My best advice for stress: Don’t try to calm down
You’re stressed. Your house is a mess, bills are piling up, you hate your job, and you and your partner have had yet another little spat about the dishes. Maybe you feel so stressed you are getting a little sweaty and feel your heart beating. As a licensed therapist, my advice to you is: Don’t try to calm down.
This doesn’t make sense at first. I have heard countless times from clients that they want to “calm down”. I get that desire. I really do. Given the option of feeling angry, afraid, or calm, I would pick calm every time. Many of my clients are feeling things that seem unbearable. So of course when we work together, they tell me they want to set a goal to feel more calm.
And yet, choosing calm in the moment might not really be an option. Sure, in a long-term context, a person can make choices to change their situation. They can leave a relationship that doesn’t work. They can switch careers to something with less intrusive demands. They can introduce new practices that increase their ability to be mindful in the long term (more on what the “m word” means in the future). But, in the present moment, choosing calm by pushing away an unwanted feeling might actually make that feeling worse. Trying to calm down sort of works like pink elephants. The more I tell you ‘”Don’t think of pink elephants”, the more you can’t help but think of pink elephants.
Instead of trying to “calm down” when you’re upset, use an anchoring exercise instead.
An anchoring exercise is a technique to get out of your head and into the moment. Its success is not measured in its ability to calm you down. Rather, its success is measured in its ability to lower your resistance to the feelings you don’t want so that you can focus on actions that are valuable to you. Put another way, this technique is successful if when you are feeling panicky, you are able to recognize the panic and not run out of a crowded room. Or when you are procrastinating on a big writing project and you can get the first sentence down, then the technique was successful. Or when you are going to absolutely lose it on someone who totally deserves it, but you are able to choose your actions carefully so that you and they don’t get hurt, then the technique is working. We owe credit to Russ Harris who developed this technique which has been used by many people successfully.
In a few seconds to a few minutes using 3 simple steps, an anchoring exercise can help you build resilience to the thing that is stressing you out.
The important part of an anchoring exercise is following the steps below in order and not evaluating your success on whether you are calm or not:
Step 1: Acknowledge what is inside your mind
What was the last thought that went through your mind? Good, bad, or indifferent, examine what your attention falls on. It might be something in the future that you are preparing for, something from the past you are trying to make sense of, or something in the present that you are trying to process.
Notice what feeling comes along with that thought. If you can’t identify a feeling, start with the most basic words for feelings. Ask yourself: “Does this thought make me feel happy? Sad? Angry? Afraid? Embarrassed? Ashamed? Disgusted?”
Step 2: Connect with your body
Having identified a feeling, now move to attending to your body. Is there something physically happening with your body that matches the emotion you identified in Step 1? Fear might come along with a racing heart. Sadness might come with a heavy feeling in your chest. Almost every time I am angry, I can feel my jaw clench and if I am really angry, I can feel my ears burning.
Exercise control of your body. The physical sensations you identify with the emotion are not in your immediate control. For example, you can’t tell your heart to slow down. However, you can usually control what happens with things like arms, legs, fingers and toes. Exercising control of your body can be as simple as wiggling your toes. It might be tracing the outline of your hand with your finger. It might be a 90-minute yoga routine (though probably not right now). Pick a body part you can control, move it, and notice how it feels to do that.
Step 3: Experience the world around you
Pick something outside your skin. Could be an object in the room, a sound outside, a smell in the air. Direct your attention to that thing. Try to describe it to yourself using the most objective language possible. It is not the laundry basket which to some of you, means “I need to put the laundry away and I never do the things I am supposed to and everyone will hate me when they figure out…” It is the white laundry basket that has a circular shape and a gray t-shirt on the top of the pile of clothes inside it. Notice a few things. Maybe you can hear a bus chattering to a stop outside your window. Maybe you can smell your hot coffee as you watch the steam drift from the top of your mug. You can notice one, two, five, ten, or one hundred things. The goal is to describe them to yourself in neutral terms.
What happens next
Are you calm now? Well, maybe you got lucky and you get to be calm now. If so, congrats to you; that wasn’t the point of this exercise, but you got a good side effect. If you aren’t calm after this practice, that’s fine too. Maybe the thing you are dealing with is very demanding of your attention, and you were able to move from it controlling you to you directing yourself in the midst of your stress, even if only for a few seconds. If you want, you can start the exercise over again, or ask yourself the question: “What do I want to do while this uncomfortable feeling is happening and how do I go about making that happen now?” The more you practice anchoring, the better you will be at using it in the moment and you will grow “muscles” in your brain that will allow you to more quickly adapt to stressful situations.
If this process seems as clear as mud and you need some help putting the anchoring exercise into practice, or if it was the best thing ever and you want more tools to help deal with challenging thoughts, feelings, and situations, don’t hesitate to contact me for a consult to see if there are ways we can work together to get you past calming down and moving toward doing what is valuable to you. Take a look around my website to find out more about me, how much I charge for therapy, and types of problems I can help with.
-Scott
