Practices

Breath work goes straight into the body, and for some people that is the problem. If your panic has ever been about not getting enough air, putting your attention on your breathing can set it off rather than settle it.

Asthma, a history of choking or smothering, panic that arrives through the chest: any of these makes the breath a loaded place to put your attention.…

For when you are stuck in shutdown there is a faster practice: short sharp exhales driven from the belly, letting each in breath happen by itself, about twenty of them.

It is meant to rouse, so expect to feel more awake and a little buzzy afterwards rather than calm. Twenty is plenty. Sit down before you start so…

Breathe in for about five and out for about ten, and do not hold at the top. Go straight from the in breath into the out breath, five to ten times over.

That pause after the inhale feels natural to add, and it can raise your heart rate rather than lowering it, which undoes what you came for. If ten…

Fighting, running and freezing are the ones everybody can name. There is a fourth: going along with things, smoothing them over, making yourself easy to be around so that nothing bad happens.

It gets read as being agreeable, or as a personality, and it is often neither. If you grew up being criticised, or spent years around someone…

You are not trying to talk yourself into feeling calm. You are trying to move your body from one setting into another, and the breath is the handle you can reach.

Once the alarm system is running, stress hormones are already in the blood and telling yourself to relax does very little about them. Changing the…

If you keep only one thing, make the out breath longer than the in breath. Four in and eight out is enough, and nothing clever is needed on top of it.

This is the closest thing to a dependable settling lever. It suits the end of the day, a queue you are stuck in, the ten minutes before sleep. Some…

If big breathing feels like too much, make it smaller instead. Breathe so smoothly that the in breath rolls into the out breath with no sound and no edges.

This asks almost nothing of you, and that is the point. Nothing to count, nothing to hold, no depth to reach for. For anyone whose panic runs through…

Let the in breath come however it comes, then breathe out through pursed lips as though through a straw for a count of eight, finishing with two more counts through the nose. Three ordinary breaths, then go again.

Three rounds is the usual dose. Notice what is deliberately left uncounted: the inhale. Counting the in breath when someone is already panicking…

The soft sound and the feel of this breath in your throat give your attention somewhere to sit. When the mind is loud, something you can hear holds better than something silent.

It is called the victorious breath, and the victory meant is over the noise in your own head rather than over anybody else. The vibration in the…

The pull towards bread, pasta and biscuits when you are low is not simply greed. Carbohydrate makes it easier for the brain to get hold of the raw material it needs for serotonin, so it gives a real if short lived lift.

Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking…

When digestion goes wrong there are usually two things to look at rather than one: something you are eating that does not suit you, and a body too braced to digest properly. Checking only one door tends to leave you stuck.

Digestion mostly happens when your body believes it is safe. If you eat every meal with your shoulders up round your ears, that alone can show up as…

Irritable bowel symptoms turn up more often in people with ADHD, and they tend to track stress. If your stomach is at its worst in the weeks when everything else is at its worst, that is information rather than coincidence.

Two things help more often than they get suggested. Cutting caffeine frequently settles symptoms on its own, since it speeds the gut up and raises…

Stress unsettles the gut and an unsettled gut drags on mood, so the two keep each other going. The good news buried in that is you can step in from either end.

You do not have to establish which came first. Easing the pressure on your nervous system helps digestion, steadying what you eat helps mood, and…

One of the earliest signs that you are drifting out of the present is that your hands and feet go vague. Not numb exactly, just less there.

It tends to happen before you notice you have gone anywhere. If you learn your own version of it, you get an early warning: a chance to press your…

When what is happening inside gets too loud, turn outward. Name what you can see, listen for the furthest sound, press your feet into the floor.

This is not avoidance. The outward senses and the sense of where your body sits both carry information about now, which is exactly what the flooding…

When someone is distressed, moving too fast to settle them can land as a message that their distress is not welcome here. Let them set the speed.

Offering a breath, a blanket, a change of subject: all of it can help, and all of it can arrive as a shutting down if it comes before the person has…

Picture what you feel as weather. A clear morning, a wind picking up, a storm sitting on the far hills. Weather is real, and weather moves.

The useful part is the distance. You are the field, not the storm. And every kind of weather in the picture is on its way somewhere, which quietly…

If something will not shift, pair it with the breath: 'I am' as you breathe in, 'letting go' as you breathe out. Let the out breath be the longer one.

Giving the mind two short phrases to hold occupies it just enough that it stops arguing with the feeling. Meanwhile the long exhale does its own…

Let the uncomfortable thing be uncomfortable, without arguing with it. People are often surprised by the relief that follows.

Much of what makes a bad feeling unbearable is the second layer: the objecting, the wishing it gone, the fear that it means something about you. Drop…

You are allowed to move. Wiggle your toes, rub one arm from shoulder to hand, put a palm on your chest. A body that is doing something is much easier to feel than one held still.

Sitting perfectly still and waiting for sensation is hard work if you are numb, and it often ends with the conclusion that you are broken at this.…