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This is why lengthening the out breath calms you and lengthening the in breath wakes you up. It also means you carry a working control that needs no equipment and no belief in anything. Try six breaths where the out breath is a couple of counts longer than the in breath, then stop and notice what changed. Small, immediate, repeatable.
God 'made the day like a resurrection' (Quran 25:47). Settling and waking are described as a cycle, which is the shape of a breath too.
الفرقان
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ لِبَاسࣰ ا وَٱلنَّوۡمَ سُبَاتࣰ ا وَجَعَلَ ٱلنَّهَارَ نُشُورࣰ ا
It is He who made the night a garment for you, and sleep a rest, and made the day like a resurrection
Qur’an 25:47read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A methodological review of heart rate variability explains that the measure indexes the parasympathetic contribution to control of the heart, which is the contribution linked to self regulation, and it spends a great deal of space on how strongly breathing itself affects the number. The tie between breath and heart rhythm is well established. How far any one person can shift their state that way varies considerably.
Laborde S, Mosley E, Thayer JF. (2017). Heart Rate Variability and Cardiac Vagal Tone in Psychophysiological Research - Recommendations for Experiment Planning, Data Analysis, and Data Reporting.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Breathing in nudges the accelerator and breathing out nudges the brake, so the shape of your breath tilts the balance.
Going limp is an old survival bet, not a failure of nerve. Some animals are alive only because they stopped moving.
Calm is not automatically the goal, and arousal is not automatically the enemy. What you are after is a system that can move between them.
Being the baby who never cried is not the same as being secure. It can mean you learned very early that nobody was coming.