Areas › Your body
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
94 practicesA 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 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…
Real rest, closeness and unhurried prayer all ask for the same thing: being still while feeling safe. That is harder than it sounds if stillness has ever been dangerous.
It is why some people cope beautifully in a crisis and find a quiet evening unbearable, and why intimacy and slow worship are often the last things…
If a practice feels like homework you are failing at, turn it into a game. Some feedback tools do this for you, bringing colour and birdsong to a grey screen as your heart rhythm settles.
Trying hard to relax is a trap. The effort keeps you keyed up, and then you have one more thing to be bad at. Play sidesteps that entirely. It is the…
You do not need other people to reach a settled state. Breath, a slow walk somewhere green, a cat asleep on your lap: all of them get you there.
The name social engagement system makes it sound as though company is the only door, which is bleak if you are isolated, and worse if people are the…
There is a listening programme that filters music into the range of the human voice, given in short sittings that add up to a few hours, to make speech easier for the body to take in.
It is delivered by a trained provider rather than downloaded and run at home, usually in small doses with a pause if things stir up. If you have…
The screen tells you nothing and asks you nothing. The plane simply flies better or worse, and the adjusting happens on its own.
That suits people who cannot easily put what they feel into words, which includes a great many children and a great many adults after trauma. There…
Some people end up fully flipped, awake until three in the morning and unable to surface until evening. That is genuinely hard to reset, and not for want of trying.
Ordinary sleep advice is not built for this. What tends to be needed is help with timing: light at the right hour, a plan to move the whole cycle in…
Trauma sleeplessness usually has two layers: night itself carries meaning, and the body's clock has moved. Both need attention.
If bad things happened at night, lying in the dark listening to every sound is not a bad habit, it is vigilance doing its job. Sleep advice alone…
When someone finally reaches somewhere safe, do not be surprised if they fall apart rather than bloom. Stay close through that part.
People who have lived on high alert often start grieving once the danger stops, and it can look like going backwards: more tears, more fear about the…