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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
This one matters for anyone whose sense of themselves was built on being capable: soldiers, police, door staff, athletes, older brothers. The shame afterwards can be heavier precisely because they believed a choice was available to them that others do not have. Size and skill are not inputs to the decision.
'We gave him hearing and sight' (Quran 76:2). The equipment was given to you, and how it answers under threat is not a report on your character.
الإنسان
إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مِن نُّطۡفَةٍ أَمۡشَاجࣲ نَّبۡتَلِيهِ فَجَعَلۡنَٰهُ سَمِيعَۢا بَصِيرًا
We created man from a drop of mingled fluid to put him to the test; We gave him hearing and sight
Qur’an 76:2read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A psychophysiological comparison across the anxiety spectrum found the opposite of what was expected: people with broad chronic distress showed blunted defensive reactivity, while narrow, specific fear produced the strongest reflex response. Defensive physiology does not line up neatly with how afraid or how tough somebody is. It measured reflexes in a clinic sample rather than behaviour in real emergencies, so hold it loosely.
McTeague LM, Lang PJ. (2012). The anxiety spectrum and the reflex physiology of defense: from circumscribed fear to broad distress.. Depression and anxiety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The response is selected by threat circuitry that never consults what you are physically capable of.
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.
Thinking about a feeling tends to slow it down. Feeling it in your body tends to speed it up. Between those two you have a throttle.
Heart rate variability is not about how fast your heart beats. It is about how much the gaps between the beats vary as you breathe.