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Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
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 rhythm research is built around, though no trial has shown this square pattern to do more than any other slow one. The tracing gives your eyes and hand something to do, which is quietly the more useful half. Keep your eyes open and follow your fingertip. Four or five squares is usually enough. If holding the breath feels bad, drop the holds and just breathe along two sides.
and make the mountains to keep it stable (Quran 78:7). Something plain and unmoving holding the ground steady is a fair picture of what a counted breath does.
النبأ
وَٱلۡجِبَالَ أَوۡتَادࣰ ا
and make the mountains to keep it stable
Qur’an 78:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An integrative review explains heart rate variability as a marker of how flexibly the body can adapt to demands placed on it, which is the reasoning behind paced breathing at around six breaths a minute. It is an explanatory review rather than a trial of square breathing. So the rationale is well founded even though this exact pattern has no special evidence over any other slow one.
Shaffer F, McCraty R, Zerr CL. (2014). A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart's anatomy and heart rate variability.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: long taught, never tested. Widely used and long taught. No trial has established that it works.
The tracing occupies attention that would otherwise go to the panic, and the count gives it something steady to follow.
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.
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.
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.