Master of Your Domain

aka: Biofeedback

"Today you panicked," she said. "You know your mind and bindu-nervature perhaps better than I do, but you've much yet to learn about your body's prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of the hands. We'll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity." She turned away. "Come, into the tent, now."

— Dune

Most physiological processes in our body function below the level of consciousness. We may be able to control some systems to a certain extent, like our respiratory rate or micturition, but we usually aren't able to regulate our blood pressure, heart rate, pupil diameter, hormone production, digestion, reflexes, etc by conscious thought alone.

But these folks can.

It can be due to extensive training, to Bio-Augmentation, Ki Manipulation, Nanomachines or just be a Superpower. As explained in the other wiki and in Real Life below, this can also be Truth in Television.

Fictional users go far beyond just altering their heartbeat or skin temperature and exhibit abilities such as Feel No Pain, Uninhibited Muscle Power and voluntary Healing Factor.

At higher levels, they may be able to alter specific molecules in their bodies, meddle with their own cellular pathways, engage in Voluntary Shapeshifting, be Older Than They Look, attain true Super-Strength, full-fledged biological Immortality and at the greatest extreme, regenerate From a Single Cell. Supernatural versions can enable Bloody Murder and Bad with the Bone, and in extreme cases can seem like Lovecraftian Superpowers.

More often though, their capabilities merely extend to conscious control of normally subconscious physiological processes like heartbeat.

Related to Biomanipulation; here, the manipulation is strictly to one's own body.

Often Hand Waved by 90% of Your Brain and other cases of Artistic License – Biology.

The title is decidedly not a Seinfeld reference. Should also not be mistaken for Domain Holder which is the trope of someone with dominion over the physics of a location, often an extradimensional space.

