nervous system · 6 min read

what are glimmers?

the small moments of ease your body notices first

written by saddy babu · 20 october 2026

somatic practitioner and breathwork facilitator

where the word comes from

deb dana, a clinical social worker who works with trauma, introduced glimmers in her 2018 book, the polyvagal theory in therapy, as the counterpart to triggers: small moments that tip a person towards feeling safe and connected. her work builds on polyvagal theory, stephen porges’s model of how the nervous system reads safety and danger, which is popular with therapists and disputed by many scientists who study the vagus nerve. in 2026 a large group of them argued that its central claims don’t hold up, and porges disagrees.

you don’t need to settle that argument to use glimmers. noticing small good moments has its own research, which I’ll come to, and a simpler test: try it for a week and see.

glimmers vs triggers

trigger has become a loose word, so it’s worth pinning down (the nervous system glossary does the same for the rest of this vocabulary). a trigger is a cue, usually small, that your body reads as a reason to brace, often before you’ve had a thought about it: a tone of voice, a door closing a little too hard. it can set off one of the four protective responses, and you feel it in the body first, as a tight chest or a set jaw.

a glimmer runs the same route in the other direction. something around you reads as okay, and your body answers before your mind has a word for it: the shoulders drop a centimetre, and the breath gets a little longer. if a trigger has a body signature, so does a glimmer, and you need both to see what your system is responding to.

the practical difference is volume. triggers arrive loudly and linger while glimmers are over in seconds, and psychology has a name for the lopsidedness: negativity bias, the well-documented tendency for bad events to land harder and stay longer than good ones of the same size. so glimmers usually need noticing on purpose. in soma reset, catch a glimmer and map a trigger sit side by side, and mapping a trigger offers a few of your own glimmers as “your way back”.

examples of glimmers

glimmers mostly arrive through the senses, which is partly why they’re so easy to walk past: warm light through a window, a heavy blanket on a cold night, the smell of rain after a hot day, or a dog who greets you as if you’ve been gone a year when it’s been twenty minutes. the first sip of tea counts. so does a friend’s laugh down the phone, the barista who remembers your order, or the first full breath after a hard conversation.

they’re personal, too. the hum of a busy cafe can be a glimmer for one person and a trigger for the next, so the test is your body: if something in you eased, even slightly, it counts.

why noticing glimmers helps

attention can be trained, and the research on savouring shows it. the psychologist fred bryant has studied savouring since the late 1980s, and with joseph veroff he described it as a capacity: the ability to notice, appreciate and draw out the good moments in your life. the findings are encouraging without being magical. in a month-long diary study bryant co-authored, the good things in people’s days lifted their mood more when they savoured them, and a 2026 review of twenty randomised trials found savouring practices gave a moderate lift to positive feelings and wellbeing.

lingering is the part that gets skipped, and a few breaths is enough: long enough to taste the tea, short enough to fit inside a busy day. over time, the glimmers you know well become somewhere to return to after touching something hard, and those round trips are how your window of tolerance widens, slowly and for real.

how to find glimmers

aim to notice three glimmers a day, and let them be ordinary ones, the kind you’ll actually catch. when one arrives, pause long enough to clock the plain fact of it: the light on the kitchen bench, the dog at the gate.

then find where you feel it in your body: shoulders that dropped, a slower breath, a jaw that let go, a small warmth in your chest. it’s the same skill a body scan trains, reading sensation without rushing to explain it, and my guided body scan is free if you’d like to practise with me.

stay with it for a few breaths, without trying to make it bigger or keep it from ending. then name it in a word or two, so you can find it again. on days you get to dinner without catching a single one, look back over the day for one small moment of okay. small evidence still counts.

glimmers and toxic positivity

toxic positivity asks you to cover a hard feeling with a nicer one, and glimmers ask for nothing of the kind. a glimmer can sit next to grief or exhaustion, and noticing it doesn’t make the day fine or mean you owe anyone gratitude. the day was hard, and the sun on the back step still felt good: both are true.

and if weeks go by without a single glimmer, with everything flat or far away, take that seriously. it’s one of the signs of a dysregulated nervous system, and worth talking through with your doctor or a mental health professional.

common questions about glimmers