Your body

The famous count is not automatically your count. One teacher finds that adding a pause after the inhale wakes her up, while the plain long exhale has her asleep within three breaths.

Protocols get passed around because they worked for someone, often someone with a large audience. That is not the same as fitting you. Keep the shape…

Breath is the quickest way you have of turning your own nervous system up or down. Nothing else you can simply decide to do works on that timescale.

Your heart rate already rises slightly as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, on every breath. So changing how you breathe changes something…

Put a hand just below your ribs and let it move. Most of us breathe up in the chest, and the settling effect comes from lower down, where the diaphragm can actually shift.

You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it…

A child cannot watch their own breathing, so give them something to watch instead. Bubbles through a wand show the out breath as it happens: too hard and it bursts, too weak and nothing comes.

Smelling a flower and then blowing it out gives each half of the breath a picture. The bubble wand is better still, because it answers back straight…

There is no breath that calms everyone. The one that settles your friend may leave you worse, and that is information about your body rather than a failure in you.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been…

Start with a count of four in and four out, then drop the count. Once the rhythm is there your body will choose its own length: six and six, eight and eight, whatever settles you.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point.…

Rather than pulling in a big breath, breathe gently and slightly less than you want to, then wait. The deep breath that arrives by itself does more than the one you force.

Keep the breathing light and unhurried, and after a while a mild hunger for air builds. Let it build a little. At some point the body takes a fuller…

Holding your breath for a moment makes the next one deeper, which sounds backwards until you know why. The urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide, not by a shortage of air.

Sensors in the brainstem watch the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, and a pause, especially after breathing out, lets it rise a little. The…

These practices are not only pleasant. They change things you could measure, which is worth knowing on the days when pleasant is not reason enough to bother.

Yoga and breath work tend to get filed under relaxation, and that undersells them. There are claims made about them shifting the chemistry involved…

Go slowly enough to learn something about yourself, rather than only a technique. What is worth keeping is knowing which breath does what in your body.

One round is rarely enough to tell. Try a breath for a minute or two, stop, and check what shifted: the chest, the shoulders, how loud your thoughts…

There are two skills here rather than one: letting your body move and settle in its own way, and being able to steer yourself deliberately towards rest or alertness. It is worth having both.

Most people are strong in one and shy of the other. If you always take charge, your body never gets to finish anything on its own. If you only ever…

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…

Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.

Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…

Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.

The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…

The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.

Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.

In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…

If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.

Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…

Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.

Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…

When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.

People agree that things helped for all sorts of reasons: not wanting to seem difficult, not wanting to disappoint you, having learned long ago that…

Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.

When you get absorbed in something these signals go unheard for hours, and then you wonder why you feel dreadful by four o'clock. The scan is dull,…

Brain imaging does show that practice changes something. Be careful with anyone who tells you a great deal more than that.

It genuinely helps to know that sitting and breathing is not nothing, particularly if you have been told your whole life to just try harder. It also…

In muscle relaxation you are usually told to let go slowly. If slow leaves you fidgeting, let go all at once. The version you will keep doing is the better version.

The standard sequence is to tense a muscle group, hold it, then release gradually, and for some people that long release is unbearable to sit…

Your eyes are an input too. A photo of someone who loves you and a plain soft coloured wall will settle you; a busy bright screen will lift you.

Hardly anyone thinks to arrange what is in front of them, and it is one of the easier things to change. Put a picture where you actually sit. Turn…

Take the spine through all six of its movements: forward, back, bending to each side, turning to each side. Standing or sitting, it takes under five minutes.

Doing the whole set matters more than doing any one of them beautifully. Left to ourselves we skip the direction that feels stiff or guarded, and…

If sitting still with your eyes closed has never worked, do it moving. Walking, washing up, gardening: the exercise is the same, and there is something to hold on to.

Sitting meditation asks for the hardest possible version of the task, sustained inward attention with nothing outside to grip. Attach attention to…

If your child is learning to settle, learn it alongside them rather than supervising. Parents who practise report less stress of their own and less flying off the handle.

Attention difficulties run in families, so the adult in the room is often working with much the same wiring at the end of a longer day. Practising…

If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.

Being able to disappear into a scene is a real ability, even when it has mostly got you into trouble at school and in meetings. A recording that…

Left, right, left, right. Walking, swimming, drumming and rowing all give the body the same steady side to side rhythm that the seated techniques are copying.

If tapping your own shoulders feels odd, or you would rather not do anything that looks like a technique, go for a walk instead and let the rhythm do…

When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.

The pause can be tiny. Say out loud what you did, tell someone, sit with it for a minute, thank God for it. Racing straight on to the next target…

When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.

Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…

A silent room is not restful for everybody. If every cough and creaking knee pulls at you, ask for music or bring headphones with something plain in them.

Too little going on can be as unsettling as too much. A low steady sound covers the sudden little noises that keep snagging your attention. Some…

When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.

They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…

Notice one thing your body is telling you right now. Thirsty, needing the loo, shoulders up somewhere near your ears. That noticing is a skill and it does come back with use.

Long stretches of stress teach you to override the body's signals until you stop hearing them at all. Then hunger, tiredness and the early edge of…