Calm Yourself Fast
7 ways to make yourself feel better fast when you’re feeling anxious, depressed, stressed, or overwhelmed.
They are very simple to do, they work quickly, and they have no downsides.
1. Havening.
Practice havening whenever you’re upset, stressed, or anxious.
Havening is a very simple strategy—so easy even children can do it—you can use to calm yourself and wash away anxiousness or anger. It stimulates both sides of the brain and creates calming brainwaves in the emotional centers of the brain.
- Cross your arms and put each hand on the opposite shoulder.
- Gently stroke down to the elbows.
- While you’re stroking down, say, “I am safe in God’s hand. I am calm and peaceful.”
- Repeat for 30-60 seconds.
2. Diaphragmatic (belly) (box) Breathing
When you’re feeling anxious or angry, your breathing becomes shallow and fast. This causes a change in oxygen in your blood, making you more anxious. It becomes a vicious cycle, causing irritability, impulsiveness, confusion, and bad decision-making. Learning to direct and control your breathing has immediate benefits. It calms the brain’s amygdala (the brain’s fear centers), counteracts the body’s stress response, relaxes muscles, warms hands, and regulates heart rhythms. This simple diaphragmatic breathing exercise can help calm you almost immediately.
- Inhale for 4 seconds through your nose.
- Hold for 4 seconds.
- Exhale for 4 seconds (twice as long as inhale).
- Hold for 4 seconds.
- Repeat 10 times. This will take less than 2 minutes.
3. Physiological Sigh
During acute anger, fear, or anxiety, this sigh opens up the millions of alveoli (sacs that help exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen in blood), releasing excess carbon dioxide, and disengaging the amygdala quickly.
- A double inhale through the nose, followed by a slow sigh out the mouth.
- Repeat 3 times.
4. Hand Warming
Imagining warmth, especially in your hands, is another tool to feel better fast and counteract the fight-or-flight response. When people warm their hands, it calms down their bodies and minds just as effectively as prescription drugs. Close your eyes and hold your hands out, palms down, and imagine a campfire in front of you.
- Focus. Think heat. You can hear the fire crackle, smell the aroma of fresh-cut wood burning, watch sparks fly and float up into the sky.
- Now feel the soothing heat as it penetrates the surface of your skin and goes deep to warm your hands.
- Picture this as you breathe deeply and count slowly to 20.
- Note: you can imagine any number of “warm” images, such as:
Putting your hands in warm sand at the beach
Taking a hot bath or shower
Sitting in a sauna
Cuddling a warm, furry puppy or kitten
Holding a warm cup of tea
Holding a hot potato with warm gloves
5. Mindfulness
Mindfulness helps keep the mind in the present moment. Since anxiety is related to having intense fear about the future or the unknown, using mindfulness lessens anxiety symptoms and brings the focus to the here and now.
Notice various items in your environment to break tunnel vision. Mentally describe the colors, shapes, and characteristics of each before moving on. Find focal points from the far side to the center and to the other side. Resist looking down or shifting your eyes quickly.
Or you can note certain smells, tastes, or textures. Take time to observe each, describing them mentally.
5. Create an Emotional Rescue Playlist
(instrumental only for calm, fun favorites with lyrics for mood)
Music can soothe, inspire, improve your mood, and help you focus. In his powerful book, The Secret Language of the Heart, Barry Goldstein reviews the neuroscience properties of music and finds that it can:
• Stimulate emotional circuits in the brain
• Release oxytocin, the cuddle hormone
• Create peak emotions, which increase the amount of dopamine
6. Loving Kindness Prayer/Meditation
Kindness Meditation (LKM) is intended to develop feelings of goodwill and warmth toward others. It has been found to quickly increase positive emotions and decrease negative ones, decrease pain and migraine headaches, reduce symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and social prejudice, increase gray matter in the emotional processing areas of the brain, and boost social connectedness.
- Sit in a comfortable and relaxed position and close your eyes.
- Take 2-3 deep belly breaths, taking twice as long to exhale.
- Let any worries or concerns drift away as you feel your breath.
- Quietly or silently repeat the following or similar phrases/prayers:
May I be safe and secure
May I be healthy and strong
May I feel joy and purpose
May I be calm and at peace
- Repeat at least once, then say these phrases/prayers for someone you feel grateful for:
May _______ be safe and secure …
- Now for someone you feel neutral about, then someone you have negative feelings toward.
- Allow whatever feelings that come to be felt.
- End with yourself again
7. Focused Movement
An advantage of treating your anxiety by practicing these exercises is that it gives you an active way to approach your condition—you’re doing something, rather than thinking about things or trying to force yourself to relax.
Engage in a task that requires focus, such as making coffee, pushups, address an envelope …
Make a fist with your hands, then relax them completely. Remind yourself that you are safe and look around you and identify several specific things and name them. Make sure you are looking in different areas, and not only what’s immediately in front of you.