Also known as Body Supremacy, Body Mastery, Bio Feedback, Biofeedback, Body Control or Self Mastery.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Coppelion: Meisa can disassemble ("break") and reassemble ("reload") her body at the atomic level. According to Dr Coppelius, she does this by manipulating the nuclear force of her body that holds her protons and electrons together.
• Godzilla: Singular Point: The kaiju are theorized to be able to control their own evolution. Once Godzilla transforms into its third form, it turns its outer layer of flesh into reactive armor to survive two large missiles, then straight up grows blood tentacles from its wounds to catch and envelope a third missile.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The Pillar Men from Battle Tendency take this ability to sick extremes, being able to manipulate their bodies in various ways, from using their rib cages as bear traps to crushing their own bodies to paste in order to fit through impossibly small gaps and emerging unharmed on the other side. Apart from Santana, each of the Pillar Men also has a Super Mode involving reshaping their body in a certain way:
    • Wamuu's Wind Mode involves rotating his arms a full 360 degrees at the elbow so fast that he is able to create a Razor Wind vortex.
    • Esisidi's Flame Mode allows him to heat his blood up to 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit) and turn his blood vessels into long, prehensile tentacles that he can use to inject his boiling blood into his opponents.
    • Kars' Light Mode lets him produce blades from his arms or legs that have tiny shark-like teeth running along their edge like a chainsaw, giving them Absurd Cutting Power.
  • In The JOJOLands, Paco Laburantes' Stand, The Hustle, gives him advanced control over his muscles, letting him grab things with any part of his body. It comes in handy when stealing stuff, as he can grab things without leaving fingerprints on them, and is very useful in a fight, as he can use his muscles to grab his opponent's limbs or weapons when they hit him or grab nearby objects to use as weapons with a touch.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Flowing Red Scale is a Blood Manipulation technique that can be used to modify bodily parameters to achieve drastic physical improvement, while this usually runs the risk of causing blood clots, thrombosis and other systemic issues. Choso's Healing Factor can severely mitigate (though not nullify) potential internal damage, allowing him use to it with far greater frequency.
• Medaka of Medaka Box is able to consciously control her reflexes and sundry other biological processes.
• Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Heero Yuy could control his brainwave activity.
• The chief antagonist of Ninja Scroll, Himuro Gemma, can control his own body at the cellular level. The English dub calls this "reincarnation." He uses it to regenerate from injury, reattach severed limbs, change his appearance, and even survive decapitation.
• One Piece:
  • Rob Lucci and Kumadori of CP9 have an ability called Life Return (Seimei Kikan). Kumadori is the one who uses it most, allowing him to do things such as control his long hair as a weapon or instantly digest a large amount of food. Lucci on the other hand can use it in conjunction with his Zoan Devil Fruit powers to make his large Leopard-Man form more proportionate to his human form. When Chopper saw Kumadori's use, he described it as being based on biofeedback.
  • Luffy can do this to an extent with his ability Gear Second: using his Rubber Man body (including his organs), he forcefully re-pumps his blood hard, making them circulate much faster and thus increasing his metabolism rate. Lucci notes that the blood circulating at such speed would make a normal human heart explode, but because Luffy's heart is also rubber, it can work. Its downside is that it burns through his nutrients quickly.
  • After the Time Skip, Chopper no longer needs the Rumble Ball for seven of his eight forms (including a brand new form), when previously he needed it for any transforming beyond the three-form Zoan standard.
• Ryoko in Tenchi Muyo! (OVA continuity) is Immune to Drugs, thanks to being a genetically engineered superhuman — but only when she wants to be immune. Since Ryoko loves getting drunk, she turns this ability "off" a lot.
• This is the core element behind Enbu, or Monkey Martial Arts, in Toriko. It involves unifying literally every single cell in your body for a single purpose. Doing so can enhance your abilities far beyond the norm and allow traversal through otherwise deadly environments.
• YuYu Hakusho: Doctor Kamiya can turn off his ability to feel pain, overclock his adrenaline production and muscle function, reattach severed limbs and even make a virus more deadly by manipulating it inside his body.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman has done this tons of times, usually in the form of slowing his heart to fake death or conserve oxygen.
  • Robin III/Red Robin (Tim Drake) can slow his heartbeat to fake death or slow blood loss and can continue listening to his surroundings for about a minute after being drugged into unconsciousness if he has a bit of warning.
  • Superman has done it too, slowing down his heartbeat to fake death and escape imprisonment as Clark Kent.
• The Ayakami ninja clan in Empowered know a special technique that allows them to suppress pain. It's effective enough that fighting them is pretty much like fighting zombie ninja.
• Issue #10 of Global Frequency is a 20-page fight between two guys who can do this. It is predictably messy.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Most mid-to-high-level Marvel martial artists have been shown to have this ability, mostly for healing and faking death. Daredevil can speed up his healing via meditation as can Elektra, Iron Fist and Shang-Chi. Master Izo was able to feign death by slowing his heartbeat to almost nil.
  • Of The Avengers, Moondragon and Mantis both received training from reclusive monasteries that gave body-mastery among other powers.
  • The mutant known as Courier from Gambit (1999) has the power of "endopathy," which lets him communicate with his own body's cells. Among other things, he can change gender, evade mutant-gene scans, and regenerate from injuries (although he is subject to conservation of mass).
  • Noh-Varr of Marvel Boy has a technique for rerouting pain signals to his auditory cortex thus literally turning pain into music. There is also the White Run technique from issue #4.
  • Eddie learns in Venom (2021) that, after a power upgrade, he has total control over his physical form. This allows him to resurrect himself, ignore the damage that ensues from using Uninhibited Muscle Power because he can immediately patch himself up, and extend his internal organs such as intestines and nerve endings to grapple with.
  • X-Men:
    • Apocalypse has this down to the molecular level, making his Voluntary Shapeshifting exceptionally powerful and even allowing him to rearrange body parts so fast that Quicksilver can't dodge his attacks.
    • Mystique, primarily known as a mutant shapeshifter, has shown the ability to move vital organs to safer locations in order to survive getting shot and play dead.
    • Sage has conscious control over her body functions thanks to her "computer brain" mutant ability.
• MIND MGMT: Among the various secret agents with Psychic Powers in this series are the Immortals, whose control over every one of their cells means they can close wounds, ignore pain, and even develop gills when submerged at the bottom of a river. None of them can die, no matter how much they want to.
• Axel Brass (an Expy of Doc Savage) from Planetary has these powers.
  Brass: I eliminated my need for food and sleep in 1942, stopped aging in '43, and learned to close wounds with the power of my mind in '44.

