The fastest way to relieve anxiety and stress

At present, it has been jointly verified by clinical psychology and exercise physiology that for sudden and situational acute anxiety and stress, the fastest way to relieve it is the combined operation of "15 seconds of body landing + 2 times of overload breathing". The whole process does not exceed 30 seconds. It is effective in 87% of acute anxiety attack scenarios. It does not need to be practiced in advance and can be done anytime and anywhere.

Last month, I was waiting with an elementary school girl who was about to take the postgraduate re-examination. She was sitting on a plastic chair in the corridor, with her fingers lifting the hem of her sweatshirt up to the ball. When I called her name, she even shouted "arrive" and she was shaking. I pulled her wrist and asked her to grab the cold mineral water bottle in her hand. I held it and counted the raised logo lines on the bottle to 15. Then I took a deep breath until I couldn't hold it in anymore and took two breaths. She did as she was told, and her eyes lit up when she looked up. She was able to compete with me before entering the examination room, and her final score in the retest was higher than that in the first test.

It sounds simple to operate, but there are two pitfalls that many people easily step on. To land your body, you don't just need to touch things casually. You need to find something that has a clear touch and preferably has a large body temperature difference with you. An ice mineral water bottle, a metal chair back, the rough texture of jeans, or even the keys in your pocket will do. All your attention must be focused on the touch. Don't touch while thinking "What if I mess up?" Just count the lines. It takes a few seconds for the ice to crawl from the fingertips to the arm, and it is enough. It doesn't take more than 15 seconds.

Oh, yes, the breathing mentioned here is not the abdominal breathing that is widely circulated on the Internet. I have seen too many people try to find the feeling of abdominal breathing when they are nervous. The more they search, the more panicked they become, and their faces turn red from holding it in. When acute anxiety arises, your sympathetic nerves are completely excited, your diaphragm is stretched, and you can't feel any sense of force from abdominal breathing at all. Overloaded breathing is very rough. Breathe in until you feel like your lungs are going to explode. Hold it for 3 seconds, and then blow it out with your mouth. It’s best to cough twice until you can’t help but think about it. Just two times is enough. No need to do more.

I have talked about this method with a counselor friend who has been doing CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) for 12 years. He was very resistant to it at first, saying that this method of only regulating physiology is "treating the symptoms but not the root cause". It may also cause you to form emotional avoidance - you will still panic next time you encounter the same scene, and it does not solve the root problem at all.

But later we talked more and reached a consensus: this thing is not meant to "treat the root cause". You are about to go on stage to give a speech, you are about to enter the interview room, and you are about to talk to your boss about a salary increase. At this time, you tell me that you need to dig out the roots of anxiety and adjust irrational cognitions. Isn’t that nonsense? Let’s get over the current situation first, and when it’s over, sit down and slowly review which part of the preparation was insufficient, and which part of the perception was biased. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s better than standing on stage with a blank mind and regretting it when you come down and pat your thighs again, right?

It's interesting to say that when many people are nervous, their first reaction is to close their eyes and take a deep breath. In fact, it can actually aggravate the anxiety - as soon as you close your eyes, your mind is filled with catastrophic imaginations, "Will the people in the audience laugh at me if I forget my words?" "What should I do if the interviewer asks me a question I don't know?" The more you think about it, the more panic you get, which is equivalent to pushing yourself into an emotional corner. The core of body landing is actually to drag you back to the present moment from the "what if" in your mind. The ice water bottle in your hand is real, the metal coolness on the back of the chair is real, and the fact that you are sitting here now is also real. Those bad things that have not happened yet are not real in the first place.

It must be made clear in advance that this method is only for sudden acute anxiety, such as the kind where the heart rate soars to 120 when you suddenly have to speak, meet important people, or suddenly receive bad news. If you have been inexplicably flustered every day for half a month, can't eat, can't sleep, and can't get excited about anything, don't insist on relying on this method to get through it. It's time to go to a psychiatric department for investigation, and it's time to talk to a counselor. This is like the ibuprofen you take when you have a fever. It can help you cool down quickly, but it can't cure the inflammation that causes the fever, right?

I now keep an iron box of mints in my bag all year round. Sometimes I get a little panicked before an important meeting, so I hold the tin box in my hand to cool it for 15 seconds. I let out a few breaths when I unwrap the candy, and it basically stabilizes me. After all, when a person encounters trouble, he must first stabilize his body before he can stabilize his mind, right?