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Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Some people regulate themselves beautifully and have never once been regulated by anybody else. From outside it reads as resilience. From inside it can sit quite close to numbness, and it usually shows up as difficulty being comforted, or a flat feeling when somebody offers. If that is you, the growth edge is not more self control. It is practising being on the receiving end, in small doses, with someone safe.
'In it there will be the gift of tranquillity from your Lord' (Quran 2:248). Calm is described arriving to a frightened people from outside themselves, rather than being produced by them.
البقرة
وَقَالَ لَهُمۡ نَبِيُّهُمۡ إِنَّ ءَايَةَ مُلۡكِهِۦٓ أَن يَأۡتِيَكُمُ ٱلتَّابُوتُ فِيهِ سَكِينَةࣱ مِّن رَّبِّكُمۡ وَبَقِيَّةࣱ مِّمَّا تَرَكَ ءَالُ مُوسَىٰ وَءَالُ هَٰرُونَ تَحۡمِلُهُ ٱلۡمَلَٰٓئِكَةُۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَةࣰ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤۡمِنِينَ
Their prophet said to them, ‘The sign of his authority will be that the Ark [of the Covenant] will come to you. In it there will be [the gift of] tranquillity from your Lord and relics of the followers of Moses and Aaron, carried by the angels. There is a sign in this for you if you believe.’
Qur’an 2:248read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and meta analysis of autonomic function across psychiatric disorders found reduced heart rate variability in many of them, and also found that psychotropic medication accounted for part of the difference, which the authors treat as a caution against over reading the marker. That caution applies here too. How regulated a person looks and what their system is actually doing are not the same measurement.
Alvares GA, Quintana DS, Hickie IB, Guastella AJ. (2016). Autonomic nervous system dysfunction in psychiatric disorders and the impact of psychotropic medications: a systematic review and meta-analysis.. Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Managing alone and being settled by another person are different skills, and only one of them gets practised when you cope early.
Yoga, breath practice, loving kindness, gratitude, forgiveness work, tapping, rubbing your own shoulders: they all seem to move the same dial. Choose whichever one you will actually keep doing.
A healthy heart rate is not a metronome. The small variations between beats are a sign your body can still adjust to what is in front of it.
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.