How to stay calm: 8 techniques and ways to calm down
“Your problems, you must forget. That’s living, it’s learning.” You may even remember the song and the drawing, but do you really know how to stay calm and manage conflicts? Let’s talk about it!
A driver distracted by his cell phone crashed into your car? The client complained about the job and still defaulted? Did your son do phenomenal art on the walls of the room? Stop and think about how you could react on each of these occasions. The way we deal with events can solve or aggravate the problem. So knowing how to stay calm makes all the difference!
It would be nice if we had the power to control any situation and not let anything affect our peace, wouldn’t it? We cannot prevent negative events from happening, but we are able to manage how we react to them.
Want to know how to stay calm at critical times? Follow this post and meet 8 new habits that will help you preserve emotional balance!
1. Take a deep breath and count to 10
In high-voltage occasions, knowing how to manage stress is a way to modify the outcome of the situation. This is because when we are moved by intense emotions, such as anger, we cannot reason clearly and evaluate the consequences of our acts. The end product of this equation is that we end up creating even more problems.
Breathing deep and counting to 10 are old clichés indicated to keep calm. But believe it or not, these actions can produce positive effects on the nervous system, since they help shift the focus of the adverse situation by turning attention to the breathing itself.
2. Take diaphragmatic breathing
Simple respiratory activity can also be a calming action if performed with some techniques. Breathing is always related to our emotional state. Note, for example, that when we feel anxiety, we breathe at short intervals or in a cut-out shape.
Diaphragmatic breathing is a technique applied, even in therapeutic settings, and has significant impacts on the state of relaxation and the recovery of self-control. To adopt this practice, follow the following steps:
- sit comfortably on a chair, with the spine upright, place one hand on the chest and the other on the belly;
- observe the movement of the hands and try to raise only the abdominal region — this indicates that you are breathing through the diaphragm;
- inhale, mentally counting to four, hold your breath for two seconds, slowly exhale until you empty your lung and keep it empty for another two seconds.
3. Take distance from the situation to evaluate it better
Have you ever noticed how we always have a recipe ready to solve other people’s problems, but when we are in the situation, everything changes context? This is because the emotional burden makes it difficult to make decisions. So one way to stay calm is to get away from the problem and evaluate it from another angle.
Whatever event may take away your peace, try to change your perspective to find different solutions. Put aside the weight of emotions and think about what advice you would give to someone who was in the same situation.
4. Avoid conversations and negative people
It’s amazing how some people or certain subjects can undermine our tranquility and leave us distressed, even when everything seemed fine, isn’t it? Avoid contact with complaining people, who only complain about life or who loves to throw the seed of discord wherever she goes.
Likewise, spare yourself from ruminating on issues that generate worry, frustration, or any other kind of emotional distress. Thoughts have a strong influence on feelings and, consequently, on our actions.
5. Take the time to meditate
Escaping some of the intense movement of day to day is a necessary measure to stay calm. An activity that promotes favorable results when it comes to achieving peace of mind is meditation. Physicians and psychologists also recommend this practice as an auxiliary treatment in cases of stress, anxiety, depression and other conditions.
To achieve good effects with meditation, you should focus on a few points, such as disconnecting from external stimuli and breathing properly — there are specific breathing techniques to meditate. Moreover, an even more difficult mission than ignoring the movement of the environment is to neutralize the noises of one’s own mind.
6. Develop the ability to hear more and speak less
Have you ever noticed that we have a bad habit of listening to answer, and not to understand what the other means? That is, in a dialogue, we pay little attention to what people actually talk about. The mind is always formulating answers, based on its own experiences. But this constant state of preparation for action creates unnecessary wear and tear.
Thus, learning to listen more and talk less is a good resource to stay calm, absorb more learning and not get too far off the boundaries in problems that are not yours.
7. Don’t take everything personally
Speaking of not being affected by other people’s conflicts, one of the issues worked on in therapy is to understand that “what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours”. Does it seem confusing? But it’s a simple thing to understand — at least in theory.
It turns out that we feel easily offended by the behavior of others, and this is a real waste of time. People don’t always intend to hurt those around, but each has their own defense mechanisms. However, these coping strategies are not always well elaborated and can reach those who are on the way.
So working on self-knowledge and emotional intelligence should be of interest to everyone. After all, these skills help not to take other people’s reactions to the personal side and to remain calm in the face of adversity.
8. Plan breaks in intense routine
Is rest break an item in your daily planning? If your answer is “no,” you make the same mistake as most people — especially the rush of freelance life — because we know well that time is money.
It is not always possible to find a space in the routine to take the focus off the commitments and relax, is it? But this momentary dodging of troubled day-to-day is essential to leave emotions in balance and to be able to remain calm in the face of unforeseen events.
On the other hand, if you never recharge your battery, you run the risk of having outbursts of anger at critical times. It’s that story: “a drop of water can make a full glass overflow.”
And now, can you remember any time when you knew how to manage stress, managed to resolve the conflict and reverse the situation in your favor? Knowing how to stay calm is a good you do yourself. Self-control helps lead to any setback and positive outcomes — whether in personal life or professional performance.
Have you noticed that in this post we started with the problems and found ways to get around them? So is life, full of ups and downs, and to face the challenges, you need to explore your best.
