Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 8

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

StillnessMind

Sleeping soon after you learn something helps you remember it. In a 2012 study, people who learned word pairs in the evening and slept soon afterwards remembered more 24 hours later than people who learned them in the morning and spent the day awake first.

The study was led by Jessica Payne of the University of Notre Dame, with colleagues including Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. Volunteers learned pairs of words at 9 am or 9 pm. Twelve hours later those who had slept remembered more, mainly because a day awake had worn away memory for pairs of unrelated words, which are harder to link in the mind. After 24 hours everyone had had one night's sleep and one day awake, only in a different order, and those who slept soon after learning still remembered more. Memory also faded more slowly across a day awake when a night's sleep had come first, which suggests that sleep steadies new memories against the interference of waking life. It is one reason sleep researchers advise against giving up sleep to cram for an exam.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card

StillnessHealth

NHS guidance links a fibre-rich diet with lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer, and recommends 30g of fibre a day for adults. On average, UK adults eat only about 20g.

The 30g target dates from 2015, when the UK's Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition reviewed the evidence on carbohydrates and health and raised the recommended amount. Four years later a large review commissioned by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet pooled 185 long-term studies and 58 clinical trials. People who ate the most fibre had a 15 to 30% lower risk of dying from any cause or from heart disease, and of developing heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer, than those who ate the least. The largest risk reductions were seen at 25 to 29g a day, and the trends suggested that more could help further. The NHS shows what 30g looks like: wholemeal toast with peanut butter and an orange; wholemeal spaghetti with a lentil sauce; and a baked potato in its skin with carrots and green beans.

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StillnessPhilosophy

The Enchiridion, a handbook of the teachings of the Greek Stoic Epictetus, opens by dividing life in two. Our judgements, intentions, desires and dislikes are up to us. Our body, possessions, reputation and position are not, and treating them as if they were leads to frustration.

Epictetus was born into slavery around AD 50 in Hierapolis, the ancient city beside today's Pamukkale in western Turkey. He spent his youth in Rome as the slave of Epaphroditus, a wealthy former slave who had been secretary to the emperor Nero, studied Stoic philosophy and began to teach after he was freed. When the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome around AD 93, he moved to Nicopolis in north-western Greece and opened a school. He wrote nothing himself. His student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and gathered the key points into the Enchiridion, Greek for “handbook”, something kept ready to hand. Marcus Aurelius thanks his teacher Rusticus for lending him Epictetus's lectures, and the handbook was later adapted for Greek-speaking monasteries and translated into Latin in the 15th century.

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StillnessPhilosophy

You do not control everything around you. You do control more of your attention, choices and responses than panic usually admits.

The idea is at the heart of Stoicism, the philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BC, and one of its clearest teachers was Epictetus, a freed slave. It was put to a hard test in 1965, when the American pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He had been given Epictetus's handbook as a student at Stanford, and through seven and a half years as a prisoner of war he held on to its lesson: his captors controlled almost everything, but not his judgement or his conduct.

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StillnessPhilosophy

One practical Stoic question: is this mine to act on, or only mine to accept? Much anxiety comes from treating both as the same job.

The question goes back to Epictetus, the Stoic teacher who opened his handbook by sorting things into what is up to us and what is not. Psychologists draw a similar line. In their 1984 book on stress, Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman separated problem-focused coping, which tackles the cause of stress, from emotion-focused coping, which eases the feelings. Tackling the problem tends to help when a situation can be changed; after a loss or with a chronic illness, calming the feelings and seeing things differently often helps more.

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DrivePhilosophy

Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cassius speaks these lines in Act 1 of Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare in 1599. He tells Brutus that nothing in the heavens made Caesar great and them his underlings: they allowed it. Many people then believed the stars shaped a person's fate. Today the line is quoted as a call to take charge of your life, and it gave John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars its title. In the play it is flattery with a purpose: Cassius is drawing Brutus into the plot to kill Caesar.

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StillnessArt

In 1723 Bach became director of music for the main churches of Leipzig. The job meant a cantata, a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, for nearly 60 Sundays and feast days a year. In his first year he composed most of them new, week after week, alongside some reworked earlier pieces.

Bach's official title was Thomaskantor, music master of St Thomas School, and he held the post from 1723 until his death in 1750. Each cantata had to suit that Sunday's Bible readings and was performed during the service at St Thomas or St Nicholas church. His first annual cycle began on 30 May 1723; alongside the new works he restaged and adapted some cantatas from his earlier post in Weimar. Music paused for most of Advent and Lent, the quiet seasons before Christmas and Easter. Senior pupils of the school sang in the choir and helped rehearse and copy out the parts by hand. His obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a former pupil, speaks of five complete annual cycles. More than 200 of his cantatas survive; many others are lost.

