Practices

Most of the traffic on the nerve joining your gut, heart and lungs to your brain is heading upwards. When your stomach turns or your chest tightens, your body is reporting in.

It helps to treat those sensations as messages rather than faults to be got rid of. Next time your stomach drops before a difficult phone call, try…

Not every kind of quiet is calm. Settled feels warm and present. Shut down feels flat, far away and oddly fine.

Learning the difference in your own body is worth the trouble, because the two states need opposite things. If you are settled, stay there. If you…

Before picking a calming technique, work out which way you are off. Revved up and shut down need opposite things.

Wound up: slow the out breath, lower the lights, less input. Shut down: more input, movement, sound, a change of room. The common mistake is running…

You can tell you are settled by small signs: your breath sits low in your belly, feelings arrive in waves rather than floods, and you can think and feel at the same time.

Other markers: your voice has some tune in it, you can take in new information, you can read what is happening on someone else's face. Knowing your…

A gut feeling is a real signal rather than a turn of phrase. The chemicals that carry emotion in your brain are also at work in your heart and your gut.

This matters most if you grew up being told your read on a situation was wrong. Noticing the sensation, naming it, then checking it against what you…

The calm and connected part of this system speaks through your face, your voice, your ears and your heart. That is why those are the places to work.

A softer face, a slower voice, unhurried breathing and something friendly to look at are not decoration. They are the reachable end of the circuit…

The way you sound reaches people more directly than what you say. There is a pathway that tunes the ear towards the human voice, and a warm, unhurried voice uses it.

Worth knowing whether you are the one speaking or the one listening. If you are settling a child or a friend, let your voice go slower and softer and…

Calm can feel unsafe if you have not had much of it. Take it in small amounts and let it be strange at first.

Grounding exercises sometimes leave people more agitated rather than less, and then they decide they are doing it wrong. Often the truth is that…

When you are far from settled, aim for the next step rather than for calm. Rattled is a real improvement on numb.

There is a rough order to these states: shut down at the bottom, revved up in the middle, settled and connected at the top. Coming back tends to…

Freezing is not something you decided on. It is what was left once the other options had gone.

A mouse does not try to charm a cat. It runs, and if it is caught it goes limp, and none of that is a considered plan. People ask themselves for…

Breathing that has gone almost invisible happens in both kinds of stillness, so it will not tell you which one you are looking at. Muscle tone will.

Look at the jaw, the hands, the shoulders, the way the body is being held in the chair. Tight and set is one thing. Slack and heavy is another. You…

Stand on one foot for half a minute, a hand on a chair if you need it, and put all your attention into the foot on the floor.

You will find it is never still. There is a constant small negotiation towards the toes, the heel, one side and back again, and every so often you…

Try locking your ankle and holding everything rigid while you balance. You will fall over. The wobble was doing the work.

People who are frightened of losing control often try to hold themselves regulated: clamped, monitoring, allowing no drift. It is exhausting and it…

There are small signs that somebody has come back into connection: light in the eyes, a bit of music in the voice, a smile that arrives by itself.

They are easy to see once you know to look, and they are just as useful in reverse. If you are with someone difficult and your own voice has gone…

Before you close your eyes for anything calming, spend a minute looking round the room. Let your eyes land wherever they want to.

Closing your eyes too early is one reason relaxation exercises backfire. If your body has not registered that the room is fine, going inward means…

Breath does not always calm. For some people it opens the door to feeling, for others it puts a little distance in. Find out which it does for you today.

The instruction to breathe deeply gets handed out as though it settles everyone. Plenty of people find that attention to their breath brings the…

Your heart speeds up slightly on every breath in and slows on every breath out. Sit quietly with a hand on your chest and you can feel it.

This is why lengthening the out breath calms you and lengthening the in breath wakes you up. It also means you carry a working control that needs no…

Breath reaches the settling machinery faster than reasoning does, because it works on a part of the brainstem that does not wait for your opinion.

That is why arguing yourself out of a panic rarely works while six slow breaths often do something. It also explains why breath practice can feel…

Hum a note you like for a few breaths, and try covering your ears with your palms so the sound fills your head.

The vibration carries through your throat and your inner ear, and humming lengthens the out breath for you without any counting. Choose your own note…

Cold water on your face, particularly at the hairline and around the lips, sets off a reflex that slows the heart. It is one of the few things fast enough to interrupt real panic.

A splash at the sink, a few minutes outside in cold air, or a bowl of cold water if you have one to hand. There is a quieter version for when you…