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Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
What works for this
Working from the body first
A body that has not slept, eaten or moved has less left over for holding itself steady. Changing the state you are in is often faster than changing the thoughts you are having, and it is more reliable when you are already worn out.
One move, today
A long slow out breath, longer than the in breath, three times. The out breath is the part that does the work.
What matches
65 practicesPut 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.…
Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. The holds are the strong part of this one, and they stay optional every single time.
Some people find the pauses deeply settling. Others meet the edge of what they can tolerate there, especially at the bottom of the exhale. Both are…
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…
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…
Practise with the noise on, at least some of the time. The quiet room is not where you are going to need the skill.
A calm that only exists in a silent house is not much use in an open plan office or a kitchen at teatime. Once you can settle in the quiet, do a…
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…
Five minutes of moving about sharpens concentration enough to notice. You do not need a session, you need a lap of the building.
Before a task you have been avoiding, get the blood going for five minutes. Stairs, a brisk walk to the end of the road, star jumps in the kitchen if…
It does not have to be one block. Ten minutes here and ten there add up to the same total, and they are far easier to get.
An hour set aside is an hour that one interruption can swallow. Bits scattered through the day survive better and they break up the sitting, which is…
Give yourself an hour rather than a fortnight. A short window creates the pressure that gets a thing started, where a long one quietly fills up with everything else.
Two weeks of notice usually means the work happens in the last few hours anyway, with all the dread in between. So set a smaller box on purpose:…
When a child starts martial arts and their maths marks go up, the maths did not improve. Their attention did, and timed maths tests measure attention as much as arithmetic.
It is worth being clear about this, because the wrong reading sends people looking for a movement class that teaches numbers. What actually changed…
End a session with a few minutes of sitting still. The styles that close with quiet seem to help most with the pause before reacting.
That pause is the couple of seconds in which you get to decide whether something is a good idea. It is trainable, and stillness right after exertion…
Teaching a child to fight works better when it comes with a plain rule: you defend, you never start it. The rule is doing as much work as the training.
A child whose brakes are slow benefits from having the decision made in advance, out loud, many times over. Then it is not something to work out in…
Do not stop dead. Give the end of anything energetic a few minutes of winding down, so the change of gear is a routine rather than a demand.
Stopping is a transition, and transitions are where things fall apart for a lot of people. A short unwinding phase, the same one every time, takes…
A scheduled break does not break concentration. It is the unplanned wandering off that does that, and a known break tends to replace it.
Teachers usually expect movement breaks to shatter the lesson and find the opposite: children come back more easily because the break is part of the…
A promising study can be very small. Thirteen teenagers, teachers doing the rating, and a fortnight of follow up is a good start and not a settled answer.
The clever part of that design is the follow up, because it asks whether anything survives after the classes stop, which is where a lot of attention…
When nobody has checked whether a benefit lasts, that is not the same as finding out it does not. Following people up for a year costs money that most studies never had.
Two mistakes sit either side of this. One is reading a gap in the evidence as bad news. The other is assuming something lasts because a trial…
The lift from a morning run does not last all day. It fades by the afternoon, which is information about when to move rather than a sign it failed.
People often notice they are sharp through the morning and gone by three. If your hardest hours are later, put some movement in before them: a walk…
Move just before the difficult task, not after it as a reward. Five minutes of skipping, stairs or running on the spot, then sit down to the thing.
The window straight after moving is when focus is at its best, so that is the bit worth spending on whatever you have been dreading. For a child,…
Almost nobody needs convincing that exercise helps. The gap is between knowing it and doing it, so spend your effort there.
More facts will not close that gap. What closes it is arranging things so the session happens with fewer decisions in the way: kit by the door, a…
Chasing the big hit is a trap. Aim for the quieter satisfaction you can have most weeks, because that is the one that lasts.
If you are built to seek out intensity, exercise can turn into another place to chase it: further, faster, more extreme, until you are injured or…
Start the movement slow enough that it is almost boring. Speed it up once it has gone smooth, and only then add the thinking part.
Throwing a beanbag back and forth, bouncing a ball, drumming on the table: pick something plain and let it become automatic before you make it…
When somebody does not take up the movement you suggested, ask what got in the way before deciding they did not want to. Usually it is money, childcare, transport or time.
Cost, an awkward class time, nobody to watch the children, a room full of people you would have to make conversation with. None of that is…
If you are the therapist, you do not need to become the movement teacher as well. Sending somebody to a person trained for it is the better version of helping.
The evidence is for movement alongside therapy, not for therapy with a few stretches added by someone who picked them up from a video. Handing it…
When someone is frightened, your words may not reach them however sensible they are. Drop your voice, slow right down, and let the tone do the work.
In high alarm, hearing tips towards low rumbling sounds and away from the range the human voice sits in, so reassurance can genuinely fail to land.…
The steadiness you are training shows up in more than your mood. Sleep, digestion and how quickly you come down after a fright tend to move together.
Worth knowing when progress on the thing you came for feels slow. People often notice they are sleeping better, or snapping less, before they notice…
Body based practices sit alongside medication rather than replacing it. If you take something, you can do both.
They are worth having on the menu for people who cannot take medication, do not want to, or want something of their own to do as well. The skill you…
None of this needs explaining to work. A child who cannot say what happened can still be helped by breath, movement and sound.
That makes body based work useful right across the ages, and for anyone who finds talking hard, including people whose language is not the one the…