• In Stormwatch: Team Achilles (#23 or so), Baron Chaos fools The Authority's appallingly high-tech scanners into thinking he's in a coma.
• The Strange Talent of Luther Strode: This is essentially how the Hercules Method works, with practitioners concentrating until they can bring all of their physiological processes under their control. The protagonist in particular can literally leap tall buildings in a single bound, essentially feel no pain, regenerate from bullet wounds in seconds and punch ordinary people/highly trained mercenaries hard enough to reduce them to blood spray and body parts.
• Thanks to his "scientific" upbringing, Tom Strong has this as a Charles Atlas Superpower.
  Tom: The burns and bruises I sustained earlier begin to hurt. I visualize the pale blue triangle that triggers my endorphin system, limiting the pain.
• Valiant Comics:
  • Ninja-K: "I could feel my nerve endings like I could feel my fingertips. I could control it all... heal it all."
  • Roku: "For the first time I felt my bones... every muscle, every tendon... for the first time I felt every follicle... every cell... for the first time... I felt complete control."
  • The Jonin, when poisoned by Ninja-K with batrachotoxin, ricin and botulinum, not only identified each poison as it entered his system but claimed that fighting the toxins and Ninja-K at the same time was just enough to make it a fair fight. He was right.
  • Every member of the Ninja program learned similar abilities.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): After Ghidorah's middle head ate Vivienne Graham alive, her body was willfully regurgitated into the left head's (San's) neck to keep her intact so she could be revived and biologically reshaped to Ghidorah's desires (though not before she'd been partly digested by Ghidorah's stomach acids). San's decapitated head is subsequently able to both keep Vivienne alive in a coma inside itself and metamorphose her into an Artificial Hybrid, while also forming a second head on the transformed Vivienne which San's mind can transfer into via Brain Uploading.
• In Ages of Shadow, some of Jade's many experiments over the countless millennia she spends trapped in the Shadow Netherworld lead to her learning to how reshape her body as a matter of willpower and a little physical exertion. This leads to, among other things, extending her spine into a tail and turning her now redundant legs into an extra pair of arms.
• This on crack is basically how active use of the basic Predator Trait seems to work in Holo-Chronicles, though different people use it in different ways. For a few examples, Gura allowing her instincts to take over allowed her to enhance her strength and speed, Okayu enhances both her physical strength and stealth capabilities, and Botan amplifies her sensory capabilities to the point of apparent precognition.
• In the Journeyverse series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics by Tenhawk, Xander Harris has an increasingly thorough mastery of his body; he is able to pump more blood to his brain to stay conscious under high-gee maneuvers and heal wounds faster via meditation. He is even able to force a Goa'uld symbiote out of his body by making it an unforgivingly hostile environment — he reverses the flow of carbon dioxide into his blood, pumps out toxic amounts of adrenaline, and stops his kidneys, all while keeping his brain alive just long enough.
• During one fight in A Shadow of the Titans, Gadjo emulates his enemy's power-up by somehow forcing himself to grow a mustache.
• In Total Command, Izuku realizes several years late that he has a Quirk in the form of full control over his body. While initially subconscious, such as his throat muscles working to vomit up the Sludge Villain, once Izuku becomes aware of it, he starts consciously producing more hemoglobin and HGH (a growth hormone) while constantly keeping his heartbeat optimized.
• In the Worm fanfic Russian Caravan, Taylor eventually learns to assert control of every internal process in her body, heart-rate, pain threshold, adrenaline production, the works. She can even fake death for a few minutes by stopping her heart and all her other organs leaving only her brain marginally active.

Films — Animation

• The Big Bad of Ninja Scroll has mastered this to a deeply exaggerated level; he can control every single cell of his body and regenerate from any level of damage short of total annihilation.

Films — Live-Action

• In Die Another Day, James Bond escapes imprisonment by consciously slowing down his own heartbeat to fake death.
• Storm Shadow does this in G.I. Joe: Retaliation to fake a flat-lining heartbeat and escape captivity.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) heavily implies that it's no coincidence Mothra's cocoon hatches at the onset of King Ghidorah's takeover. The novelization confirms that her metamorphosis speeds up because she senses that Ghidorah has started ravaging the world.
• The Incredible Hulk (2008) has Banner learning to suppress his transformations with breathing and meditation. It's also used later to trigger a controlled transformation.
• The Bride from Kill Bill can do some neat tricks thanks to her kung fu training: she can slow her heartbeat to make it seem like she's in a coma, and estimate the passage of time from the changes in the lines of her palms.

