7 July

This is sinus rhythm. Your 'normal', beautiful, steady heartbeat. Breathing is a rhythm too, as are your circadian cycles. Medicine has some tricks to help control rhythms, but it has little or no understanding of the rhythms themselves. Here's where years of living close to this got me. Funnily enough, I think the key is to try to understand rhythms. The key to smooth, regular rhythm - of breathing, of your heart, of sleep etc. - is *arrhythmia* of your activity in the world. If your everyday activity is too consciously repetitive, it paradoxically creates arrhythmias in your life and body. Disturbed patterns of breathing and heartbeat, just for starters. You can see that in anxious people, how they set up obsessively regulated routines in an attempt to bring regularity to their life, but it actually does the reverse, it creates clunky rhythms in their bodies and lives that cause all sorts of problems. Everyday life is full of mixed rhythms, and living those as they are paradoxically creates a sublime regularity of rhythm in your body. Also this is I suspect why people with something like anxiety and depression can find the repetitive rhythms of music irritating at times, songs get 'stuck' in their heads because their tendency to obsessively create rhythms to try to achieve calm latches onto anything.