Creative reflection based on Bach contextRead card

StillnessHealth

Sleep is part of learning, not a pause from it: while you sleep, the brain goes back over what you practised during the day and strengthens it. That is why a new skill often runs more smoothly the next morning than it did the evening before.

In a 2002 study at Harvard Medical School, led by Matthew Walker, volunteers learned to type a short number sequence as quickly and accurately as they could. After a night's sleep they were about 20 per cent faster, with no loss of accuracy, while the same number of hours awake brought no significant gain. The size of the improvement was linked to how much light sleep, known as stage 2, people had, especially late in the night. Animal studies from the 1990s suggest how this might work: in rats, groups of brain cells that were active while the animals explored became active together again during sleep, as if the day were being replayed. It is one reason why an extra tired hour at the desk may help less than a full night's sleep.

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StillnessHealth

Fibre is good for the gut and the heart, but adding a lot at once can cause bloating and wind. Increase fibre-rich foods such as wholegrains, beans, fruit and vegetables over a few weeks, and drink plenty of fluids so the fibre can do its work.

Fibre is the part of plant foods that the small intestine cannot digest. Some kinds pass through largely unchanged and hold water, which keeps stools soft; that is why fluid matters. Other kinds are broken down by bacteria in the large intestine, which releases gas, so a sudden jump in fibre can bring bloating and wind until the gut adjusts. The NHS advises increasing fibre gradually and drinking plenty of fluids. UK guidelines recommend 30 g a day for adults, yet most adults eat only about 20 g. A 2019 review in The Lancet, covering 185 long-term studies and 58 clinical trials, found that people who ate the most fibre had a 15 to 30 per cent lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, bowel cancer and early death than those who ate the least.

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StillnessMind

Cyclic sighing, breathing in twice through the nose and then out slowly and fully, lifted mood more than mindfulness meditation in a 2023 Stanford study. Of four methods that 108 adults practised for five minutes a day for a month, it gave the biggest rise in good mood and the biggest drop in resting breathing rate.

The study was led by the psychiatrist David Spiegel and the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and published in Cell Reports Medicine. Most volunteers came from an undergraduate psychology class at Stanford, and they were assigned to groups at random. The other breathing exercises were box breathing, with equal counts for breathing in, holding, breathing out and holding again, and cyclic hyperventilation, deep breaths in and short breaths out followed by holding the breath. In cyclic sighing the second, shorter breath tops up the lungs before the long exhale. A long, slow exhale is thought to calm the body through the vagus nerve, which slows the heart. People also sigh on their own every few minutes, which helps reopen tiny air sacs in the lungs. With about a hundred mostly young, healthy volunteers and one month of practice, the study is encouraging but small.

Stanford (Huberman & Spiegel)Read card

StillnessMind

Putting a feeling into words can quieten the brain's alarm system. In a 2007 brain-scanning study at UCLA, when people chose a word for the emotion on an angry or frightened face, the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, responded less than when they described the faces in other ways.

The study, led by the psychologist Matthew Lieberman and published in Psychological Science, offered brain evidence for something therapists have long encouraged: putting feelings into words, which researchers call affect labelling. The amygdala reacts quickly to possible danger. Labelling also raised activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a frontal area linked to controlling emotions, and the more it rose, the more the amygdala's activity fell. In 2012 a UCLA team tried the idea on people afraid of spiders. Those who described their feelings aloud while facing a live spider showed less physical arousal, measured by sweat on the skin, when they met a different spider a week later than those who used other strategies, although they did not report feeling less afraid. Naming a feeling is no cure for anxiety, but it seems to change how the brain handles it.

UCLA (Lieberman)Read card

StillnessMind

Losing sleep reliably weakens alertness and attention, and it can also impair judgement, impulse control and control of emotions. People are often poor judges of how impaired they are.

Much of the evidence comes from simple tests of sustained attention, such as pressing a button whenever a light appears at random, which reveal lapses and microsleeps, moments of sleep lasting a few seconds. In a 2003 study at the University of Pennsylvania, volunteers who slept six hours a night for two weeks ended up doing as badly on such tests as people kept awake for up to two nights, yet they rated themselves only slightly sleepy. In a 2000 Australian study, 17 to 19 hours without sleep left performance on some tests as poor as at a blood alcohol level of 0.05%, the drink-driving limit in much of Europe. Emotions suffer too: after a night without sleep, the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, reacts more strongly to unpleasant pictures and is less restrained by the front of the brain.

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StillnessMind

Gratitude exercises, such as writing down a few things you are thankful for each week, raise wellbeing slightly on average. A 2025 review of studies with nearly 25,000 people in 28 countries found a real but small effect that varied between countries and methods.

