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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Plenty of what helps during treatment ends when the relationship does. This does not. People often say afterwards that the breathing thing was the part that lasted, partly because it needs nobody's permission and nobody's diary. Keep the app on your phone through the months when you never open it.
'We are closer to him than his jugular vein' (Quran 50:16). What is nearest to you goes wherever you go, which is the whole argument for keeping a practice in the body.
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وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of heart rate variability biofeedback and depressive symptoms found a moderate pooled effect in adults, based on a modest number of trials. Moderate and modest are the words to carry: a genuine effect on a limited evidence base. Those studies also measured supervised practice rather than what happens years after treatment ends.
Pizzoli SFM, Marzorati C, Gatti D, Monzani D, Mazzocco K, Pravettoni G. (2021). A meta-analysis on heart rate variability biofeedback and depressive symptoms.. Scientific reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A tool that travels with you is available at the moment things get hard, which is rarely during an appointment.
The tools that reach what words cannot are physical: feet on the floor, a long breath out, pushing hard against a wall, deliberately walking away from something.
When somebody tells you a practice will calm you, treat that as a hypothesis about you rather than a fact. Try it and watch what actually happens.
The shutdown side of this system runs everything below your diaphragm. That is why going flat so often arrives with stomach trouble, bladder trouble and no appetite.