They aren’t answering you... again.

That familiar old feeling starts to creep into your body and mind. You can feel your racing heartbeat, your arms and legs twitching and restless, taking fast, shaky breaths, and then there’s the worst part of all: the horror stories that your brain starts writing about WHY.

If this is happening to you all the time, there’s an important number you need to keep in mind. 20. That’s the number of minutes it takes to get your nervous system back under control. But how could you possibly do that when the situation feels like an absolute emergency!?

First, let’s talk a little bit about our anxiety. (After all, we can’t do anything about it if we don’t understand it!)

Your anxiety, while looking and feeling like a legitimate sign that danger and disaster are imminent, is kind of a time-traveler. What do I mean by this? Well, your anxiety doesn’t live in the current moment. It doesn’t get its information from what’s happening in the here and now. It’s more like it travels forward into the future and tries to predict what danger might be waiting for you there.

And whether its prediction is accurate or not… it ALWAYS manages to find the worst case scenario.

So, if you can, grab your anxiety’s ankle before it disappears into its time-traveling vortex and instead of panic-texting your sweetie, let’s use your phone to set a timer for 20 minutes.

We’re going to try to interrupt your anxiety before it has a chance to do any fortune-telling.

Tools to try during your 20 Minute Reset

Instead of just one tool, we’re going to talk about three of them that can help bring you back to the present moment. (After all, it’s the only place we should be gathering information from anyway!)

The first tool is called Grounding.

Look around you and name 5 things that you can see.
Tip: These don’t have to be anything special; in fact, mundane observations are perfectly OK.

Then, use your ears to identify 4 sounds around you.
Tip: If one of the sounds is your own breath, that’s OK, too.

Next, use your body to find 3 things that you can touch.
Tip: These might be the seat underneath your butt, or the soft cotton of your shirt.

Last, try to identify a smell and a taste.
Tip: It’s ok if you can’t smell anything! You can also try to remember a smell from earlier in the day.

If you feel calmer, you can move onto the next step. And if you still feel extremely anxious or upset, you can do it all over again, looking for totally new sights, sounds, and sensations. (It may take a few times before you start feeling like yourself again.)

This practice pulls you out of the future and into the here-and-now.

This is key because even if you THINK you know what dangers might await you in the future--like a breakup or infidelity or your partner simply losing interest--it’s possible that you might be completely wrong about the situation!

The second tool is an Ice Water Reset.

Fill a bowl with some cold water and ice, and gently dunk your face in the bowl. If you don’t have that available, you can also hold onto an ice cube and focus on the cold feeling in your hand.

The face-dunk can help to trigger the Mammalian Dive Reflex, which might help to lower your heart rate. And the extreme cold of the ice cube in your hand is a great tool for focus (it’s tough to focus on other things with such an extreme temperature drop for your body to attend to!)

The last one, let’s call a Draft Dump.

If your mind is still racing and you feel words spilling out of you, go ahead and write them down. You can type up a storm in the ‘Notes’ app in your phone (hint: NOT on your text screen!) or grab a piece of paper or your journal and let ‘er rip.

Get all of those big feelings and words off your chest, but don’t send them out.

20 Minutes is the key to your Calm.

Is your phone still counting down?

You might notice that it’s tough to maintain that heightened, panicked feeling for the entire 20 minutes if you’re using the techniques above.

Somewhere after minute 12, your body and mind will probably start heading back to your baseline. This is where feelings of safety, calm, and rationality will start to come back to you.

The lights in your brain will stop flashing red, and the prefrontal cortex (your THINKING brain) will start to light back up. You might even get hit with some realizations that you hadn’t considered in your panicky state:

“Oh yeah! They DID say they had a big meeting today…”

Why this helps:

It’s pointless to try to THINK yourself out of a chemical flood. (Believe me, I’ve tried!) The wiser thing to do is to wait out the alarms, and tend to your brain and body while you find your way back to normal.

Because the “normal” you is going to make much better decisions than “panicking” you!

Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t change the fact that you are STILL waiting for that return text…! But, it may help prevent you from digging yourself into a hole by acting from your EMOTIONAL brain instead of your RATIONAL one.

Ok, this was helpful for now… but need MORE!?

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