable. Cost, travel, waiting lists and whether you enjoy it are legitimate grounds for choosing…

If you mostly run hot and jumpy, start with slow paced breathing. If you mostly go blank and far away, work that reaches you through sound and voice tends to get further.

The idea is to pick the tool that pulls against your usual tilt. Breathing practice puts the brake back on a system that has lost it. Sound and voice…

If you understand your history perfectly and nothing has changed, you are not failing at this. Insight alone is pushing water uphill against the current of information coming from your body.

Articulate people get stuck here often, because talking is the thing they are best at. What tends to be missing is an actual experience of being safe…

None of this makes thinking useless. Making sense of what happened, and changing what you concluded about yourself, does work that no breathing exercise touches.

The body work settles the alarm. The thinking work deals with the verdict you passed on yourself afterwards: that you are weak, that it was your…

Being still is not the problem. The circuit that shuts you down under threat is the same one that lets you sleep deeply, digest, rest and curl up with someone you love.

So the aim is not to stay switched on. It is to be still and safe at the same time, which is a capacity you can rebuild rather than a symptom to…

Deep rest needs a dose like anything else. If a long daily relaxation is leaving you flatter each week rather than steadier, make it shorter.

Someone can start a forty day programme of long guided rest with the best intentions and find that by the second week they are sinking instead of…