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I hate getting startled, even when I realize right away that there is nothing to worry about. But the physiological effects, once set in motion, carry on. My heart seems to skip a beat and then rev up to a high rate and it's uncomfortable, taking some time to come back down to normal.

Some years ago, I discovered a technique to suppress the effect of being startled. I just breathe in sharply, using mostly my diagphragm, before my heartrate goes up and it keeps things normal as usual. I wonder if this is also using the vagus nerve to suppress being startled?

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ordu 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I wonder if this is also using the vagus nerve to suppress being startled?

I don't know about vagus nerve, but I can propose a different explanation. Emotions can change the state of your body, your brain feels the state and triggers emotions. It can become a self-reinforcing loop. In particular, diaphragm contractions or tension can be such a state. For example, I have sometimes issues with getting rid of anxiety, and when it happens, it is because of my diaphragm. It becomes tensed, I feel it and so I feel anxious. To get rid of anxiety I need to a) rationalize it away and b) keep my diaphragm relaxed.

When you overload your diaphragm with some irrelevant activity you may be breaking the self-reinforcing loop. Or maybe this movements of your diaphragm trigger some other response that wins. As a wild guess, your organism expect that after a deep breath you'll hold your breath for some time, and so it limits the heart-rate to not burn oxygen too fast.

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enaaem 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is btw the whole idea behind Vipassana. The idea is that most of your suffering comes from your unconscious reaction to bodily sensations and you can train yourself to become more aware and equanimous.

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ordu 2 days ago | parent [-]

You know, I studied psychology and I still feel sadness that undergraduate course will discuss Galen and his humors determining different types of personality (only to mock the very idea of typologies), but it keep silence about buddhism, which is still is a source of insight for "western" psychologists, because it was ahead of them by centuries or even millennia.

Modern historians like to attack Eurocentrism of the history, but why psychologists are afraid to admit that psychology was started in Asia, that western psychologists still have something to learn from buddhists.

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enaaem 2 days ago | parent [-]

It seems that Western psychology doesn’t look much into on how you can train your mind? Maybe because it is hard to test? In eastern psychology you have practitioners who have trained a specific technique for decades and then share their experience. It’s a completely different way of researching.

	▲	ordu a day ago \| parent [-]
		Western psychology tried that. In its special way, but still. Introspection was a big thing in XIX century. To become a subject of a psychological experiment you'd need to get a special education and training. There was that guy, Titchener that invented structuralism based on his introspective research. It didn't work though. I can't remember why exactly it didn't work, can only guess.

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djmips 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That sounds like an excellent theory.