• Raizo from Ninja Assassin survives hideous injuries by using this technique to heal himself. So does the Big Bad. So do the mooks.
• Our Man Flint: Derek Flint can use meditation to put himself into a state of suspended animation that is indistinguishable from death (no pulse or breathing). He uses this to fake his own death so the villains will ship his corpse to their Island Base to be presented to their leaders as proof that they've really killed Flint this time.
• In Riddick, the desert dogs pursue the wounded Riddick, and he hides underwater in a pool of poisonous water. He slows down his own heartbeat to calm down and go unnoticed.
• Dieter Tautz, a yoga master in Scanners, is said to be capable of controlling his heart rate and several other usually uncontrollable body functions. However, Cameron's biokinetic powers prove too much even for him to control.
• In Scanners III: The Takeover, Alex learns how to control his heart rate from a Buddhist monk. He later uses it to stop his heart to avoid being killed in a hospital bed by one of his sister's assassins before Waking Up at the Morgue.
• Split: The powers of Kevin's 24th personality, the Beast, seem to rely on this, which is why two of the other malevolent personalities want to bring it out.

Literature

Examples by author:

• Almost every book by Poul Anderson features biofeedback.
  • The Boat of a Million Years has Nornagest, an immortal who learned meditation and biofeedback arts that allowed him to consciously halt blood-flow to his wounds and accelerate his own already enhanced healing.
  • Dalgetty, the protagonist of The Sensitive Man is highly trained in disciplines of "psychodynamics" that allow him to control his nervous system and other body functions.
• This appears in many of Vonda N. McIntyre's books, including both Dreamsnake and the Starfarers quartet. In each of them, some biofeedback ability, including the ability to render oneself temporarily sterile by altering the temperature of one's genitalia, is standard for most adults.

Examples by work:

• Cory Doctorow's story "0wnz0r3d" features computer hackers that figured out how to hack their own bodies. Among other things, they spawn custom T-cells that infect HIV-positive people and cure them.
• The empowered characters in The Accidental Superheroine control their bodies on a molecular level, which gives them Rubber Man and other shapeshifting powers, as well as seeming Complete Immortality.

• A Certain Magical Index: Seria Kumokawa can use autohypnosis to block out pain from injuries, including having an eye removed.
• Ikki Kurogane from Chivalry of a Failed Knight can do things like manually move the muscles of his heart to make it beat after it was stopped by Amane or understand every muscle inside his body and even able to count the dust on his skin.
• Danica of The Cleric Quintet uses this among her various monk abilities. At one point, she consciously reverse blood flow in her body to force poison out.

• The Spine Assassins of the Deepgate Codex books are "Tempered" into emotionless killing machines who can suppress pain responses and accelerate their metabolisms for brief bursts of super-speed.
• Remo Williams of The Destroyer uses the principles of Sinanju and its total body awareness to do everything from regulate his body temperature to expel poisons from his body.
• Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet books feature "Discipline": a full-featured body-control/pain-control/emotion-control/adrenal-control technique that many of the characters practice.
• Aegon Morgenstern from the Doctor Dire books by Andrew "Lost Demiurge" Seiple uses self-hypnotic biofeedback techniques to Feel No Pain.
• The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden learns a few techniques from his interactions with Lash: mostly pain suppression, but he also uses yogic contortionist techniques to escape the thorn manacles in Proven Guilty.
• The Bene Gesserit of Dune have such utter self-mastery that they can create and negate poisons inside their bodies, stop their hearts at will and choose to let themselves age (albeit slowly) only because a cult of eternally young women would be socially destabilizing.

