Your body

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…

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…

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 you find yourself reaching for something sweet again, try asking what the reaching is doing for you instead of telling yourself off. Comfort, a small rebellion, a way to stay awake: the answer usually points somewhere useful.

Talk about being good or bad closes the conversation down. Curiosity keeps it open, and it tends to surface the actual job the food is doing, which…

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…

If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.

Attention to the inside, the chest, the stomach, the throat, sits close to the emotional wiring and can open more than you meant to open. Position in…

One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.

The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The signal is information and it deserves a hearing. But you can hold it up against the room…

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.…

Cold water on your face, especially around the eyes and cheeks, slows things down fast. Splash it, or hold a cold flannel there for half a minute.

This is one of the few things that works when you are too far gone to concentrate on anything. It asks for no skill and no privacy beyond a tap. Lean…

Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.

Twenty or thirty seconds is enough to feel something shift, and most people find the breath falls into step with the tapping on its own. Warmth in…

When you are helping someone settle, put the technique in their hands rather than your own. They tap themselves, they set the pressure, they stop when they want to.

Being touched by someone else, even kindly and with permission, asks a lot of a person whose body has been handled badly before. Self-administered…

Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.

The counting brings the breath down to somewhere between four and six a minute, depending on how fast you count, which is the range most of the heart…

In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most…

Breathe in, then let it out as a sigh you can actually hear. Not a polite one.

The sound is the point. A silent out breath does some of the work, and letting the voice into it adds a bit more, which is probably why sighing turns…

Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.

You can strip away everything else and this part still stands up. Naming the state and accepting it in the same sentence blocks the second wave, the…

Before you try anything, give your distress a number out of ten. Do the thing. Then give it a number again.

Even a drop from eight to six is worth having, because you were the one who moved it. That is often the more important result: not the two points,…

When you have gone numb rather than frantic, try a long low sound on the out breath. Voo, drawn out until the breath runs out, so your lips and chest buzz with it.

This is for the flat, far away state, not the racing one. The buzz gives you something unmistakable to feel when nothing else is registering, which…

After you have tried something to settle, check: how here do you feel now, compared with before? Do not assume it worked just because it usually does.

This takes ten seconds and does two jobs. It tells you whether that particular thing is worth reaching for again, and it slowly trains you to notice…

Rest one hand on your forehead and the other on your chest. After a few minutes, move the forehead hand down to your belly. Eyes open or closed, whichever you prefer.

Again the instruction is only to notice what goes on between the two hands. That noticing is quietly the training: it is body awareness arriving…

Two senses rarely get named: the one that tells you where your limbs are, and the one that tells you which way is up. Pressing your feet into the floor or slowly turning your head feeds both.

When someone feels unreal, or far away from their own body, these are the channels that have gone quiet. They carry plain information with no feeling…

Keep one strong smell for when you have gone flat, lemon or peppermint, and one soft smell for when you are wound up, something like lavender. Smell asks nothing of you, which is its whole advantage.

Set this up in advance, because the moment you need it is the moment you will not feel like planning. A small bottle in a bag, a sprig in a pocket, a…

For coming down, something sweet taken slowly tends to help more than anything you chew: sipped through a straw, or let dissolve on the tongue. Nobody around you can tell you are doing it.

Slow sucking soothes in a way that goes right back to the first weeks of life, and it is quiet enough to use in a meeting, on a bus, in a waiting…

When you have gone flat and far away, chew something noisy or blow something: pretzels, raw carrot, bubbles, a slow puff at a candle flame. It lifts you without tipping you into panic.

Collapse does not respond to calming, since you are already too far down for that. What helps is work for the jaw and a long active out breath, both…

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…