Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.

What the research says

A systematic review placed two literatures side by side and found that the ability to sense internal bodily states and cardiac vagal tone, a measure of the calming branch of the nervous system, were each associated with better emotion regulation. The findings are associational and drawn from varied studies. They support the idea that this bodily layer matters for how we handle feeling, without settling which way the causing runs.

Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.