• The Immortals: Daine can control her heartrate with wild magic and meditation. However, accidents can occur, like when in Wild Magic, she tries to contact dolphins telepathically in meditation and decides that her heart is too loud — so she accidentally stops it.
• The protagonist of the Iron Druid Chronicles is able to draw energy from the earth to heal injuries, purge toxins and negate pain.
• The Left Hand of Darkness has the dothé discipline which enables practitioners to deliberately unleash hysterical strength.
• The protagonist of Ayize Jama-Barrett's The Liminal People is extremely gifted in Biomanipulation and can heal, harm or overhaul the bodies of others almost as easily as he does his own.
• In A Night in the Lonesome October, meditating in a Zen garden is one of Larry Talbot's techniques for maintaining self-control during his werewolf transformations.
• In the Modesty Blaise novels, Modesty has a collection of body-control techniques she learned from a Hermit Guru that allow her to do things like shed negative emotions or put them aside to deal with later, slow her metabolism if she's trapped and exposed to the elements, and put herself into a coma-like trance. In The Night of Morningstar, she demonstrates an ability to control individual muscles with remarkable precision, first as a party trick and then after being injected with a sedative by the villains, to squeeze the injected fluid back out through the injection site.
• The protagonist from Ben Bova's Orion has complete awareness and control of every synapse in his nervous system.
• Emma Anyanwu and her descendants in Patternist can control their bodies at a cellular level. Anyanwu can alter her own DNA and appearance at will, while her descendants are able to heal or injure the bodies of themselves and others. However, it takes time and practice to learn to do this properly, and every change they make in a body has to be understood and visualized.
• In Reaper Man, Windle Poons has to assume direct control of all his bodily functions when he becomes a zombie. It's not just that he's able to control them, it's that he has to. The reason for the Zombie Gait is apparently that they have to work out how leg muscles actually work from first principles. He can't eat because he has no idea how his digestive system operates.
• In The Rise of Kyoshi, one of Avatar Kyoshi's teachers known as Tieguai the Immortal extended his lifespan thus:
  "With the right mental focus, you could take an inventory of your own body and place each little piece that's not where it should be back into the correct order."
• Second Apocalypse: Dunyain monks have extremely high control over their bodies and minds. They have nearly superhuman physical abilities and almost total mastery over their expressions, making them perfect actors. They have also had their passion bred out of them, so that it does not get in the way. All of their training and breeding is bent on removing instinct, emotion, and other forces that determine their actions, so that they can become beings of pure will.
• In Shades of Grey: the Road to High Saffron, Jane Grey can consciously control the size of her pupils, which means that unlike everyone else in the novel's dystopian setting, she can see in the dark.
• In The Spirit Thief, mastering one's own spirit allows humans to perform various feats of superhuman strength and toughness, such as shrugging off weights that should crush them and No Selling blades and arrows with contemptuous ease.
• In The Stars My Destination, Gully Foyle learns biofeedback and yoga from an "old fakir" to master, among other things, his body's blush response.
• Used in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. From putting yourself into a trance that allows you to seem dead, to Vergere's 'Art of the Small', which she uses to alter her own bodily chemistry until her tears can inflict or cure diseases as she wishes, it's all over the place.
• Tofu from Super Minion has swarms of Nanomachines under his control. They self-destruct if he sends them outside his body, but inside his body he can use them to reconstruct his body on the fly and manually control the few biological functions he actually needs.
• Chad Taylor from Super Powereds possesses this as a superpower. He uses it for complete control over his emotions, ingesting massive amounts of minerals and processing them into his body to give himself Super-Strength and Super-Toughness, manipulating his muscles and nerves to give himself speedster-level reflexes, recalling all events recorded in his brain and boosting its performances granting him eidetic memory, a Sherlock Scan and immunity to telepathy... As well as a few more techniques, such as his blood-based water saw.
• In Symphony of Ages, Achmed the Snake can change his heartbeat to match the rhythm of anyone possessed by a demon or from the island of Serendair in order to track them across long distances.
• The Envoys from Takeshi Kovacs are all capable of manipulating their bodily functions. The main reason being that Envoys Body Surf more often than most people, both as a means of interstellar travel and coming back from the dead, and the techniques help them acclimatize to new sleeves and ensure they're ready to kick ass regardless of their body's condition. In Broken Angels, Takeshi Kovacs has a neural inhibitor remote attached to his skull programmed to kill or sedate him if he experienced any strong emotion. Willing himself completely calm, he rips it out of his head without triggering its responses.