One of the first experiments on the practice was a 2003 study by the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough. Students who kept a weekly list of things they were grateful for felt better about their lives than those who listed everyday hassles, and a rise in good mood was the most consistent result. The 2025 meta-analysis, a study that pools the results of earlier studies, was published in the journal PNAS by a team that included McCullough. It combined 145 papers covering 24,804 participants and put the average effect at about 0.19 on a standard scale on which 0.2 counts as small. Effects were larger when researchers measured positive feelings, when several kinds of gratitude exercise were combined, and in studies that assigned people to groups by chance. The authors could not explain why results varied between countries and called for more research.

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StillnessMind

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz. In Man's Search for Meaning (1946) he argued that no one can take away our freedom to choose our attitude, so the line suits him, yet it has never been found in his writings. The American psychologist Rollo May described this pause between stimulus and response in 1963. Stephen Covey spread the idea, linked to Frankl, in 1989; he later said he had read it in a library book whose author he had forgotten.

Commonly misattributed to Viktor Frankl; wording popularised by later writersRead card

StillnessHealth

A 2013 study in mice found that the brain cleared amyloid-beta, a protein that builds up in Alzheimer's disease, faster during sleep. A 2024 mouse study, which used a small fluorescent dye and different methods, found clearance was slower during sleep. Scientists are still debating how sleep affects the brain's waste removal.

The 2013 study came from Maiken Nedergaard's laboratory at the University of Rochester, which in 2012 had described what it called the glymphatic system: cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid around the brain, flows in along channels around blood vessels and washes through the tissue. Her team reported that the space between brain cells widened by about 60% during sleep, letting fluid flow more freely. In 2024 Nick Franks and William Wisden at Imperial College London measured the movement of dyes directly and found clearance markedly reduced in sleeping and anaesthetised mice. In 2025 Nedergaard's group reported that during non-REM sleep, the stages without the rapid eye movements of dreaming sleep, which fill most of the night, slow waves of the chemical messenger noradrenaline make blood vessels tighten and relax, pumping fluid into the brain. The methods differ, and none of these studies was in humans.

Sleep scienceRead card

StillnessHealth

Most healthy adults need about seven to nine hours of sleep a night, although the exact amount varies from person to person. Teenagers need more, around eight to ten hours, and for people over 65 the advice is seven to eight.

The figures come from expert panels that reviewed the research in 2015. The US National Sleep Foundation recommended seven to nine hours for adults aged 18 to 64, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society advised adults to sleep at least seven hours regularly. Sleeping less than that on most nights is linked to weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression and more accidents. A few people genuinely need less: in 2009 researchers in San Francisco found a rare variant of a gene called DEC2 in people who naturally slept about six hours a night and felt rested. Such people are rare. A practical check is how you feel during the day: whether you wake refreshed, stay alert without leaning on caffeine and can concentrate on ordinary tasks.

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StillnessHealth

Morning light does more than brighten a room: it helps reset the body's internal clock, which times alertness, hormones and sleep. The clock runs slightly longer than 24 hours, so without that daily reset it would slowly drift later.

The signal comes from a third kind of light-sensitive cell in the eye, separate from the rods and cones we see with. These cells, identified in 2002 by teams including those of David Berson and Samer Hattar, contain a pigment called melanopsin that responds most to blue light. They report to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a tiny cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, at the base of the brain, that acts as the body's master clock. A 1999 Harvard study put the human clock's natural cycle at about 24 hours and 11 minutes. Morning light shifts the clock earlier; bright light late in the evening shifts it later and delays melatonin, the hormone that signals night. The clock's molecular machinery earned Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Circadian science / NCBIRead card

StillnessHealth

Caffeine lingers in the body for hours: healthy adults usually take three to seven hours, often about five, to clear half of what they consume. This is its half-life. Smoking shortens it, while pregnancy, the contraceptive pill and some medicines lengthen it, so the same coffee lasts longer in some people.

Caffeine keeps you alert by blocking adenosine, a chemical that builds up in the brain while you are awake and makes you feel sleepy. From a drink it is absorbed within about 45 minutes and peaks in the blood after one to two hours. The liver then breaks it down, mainly with an enzyme called CYP1A2. In smokers the half-life is 30 to 50 percent shorter; the contraceptive pill can make it considerably longer, and late in pregnancy it can reach 15 hours. In a 2013 study at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, 400 milligrams of caffeine, about three mugs of filter coffee, cut total sleep by more than an hour even when it was taken six hours before bed. The researchers advised avoiding large amounts of caffeine for at least six hours before going to sleep.

PharmacologyRead card

StillnessHealth

Mild dehydration, a fluid loss of about 1 to 2 percent of body weight, can bring tiredness, headache and low mood, and in some tests it makes people less accurate at attention tasks. The effects show most clearly in the heat or during exercise.

