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Simple Practice:
The Hand on the Heart Exercise
Safe touch releases oxytocin, known as the "love hormone", which is key in emotions such as trust, safety, calm, and connection.
As Dacher Keltner notes in his book Born to Be Good, oxytocin is the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol - and oxytocin repairs any damage to the physical heart caused by cortisol.
It is one of the most powerful tools we have to restore a sense of calm and equilibrium in the body-brain.
Anchored in both mindfulness and self-compassion, it is powerful enough to calm down a panic attack in less than a minute, and to prevent the stress response from even happening in the first place.
1. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe gently, softly, and deeply into the area of your heart. If you wish, breathe in a sense of ease or safety or goodness into this heart center.
2. Remember one moment, just one moment when you felt safe, loved, and cherished by another human being. Don’t try to recall the entire relationship, just one moment. This could be a partner, a child, a friend, a therapist, or a teacher; it could also be a spiritual figure, or a loving moment with a pet.
3. As you remember this moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished, let yourself experience the feelings of that moment. Let the sensations wash through your body. Let yourself stay with these feelings for at least thirty seconds. Notice any deepening in a visceral sense of ease and safety.
4. Repeat this practice many times a day at first to strengthen the neural circuitry that remembers this pattern. If you practice five times a day for a full week, you will train your brain in this new response to any difficult moment. Then you can repeat it any time you need to calm yourself down.
Why Hand on the Heart works:
When you breathe deeply into the heart center, you’re activating the calming parasympathetic branch of the nervous system.
When you breathe in a sense of ease or safety or goodness, you’re restoring a coherent heart rate variability which allows your heart to respond more flexibly to stress.
When you remember a moment of feeling safe and loved and cherished with someone, you’re activating the release of oxytocin, the brain’s direct antidote to the stress hormone cortisol.
You may actually feel the warm glow of the oxytocin as it washes through your body, coming to a sense of safety, trust, and calm.
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