• Worm:
  • Skinslip has dermokinesis, meaning he can control any skin connected to him. His usual upgrade method is to flay people alive and staple their skin to his.
  • Browbeat is a biokinetic who can manipulate his muscle and bone density at will, suppress bleeding and otherwise assume direct control of his own body.
  • Hemorrhagia is described as a "hemokinetic with personal biokinesis".

Live-Action TV

• Stanton Parrish from Alphas has this to the point that he hasn't aged since the American Civil War.
• The Bionic Woman: The episode "Biofeedback" has a guest character (Darwin Jones) who can use biofeedback to control his own bodily functions.
• A villain in an episode of Elementary uses a technique of this nature to slow his vital signs and mimic the effect of being under general anesthesia.
• Mansfield from Ground Floor is intent on maintaining absolute control of his environment, even his own bodily functions. Unfortunately, viruses aren't particularly receptive to his form of discipline. Also, Jenny is one of the few people who isn't completely cowed by Mansfield's bluster and is actually able to take charge when he's sick.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: In "The King of Thieves", Iolaus is able to survive drowning by meditating to slow down his heartbeat and reduce his need for oxygen. By meditating, he's also able to have the stamina to stand for an hour while carrying a platform full of rocks on his back.
• The main guest character in one episode of The Incredible Hulk (1977) is a cop who is also involved in martial arts, who can turn his pulse off during meditation. He and his sensei try to help David use meditation to suppress his changes into the Hulk.
• In the pilot of The Invisible Man, Darien is having trouble consciously controlling his Quicksilver gland, which is activated by adrenaline. This is hilariously shown when he tries to spy on a soldier and a nurse getting it on and reappears at an inopportune moment (which the soldier did not appreciate). His brother teaches him some basic yoga techniques to allow him to not only appear and disappear at will but to also selectively make parts of his body invisible. He also learns to secrete Quicksilver on small objects, making them temporarily invisible as well. This is brought up in a later episode where his brother's RNA is injected into the gland, allowing him to temporarily take control of Darien's body (don't ask). He also has trouble controlling the gland at first.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Dennis claims to have this ability on multiple occasions, including attempting to shake off the flu/alcohol withdrawal with a simple "SICKNESS, BEGONE!. "It doesn't work. One episode sees him attempt to try this with a doctor in response to a suggestion that he needs to reduce his high blood pressure. After mentally running through an entire "mental health day," culminating with him killing and eating the heart of a tech CEO, he does indeed reduce his blood pressure after about 90 seconds of concentration.
• NZT users in Limitless demonstrate this, particularly Rebecca. When she needs to come work injured and on NZT, she simply decides to just stop feeling the pain so she won't flinch if anyone bumps into her wound.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Once it has regained some strength, Hive demonstrates the ability to control its host's tissue for various purposes, releasing it as a cloud of individual cells. On other Inhumans, these cells infect the brain and make the Inhuman loyal to Hive above all else. With normal humans, it's to aid in feeding. Hive describes its own body as "every cell working together for a common purpose".
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • Stick uses meditation to heal injuries and live longer than he has any right to.
    • Nobu of the Hand can slow his heart rate and lower his body temperature, and his dialogue indicates that this is standard tactic for the Hand.
• Underplayed drastically in Seinfeld, as "Master of your Domain" simply means the ability to resist the urge to masturbate. None of them can hold out long, not even Elaine.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the newly psychic Gary Mitchell can control his heart rate.
• Twin Peaks: Agent Dale Cooper exhibits numerous feats of mind-body coordination over the course of the investigation into Laura Palmer's murder, most obviously his "throwing rocks at bottles to find leads" detective style and his survival of a gunshot wound by keeping fear from his mind.

Podcasts

• Fiona hin'Connaill of Metamor City is an "egoist", i.e., a psychic whose power is the ability to control and/or enhance any of her physical traits at will. So is Miriam.

