Why do cats love boxes so much?
&gt; hunkering down in small, enclosed spaces is a kind of “swaddling” behavior left over from cuddling up with their moms and littermates when they were kittens.<p>This isn&#x27;t cat specific. The concept of boundaries is very important in healing trauma, and just in general is a key concept in human being&#x27;s emotional development.<p>&gt; This is peculiar. How safe and cozy can a cat feel sitting right out in the open on top of the water bill? Dodman describes it as something like the placebo effect. “This virtual box may provide some misplaced sense of security and psychosomatic comfort,” he writes.<p>It is also an exercise I found in a book for healing trauma : make a circle on the floor with some towels, or a rope, or other objects and sit in it. It actually works and can help calm down the nervous system. It is a &quot;patch&quot; you could say, a substitute for weaker boundaries. When you sit in the circle, you can feel your body and emotions more easily.<p>Understand this isn&#x27;t &quot;scientifically proven&quot;, but certainly experientially verified at least for me.<p>Just wanted to highlight that the concept of sitting in a physical boundary, even if it&#x27;s just a square drawn on the floor , does help with the nervous system and it&#x27;s not cat specific - just something most people don&#x27;t know about.<p>I would have never thought this exercise would work, it seems silly and yet in my experience it has reliably, consistently, provided relief when my anxiety was really high.<p>Someone with no significant trauma and relatively good boundaries (physical, emotional) may not notice any difference.