Two controlled studies at the University of Connecticut, published in 2011 and 2012, made healthy young adults slightly dehydrated by having them walk on a treadmill, in some sessions after taking a diuretic, a pill that makes the kidneys pass more water. In 25 women, a loss of about 1.4 percent of body weight lowered mood, made tasks feel harder and brought on headaches and poorer concentration, although most thinking tests were unaffected. In 26 men, a loss of about 1.6 percent increased fatigue and tension and led to more errors on tests of attention and working memory, the short-term mental notepad we use to hold information while using it. For a 70 kg person, 1.5 percent is about one litre, an amount that can be lost as sweat in an hour of hard exercise in the heat.

Hydration scienceRead card

StillnessHealth

Fullness builds from several signals at once, from the stretching stomach, gut hormones, nutrients and the brain, and they begin to change while the meal is still under way. There is no fixed rule that the brain only learns you are full 20 or 30 minutes later.

Physiologists distinguish satiation, the process that makes you stop eating, from satiety, the fullness that lasts until the next meal. As the stomach stretches, sensors in its wall send messages along the vagus nerve to the hypothalamus, the brain's appetite centre. When food reaches the small intestine, the gut releases hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK) and GLP-1, which slow digestion and add to the feeling of fullness; GLP-1 is the hormone copied by weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide. Eating slowly may help: in a 2008 US study, 30 women ate about 67 fewer calories when they ate the same meal slowly, and felt fuller at the end. The effect varies from person to person.

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StillnessHealth

Box breathing is a simple calming exercise: breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, breathe out for four and hold again for four before starting over. It slows the breath and gives the mind a steady rhythm to follow.

The four equal steps are why it is also called square breathing: each count is one side of the box. It resembles the breath-control exercises of yoga and is taught to US Navy SEALs, the navy's special forces, as a way to stay calm under pressure. Slow breathing tends to lower the heart rate by shifting the autonomic nervous system, the part that runs the body without conscious effort, towards its calming 'rest and digest' mode. A 2023 Stanford University study had volunteers spend five minutes a day for a month on one of three breathing exercises, box breathing among them, or on mindfulness meditation. The breathing groups gained more in positive mood than the meditation group, and the exercise built around long, slow breaths out did best. If holding your breath feels uncomfortable, shorten the holds rather than forcing the count.

Breathing techniqueRead card

StillnessHealth

The 5-4-3-2-1 exercise is a simple way to come back to the present: name five things you can see, four you can physically feel, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste. If a step isn't available or feels uncomfortable, skip it and stay with something you can notice.

Exercises like this are called grounding techniques. Therapists teach them to people who struggle with panic, spiralling anxious thoughts, flashbacks after a trauma or dissociation, the detached feeling that you or the world around you are not quite real. The idea is simple: attention is limited, and deliberately noticing concrete things through your senses draws it away from worrying about the future or replaying the past. Counting down also gives the mind a small task with a clear end. Few formal studies have tested this exact sequence, so it is best seen as a practical way to get through a difficult moment rather than a treatment. If anxiety is frequent or hard to manage, talking to a GP or a therapist can help.

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StillnessHealth

Progressive muscle relaxation works through the body one muscle group at a time: you tense the muscles for a few seconds, then release them and notice the change. Repeating this in order, from the feet up to the face or the other way round, teaches you to recognise tension and let it go.

The technique was developed by the American physician Edmund Jacobson, who first presented it at Harvard University in 1908 and described it in detail in his 1929 book Progressive Relaxation. His original method needed weekly lessons and daily practice. The South African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe later shortened it to about 20 minutes and used it to help patients face their fears step by step, and many shorter versions followed. The idea behind it is that stress and anxiety tighten the muscles, often without our noticing, and learning the feel of real release helps reverse that. It has been used for anxiety, stress, insomnia, low mood and pain, needs no equipment and can be done lying down or sitting in a chair.

Relaxation techniqueRead card

StillnessHealth

Short naps of about 10 to 20 minutes improve alertness and performance for many people. Because they usually end before deep sleep begins, you are less likely to wake up groggy than after a longer nap.

The grogginess after waking from deep sleep is called sleep inertia; it usually lasts 15 to 30 minutes but can go on longer. In a 2006 study at Flinders University in Australia, researchers compared afternoon naps of 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes after a short night's sleep. The 10-minute nap gave the quickest and best boost; the longer naps caused grogginess at first, and their benefits only showed later. In a NASA study of long-haul airline pilots in the early 1990s, pilots given a planned 40-minute rest in the cockpit slept for 26 minutes on average and were more alert later in the flight. Longer naps are not harmful in themselves, but timing matters: a nap late in the afternoon can make it harder to fall asleep at night.

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