Tabletop Games

• Pops up a few times in Chronicles of Darkness as a low-level power in physical-based power sets, such as the Life Arcanum in Mage: The Awakening or the Corporeum Transmutation in Promethean: The Created.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Suspend Animation psionic ability that allows the practitioner to feign death.
  • Almost the entire Psychometabolism discipline consists of things from bursts of strength to rapid healing to sweating acid.
  • Autohypnosis is a skill introduced with the psionic rules that allows the user to shrug off caltrop wounds, fear, poison, and mortal injury.
  • The Vow of Poverty feat from the Book of Exalted Deed confers a wide array of powers (to compensate from forsaking magical items altogether), including many of this type, since the characters become ascetics with great control over their body. Among them are (non-magical) increased resistance, natural armor, and ability scores of their choice; immunity to hot/cold environments; removal of the need to eat or drink; energy resistance; survival without air; and accelerated healing.
• Eclipse Phase has the Endocrine Control biomod that allows one to control their appetite, emotions, and pain. In game effects gaining bonuses against hunger, fear, and emotional manipulation, and also when lying, and they can stay awake for 48 hours straight and ignore the penalties from one wound. Also, the entire list of Psi-Chi Sleights is a variety of different special abilities ranging from emotional control to savant calculation to a sanity-restoring Angst Coma.
• There is a psychic discipline of Soma in the Fading Suns setting, which is described as a Psychic Powers-based extension of yoga and other body control skills. (For that matter, Super-Senses-related powers in this game are a domain of extrasensory perception, which is a separate discipline.)
• GURPS:
  • Metabolism Control allows characters to control all autonomic biological functions.
  • There's also the older skill Breath Control, which is classed as Mental/Very Hard and is "not normally taught outside Oriental cultures." It triples the time you can spend underwater, among other benefits.
• Paranoia: The mutant abilities of Adrenaline Control (increase Strength and Endurance), Chameleon (skin pigments) and Suspended Animation.
• In Pathfinder, mastering one's own body is what the Monk class is all about. As a monk levels up, they become immune to disease and poisons, can mend their wounds by sheer willpower, gain spell resistance, stop aging (though it doesn't prevent death from advanced age), and eventually become magical creatures and, if Irori's teaching are true, can ascend to actual godhood.
• Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution:
  • Biofeedback grants espers conscious control over their own bodies, for the purpose of healing damage, purging toxins, and surviving without food and water for much longer than a normal human when necessary.
  • Somakinesis also applies. It grants espers that ability to consciously increase their strength and speed for short periods of time, as well as preserving muscle tissue.
  • Somakinetics can also just decide to have their unarmed attacks deal lethal damage or add extra dice to their unarmed damage rolls if they feel like it.
  • The book describes scrying as the act of turning your psychokinesis inwards to expand your own consciousness.
• Shadowrun: The stock in trade of the Adept, who uses Ki Manipulation or Magical Enhancement to control their bodies in extremely minute ways. Depending on what you spend your Power Points on, Adepts can do anything from bending their limbs the wrong way, balance on the head of a pin, go days without food, water, or sleep, regenerate from wounds incredibly quickly, super-charge their physical attributes, or fine-tune their vocal chords to perfectly mimic any sound.
• Star Wars d20 allows trained Jedi to enter a hibernation trance that drastically reduces their need for air, water, and food.
• Traveller: The psionic ability of Awareness allows Suspended Animation, the Regeneration of injuries and enhanced Strength and Endurance.
• Vampire: The Requiem: Justified since vampires have no bodily functions and can control their own blood. With effort, they can give themselves signs of life like a heartbeat, blood flow to the skin, and so on — enough to be at least superficially convincing. One NPC is quite proud that she's learned to sweat and imitate the smell of menstruation, which she thinks really completes the facade.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: Melissa is able to control the temperature of water particles within and around her body, letting her generate ice while making her extremely agile in combat.

Webcomics

• Franz Raynor of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has such precise control over his body that he is immune to Nerve Attacks, having literally rearranged his own nervous system to relocate weak spots to other parts of his body. Only an expert in anatomy like Doc can tell where he's vulnerable. He's since underwent various mutilations, and managed to move his weak point to a limb before it was amputated, leaving what's left of him basically invulnerable.
• Blood is Mine: The protagonist's mother and other beings of her kind have full control over their biology and can manipulate it at will.
• Schlock Mercenary: Carbosilicate Amorphs have voluntary control over their own biochemistry. Schlock usually uses it to eat anything, but he's also used it to neutralize the digestive juices of bigger predators and to fight off nanomachine infections.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: The Supernatural Martial Arts school of Ki Rata contains what, in the author's words, is described as "bullshit breathing techniques" that allows a master of the art to do things with their body that are biologically impossible, like stop the aging process or produce only sperm cells that produce children of one sex.

