Gratitude is positively correlated with a greater sense of wellbeing and happiness, per Harvard research, and can have effects not just over time but immediately, too, like by helping to lower blood pressure. Not for the situation that made you all riled up, but for all the other things in life that you’re thankful for. Try a walking meditation the next time you feel yourself losing your cool. Immediately after exercising, you’ll experience a flood of endorphins, which trigger positive feelings and can help quiet down anxiety and stress, and in the long run, exercise can reduce the number of bad mental health days you experience, per a study in the journal Lancet Psychiatry. And the great outdoors are even more calming if you have time to move around in them. A 2020 study found that spending as little as 10 minutes outside can improve mood, focus, heart rate, and blood pressure. Ask yourself what each of your senses is taking in and note how your body feels in its surroundings. If you’re looking for options on how to calm yourself down, this is an easy one to try out. Noting what you can hear, see, touch, taste, or smell can help you move your awareness and focus from your racing thoughts to your surroundings. Try box breathing, where you breathe in for a count of four seconds, hold the breath for four seconds, and exhale the breath slowly for four seconds before starting again. That’s because breathing deeply stimulates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, decreasing our blood pressure and heart rate and relaxing our muscles. Slow, deep breathing, where you fill up your belly with breath and exhale it over several seconds, can help create comfort and relaxation, per research published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. There’s no one answer as to how to calm someone down, but these are good places to start:īreathe deeply. Luckily, that stress response can be countered by a variety of ways to calm down, including several that we can do whenever and wherever. And while that biological response is helpful when it comes to escaping immediate danger or priming us to take down an attacker, it’s not as useful when the stressful situation at hand is being stuck in traffic. Those are results of our body’s fight-or-flight reaction being activated. When we’re in stressful situations, our bodies react accordingly. Have you ever tried to tell a toddler in the throes of a tantrum to “just calm down”? Have you ever told this to yourself? Or, worse still, maybe someone has even dared say this to you in a heated moment? Of course, it’s an easy thing to say but a much harder thing to actually do (particularly for the toddlers).
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