The most fundamental aggression to ourselves . . . is remaining ignorant by not having the courage . . . to look at ourselves honestly and gently. — Pema Chödrön
The long escalator delivers me back up onto the Sauchiehall Street pedestrian precinct, recently redesigned with medium-sized trees, grey metal-mesh benches, and regularly placed waste bins and bicycle racks. I am always a little disoriented emerging from a large shop, but I do remember where I chained up my bike. I unlock it, place my backpack into the basket, put on my hi-vis vest, hat, and gloves, wake up the bike battery and reach into my left coat pocket to check my blood sugar levels on my smartphone to see whether they are okay for the 20-minute cycle home. It’s not there. I check the other pocket, where I keep my keys—not there either. Nor in my trouser pockets or backpack. Oh no, this is bad! Not just because it’s a pain to lose one’s phone, but because I now depend on this vital app: it communicates between the blood-glucose sensor in my upper arm and the insulin pump in my trouser pocket, telling it to deliver insulin through my skin as needed.
I feel a little alarmed but do my best to keep breathing and thinking clearly, trying to retrace my steps and remember when I last checked my blood-sugar levels. Hard to recall; I do it so often, on auto-pilot more or less. I am aware that I won’t help by catastrophizing, so I pull myself back from imagining the potentially dire consequences of being without my phone. What does help is staying grounded in my body, noticing the environment—other shoppers milling around, the fading color in the sky—and continuing to breathe slowly and fully down in my belly. It seems to keep my slightly “sinking stomach” from sinking any further.
I am curious about this “sinking stomach” experience: what actually happens there on a neuro-biological level? Apparently, it is the enteric nervous system (the “gut brain”) responding to perceived threat. When your brain detects danger—whether physical threat or emotional distress—the sympathetic nervous system diverts blood away from the digestive organs toward your muscles, preparing for fight or flight. This creates that hollow, dropping, or churning sensation. The vagus nerve runs directly from the brainstem through the chest to the abdomen, creating a superhighway of communication between brain and gut. When we’re anxious or distressed, signals travel down this nerve, affecting gut motility and sensation. That’s why we feel emotions so powerfully in our stomachs, which scientists call our “second brain.”
The gut contains more serotonin receptors than the brain, and produces many of the same neurotransmitters. The communication goes both ways. By consciously breathing deeply into the belly, we can send signals back up the vagus nerve to the brain that help to restore a sense of safety and calm the alarm response. So being in touch with the body is clearly a helpful thing, both for recognizing that something potentially dangerous is happening and for an effective first aid response—breathing more deeply. Longer exhalations in particular have a rebalancing effect on the nervous system.
But sometimes it is hard to stay in connection with the body. Sometimes, the tension just creeps up on you and before you know it, you’re caught in that braced, drained-of-energy state we call “stress.” One definition of stress is: “a perceived discrepancy between the demands of a situation and the physiological and social resources of the person.”*
We are having “diary time”—checking in with each other about planned trips away, people coming to stay, when to prepare for our current collaborative work project, and when we each need to use our shared professional Zoom account. A young friend from London is visiting soon and we want to take them to see the Fifty Years Andy Goldsworthy exhibition in Edinburgh. A quick check on my phone (I did find it, of course; I had left it in the changing room of the shop I last visited) tells me it’s best to book in advance. My husband needs to use the bathroom and I think it will be quick to book the tickets now without disrupting our meeting, so I go to the Royal Scottish Academy website. I usually do these types of things on my laptop and I struggle to read the small script on the phone screen, whether with my glasses on or off. I tick the relevant boxes, two seniors, one, well is it a child, or a student? And there are two age brackets of children. I have ticked the wrong one and only notice it once I have opened the basket. I reorder the tickets and somehow find myself with a request to pay for four adults and three children.
My husband is back and wants to get on with our meeting—he is doing his best to be patient, but I feel the pressure. The desire to complete this action outweighs anything else—no matter my strained eyes, frowning forehead, tight jaws, raised shoulders and shallow breathing. I only allow myself to properly feel all those sensations after I have managed to correct the figures and go through the payment procedure and even saved the tickets to my “wallet.” But at what cost! All my chronic tension spots have had further affirmation that, apparently, they need to stay tight for life to happen smoothly.
The Buddha’s teaching starts with a simple observation: “There is suffering” (Skt. duhkha). Not as pessimism, but as honest seeing—the first step on the path. It is directly related to craving and aversion, wanting things to be different than they are in some way or other. I am intrigued to see how closely this mirrors what neuroscience reveals: we’re wired to tighten against difficulty, to brace against what we don’t want. The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes us—muscles tensing, breath shortening, attention narrowing. This response served our ancestors well when facing predators, but it fires just as readily for lost phones, confusing websites, not to speak of all-pervading global threats such as climate change. The difference is that in our fast digital society there is hardly room to recover from stress; it has become chronic.
One of the great gifts of mindfulness is the opening up of choice in how we respond to a triggering situation: if our nervous system is regulated enough to be present in the first place, and if we catch it early enough. Neuroscientists describe a “window of tolerance”—that zone where we can be present with difficulty without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Mindfulness practice gradually expands this window through the interplay of mind and body. Regulation can proceed from the top down—using the mind to calm the body—or from the bottom up—using the body to calm the mind.**
There was a decisive moment in both the scenarios I described, a flash of recognition. When I realised that I didn’t have my phone with me and my stomach sank a fraction, almost instantaneously there was a realization that it mattered how I was present with this. That this shift toward greater awareness was almost as important as finding the phone. In the ticket-booking saga, the moment of recognition came a bit late, but when it arrived there was a similar, noticeable sense of uplift and relief. A moment of insight that it hurts to strive toward results in this driven way and that it doesn’t have to be this way; it is perfectly possible, based on my experience, to be efficient and relaxed. In both cases the awareness of the bodily state of stress activation was a crucial part of the experience.
This recognition—this honest seeing of our actual state—is the foundation for everything that follows. Once we know we’re struggling, once we’ve felt that sinking stomach or tight jaw or shallow breath, we have options. We can pause. We can breathe more deeply. We can soften the grip, drop the shoulders, and widen our gaze. We can ask ourselves: What does this situation actually call for? Do I need to act? To wait? To let go?
But without recognition, we’re just ricocheting between states of activation and exhaustion, accumulating tension we don’t even know we’re carrying until our bodies force us to pay attention through pain, illness, or breakdown. Much conspires to keep us from this honest assessment of what’s going on for us—a general expectation to always be on top of the game, for example. Or a lack of confidence that we can handle emotional challenges, leading to continuously distracting ourselves. But as the meditation teacher Tara Brach puts it, “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.” Recognition expands that boundary, one conscious moment at a time.
* Lazarus, R. S., and S. Folkman. 1984. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer, p.19.
** van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking. pp. 62-63.
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