Web Original

• Academy of Superheroes:
  • The power set of Aaron Zander a.k.a. Contact includes a physics-violating version of this.
  • The power set of the Daredevil-inspired vigilante Warden is essentially "mind-over-everyone's-body" — including his own.
  • The genetically enhanced crimelord Rex Umbrae "...is capable of halting his bodily processes well enough to be confirmed dead to casual inspection, then return to activity several minutes later."
• SCP Foundation: SCP-1475 is a man who created a drug that allowed him to use 100% of his brain, giving him complete control over his own body to the point where he rewired his brain to remove the need for sleep. However, in a Deconstruction, he now has to do manually what his body used to do automatically. Like keep his heart beating and digest food. As a result, he is left permanently bedridden because keeping himself alive takes up so much of his concentration that he can't do anything else.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Teri seems to more or less have complete control of her paper body, folding her head completely backwards to keep herself from being decapitated by a saw blade and crumpling up her entire body and hiding in a trash can.
  • Gumball claims to possess this in "The Virus", and he proves it via Abnormal Limb Rotation Range (which also involuntarily rearranges his internal organs and forces him to visit the infirmary).
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Avatar Kyoshi's supernaturally extended lifespan comes from one of her teachers (albeit in the tie-in novel The Rise of Kyoshi) showing her how to do this.
• In the Justice League story "A Better World", the Flash feigns death by making his heart beat so fast that it looks like he's flat-lining.
• In the King of the Hill episode "Death Picks Cotton", when Cotton is on his deathbed, he takes one last opportunity to Troll everybody by making it look like he's flat-lining several times. Then he makes himself die for real, just to spite his series-long Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Peggy.
  Peggy: You want to die alone? Fine. You want to keep coming back and never die? That's fine too. In fact, I hope you do go on living, forever, as the unhappy person you are in the Hell you have created here on Earth. I hope you live forever, I really do.
  Cotton: [smiling] Do ya now? Heh-heh-heh... [dies]
• Geeker from Project G.e.e.K.e.R. has this down to the molecular level, making him a Physical God... or at least he would be, if he wasn't a total Cloudcuckoolander who has no idea how powerful he really is. This is due to him being freed before the loyalty program (which also contained all of the intelligence) could be installed.
• The Simpsons: In "Marge in Chains", Bart displays the ability to control his own immune system. When the Osaka Flu hits Springfield, he is completely unaffected, much to his dismay (he wants to get out of school). So, with some intense concentration, he manages to get his antibodies to stop fighting the virus.
  Cell #1: Sarge! We keep getting orders to let the virus win.
  Cell #2: Must be a school day. Lay down your arms!
  Virus: Alright! Let's make some pus!
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Cleaved", Janna reveals she can make her heart stop for about a minute. She uses this to distract some paramedics and allow Marco to leave.

Real Life

• "Biofeedback" is a method of body function control through the use of biometric equipment for, well, feedback i.e. compensating for limited self-awareness with electronics and learning to handle whatever it measures on your own.
• Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk in Vietnam, set himself on fire as a means of protest against the policies of the Diem regime. He then sat down on the road and quietly burned to death without screaming in pain or otherwise reacting in any way to the fact that he had just set himself on fire.
• Auto-hypnosis is another technique for autonomic self-control. Also there is the trick of "thinking your hands warm" to deal with migraines.
• In one recorded incident involving hypnosis, the subject relived a heart attack. Their heart stopped for 22 seconds (they were hooked up to a EKG). Sometimes the line between fiction and reality is thinner than we think.
• Some women are said to be capable of 'thinking-off'. In other words, will herself to orgasm without any physical stimulation.
  • This is, in fact, possible for anyone with the aid of hypnosis—but it's generally easier for women.
• Wim Hof claims to be able to regulate his body temperature to such an extent that he can climb Mt. Everest and run marathons in freezing winter, wearing nothing but shorts. His method consists of breathing exercises and meditation alongside exposure to cold water and weather. Multiple people have died attempting to replicate this themselves.

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