Practices

Breathe in for about five and out for about ten, and do not hold at the top. Go straight from the in breath into the out breath, five to ten times over.

That pause after the inhale feels natural to add, and it can raise your heart rate rather than lowering it, which undoes what you came for. If ten…

Fighting, running and freezing are the ones everybody can name. There is a fourth: going along with things, smoothing them over, making yourself easy to be around so that nothing bad happens.

It gets read as being agreeable, or as a personality, and it is often neither. If you grew up being criticised, or spent years around someone…

You are not trying to talk yourself into feeling calm. You are trying to move your body from one setting into another, and the breath is the handle you can reach.

Once the alarm system is running, stress hormones are already in the blood and telling yourself to relax does very little about them. Changing the…

Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. The holds are the strong part of this one, and they stay optional every single time.

Some people find the pauses deeply settling. Others meet the edge of what they can tolerate there, especially at the bottom of the exhale. Both are…

If you keep only one thing, make the out breath longer than the in breath. Four in and eight out is enough, and nothing clever is needed on top of it.

This is the closest thing to a dependable settling lever. It suits the end of the day, a queue you are stuck in, the ten minutes before sleep. Some…

If big breathing feels like too much, make it smaller instead. Breathe so smoothly that the in breath rolls into the out breath with no sound and no edges.

This asks almost nothing of you, and that is the point. Nothing to count, nothing to hold, no depth to reach for. For anyone whose panic runs through…

Let the in breath come however it comes, then breathe out through pursed lips as though through a straw for a count of eight, finishing with two more counts through the nose. Three ordinary breaths, then go again.

Three rounds is the usual dose. Notice what is deliberately left uncounted: the inhale. Counting the in breath when someone is already panicking…

The soft sound and the feel of this breath in your throat give your attention somewhere to sit. When the mind is loud, something you can hear holds better than something silent.

It is called the victorious breath, and the victory meant is over the noise in your own head rather than over anybody else. The vibration in the…

The alarm system in you responds to what your body does more readily than to what you tell it. Sit down, unclench, breathe out slowly, and only then try to reason with yourself.

Reasoning does work, just not at the top of the curve. Wait until the arousal has come down a little, then think about what happened, and you will…

The urge to punch a wall is the body trying to dump a load of energy. Give it somewhere to go that will not cost you a hand or a door.

Telling yourself to stop rarely holds, because the urge is doing a job. Choose the substitute in advance and keep it dull and near to hand: press…

Press ups on clenched fists give the hands something close to striking, while the effort and the counting take the story out of it.

The shape of the movement is part of why it satisfies, and the breathing it forces is what stops it being a rehearsal. Count the reps, keep the…

If one sigh helps, take another. Nothing says you have to wait for the hard part to be over first.

Waiting makes the sigh a report on something already finished. Repeating it while you are still in the middle turns it into an intervention instead.…

For a child who is boiling over: eyes closed, fingers gently over the ears, and a long humming breath out. They can feel the buzzing inside their own head.

Blocking their ears is something an upset child often does already, so you are borrowing a movement their hands know rather than teaching a new one.…

If techniques and explanations are not for you, carry a bottle of water and drink it down whenever you feel yourself going up. That is the whole method.

Some people want something to do, not something to understand, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to be. A bottle in your bag or your van is a…

If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.

Attention to the inside, the chest, the stomach, the throat, sits close to the emotional wiring and can open more than you meant to open. Position in…

One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.

The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The signal is information and it deserves a hearing. But you can hold it up against the room…

When someone is distressed, moving too fast to settle them can land as a message that their distress is not welcome here. Let them set the speed.

Offering a breath, a blanket, a change of subject: all of it can help, and all of it can arrive as a shutting down if it comes before the person has…

Keep a short list of things that settle you, and choose from it by how you actually are, not by which one you like best. Wound up and racing needs something different from flat and switched off.

When you are speeding, the things that help slow you down: a long out breath, cold water on the face, attention to your feet and hands, pushing…

If your body is braced to run and there is nowhere to run to, try running in extreme slow motion. One knee lifting over several seconds, then the other.

The urge to bolt does not disappear when you sit on it, it just stays in the muscles as shaking, tightness or ache. Doing the movement so slowly that…

Picture something that could hold what you cannot deal with today. A box, a safe, a chest with a lid. You choose the size, what it is made of and where it is kept.

The details matter more than they sound: deciding what holds it, and knowing you can open it again, is what makes this different from pushing…