Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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320 practices

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If you try to call up a good feeling and nothing arrives, you are in ordinary company. That blankness is common after a long stretch of hard years, and it is workable.

It helps to do this part with someone else at first, because another person will notice the flicker you dismissed. Look for what is reliably there…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 28:73One line of research

Keep the explanation short when you offer this to someone. It is a way of breathing that gets your heart to send your brain a message to settle. Would you like to try it?

Long technical framings cost more than they buy. They ask a person to take in a great deal before they have felt anything, and the offer of a choice…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 7:205One line of research

Practise this when you are calm and again when you are wound up. The second one is what makes it available in the moment you need it.

Skills learned in one state can be strangely hard to find in another, which is why people say they forgot to use it. Do the first round with someone…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 33:41One line of research

A useful picture: the parts of your brain are sections of an orchestra. In dysregulation they are playing different tunes at different speeds. The aim is timing, not repair.

This is a kinder frame than damage, and a more accurate one. Nothing is broken or missing. What has gone is the coordination between parts that used…

Five minutesYour nervous systemMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:96One line of research

There is more about your body than the practices: the your body area has the themes and the courses too.

Neurofeedback has its strongest support in attention difficulties, decent support in depression and anxiety, and for trauma it is promising rather than proven.

Reported gains include better sleep and attention, less irritability and fewer trauma symptoms. The honest caveats are cost, wide variation in how…

Five minutesYour nervous systemMedical and treatmentQur’an 67:23One line of research

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.

The older idea was simple: stress bad, relaxation good. It missed that the same slowing down which feels like peace when you are safe is shutdown…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:125One line of research

Gut trouble during a hard stretch is not imaginary and it is not a character flaw. Your gut has its own branch of the nervous system, and it answers threat like the rest of you.

It senses chemical change, runs digestion and talks to your immune system, and it is wired into the same circuits that handle fear. So the churning,…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 50:16One line of research

Your stress system needs an all clear as much as it needs an alarm. What often breaks after trauma is the signal that says it is over.

Cortisol rises to get you moving, and a feedback loop is meant to notice you are safe and turn the tap off. When that loop is working badly, avoiding…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 106:4One line of research

Unfinished defence tends to park somewhere specific: a jaw that will not unclench, arms that never got to push, legs that never ran.

Mobilising starts deep in the middle of you and travels out to the edges, first the eyes and jaw and voice, then the arms, then the legs. Stopped…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:125One line of research

When the danger still feels like it is happening, that is not a mistake in your thinking. It is a sequence in your body that never got to finish.

This is why arguing with yourself does so little. You can know the date, know where you are, know it is long over, and still have a system reporting…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 10:62One line of research

People carrying long term trauma often show low stress hormone levels rather than high ones. Flat and exhausted is a stress presentation too.

Researchers expected the opposite and found this repeatedly. It matches what people describe: not wired but wrung out, foggy, unable to get started.…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 2:286One line of research

A day has a shape. Energy up in the morning, a real dip in the early afternoon, a second lift in the evening, then down into sleep.

That early afternoon dip is normal and not a sign that you are lazy. Knowing the ordinary pattern gives you something to compare your own against,…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 6:96One line of research

Coming alive at night is a common pattern after trauma. Mornings are flat, the day is heavy, and something lifts around the time you are meant to be winding down.

It is easy to hear that as a lifestyle choice, and easier still to blame yourself for it. It is more accurately a shifted rhythm. Naming it that way…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 78:10One line of research

Relaxation exercises make some people feel worse, and there is a reason for it. The branch that gives you rest when you are safe is the branch that gives you shutdown when you are not.

If your alertness is the thing holding you out of collapse, removing it can drop you into the collapse. That is not a failure to relax properly. If…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 89:27One line of research

Roughly four fifths of the traffic on the vagus nerve is heading up from your body to your brain. Your brain is largely reading a report from your body.

That is the strongest argument for working with the body rather than only with thoughts. If the report says danger, telling yourself a better story…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 32:9One line of research

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.

Those symptoms usually get treated as separate problems, or as nothing at all. Seeing them as part of one state can be a relief, and it makes the…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 2:22One line of research

Sound sensitivity is not a fault in your hearing. Under threat the ear opens out towards high and low sounds, the range that carries warning, and that is the range which makes ordinary life feel loud.

Screeching, growling, humming, scraping: those are the frequencies that signal alarm in the animal world, and a system on guard widens to catch them.…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 67:23One line of research

A child who does not feel safe cannot filter the room. The pencil scratch, the scraping chair, the fan and the rustle of a coat all arrive at the same volume as the teacher.

So the attention problem is real, and it is not the same thing as not caring or not trying. A quieter corner, a seat away from the noisy fan, a…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 16:78One line of research

If your response to being hurt was to go blank rather than fight or run, look at how old you were and how big they were. Blank may have been the only thing left.

A small child cannot fight an adult and cannot leave the house. When trying to connect has already failed and the other two doors are locked, what…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 50:16One line of research

Going limp is an old survival bet, not a failure of nerve. Some animals are alive only because they stopped moving.

The wager is that whatever has hold of you will lose interest in something that seems already dead, and that when it does you will get up and go. It…

Five minutesYour nervous systemBody basedQur’an 2:286One line of research