Most of us think of rituals as ceremonies attached to special occasions. But researchers have found that everyday rituals — the small, patterned behaviors we engage in regularly — can be a source of profound connection. Unlike habits, which we perform mindlessly, rituals are imbued with meaning. They signal to others and ourselves that something matters.
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Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships.
Maria Popova
Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don't.
Sarah Miller
But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind's organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day's conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac's angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.
Maria Popova