5 Techniques for Calming Down & Finding Your Center

In this article, you’ll explore…

1. The role of your nervous system in feeling stressed and anxious

2. Mindful Breathing

3. Legs Up The Wall

4. Journaling

5. Body Scan

6. Yin Yoga

1.

The role of your nervous system in feeling stressed and anxious

We can’t have a conversation about stress without talking about your nervous system. Long story short, your body is constantly scanning your environment and determining whether to activate your sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight response) or parasympathetic nervous system (rest/digest).

The reality of your nervous system is more nuanced than this, but this model will be sufficient for today’s article.

I think it’s important to expand a bit on these concepts of ‘fight/flight’ and ‘rest/digest’ because much of life exists between the extremes of running/fighting for your life and sleeping.

Your Sympathetic Nervous System

Your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) prepares your body for action. When your body anticipates or experiences a stressor, it quickly determines which course of action is required and one of three stress hormones is secreted by your adrenal glands:

• Noradrenaline - flight

• Adrenaline - fight

• Cortisol - buckle down for a stressful situation

Each hormone has distinct impact on your body’s functioning, yet all three result in faster respiration (breathing), increased blood pressure and heart rate, and slowed digestion.

These stress hormones are secreted not only in life-threatening situations, but also during everyday activities such as running, playing with the kids, doing yardwork, driving your car, playing sports, reading emails, calling an angry customer, giving a presentation at work, and walking into your manager’s office for your annual performance evaluation.

It’s also worth noting that the uncomfortable feelings you experience during periods of acute stress, anxiety, and panic are caused by the circulation of these three stress hormones in your body.

Your Parasympathetic Nervous System

On the other end of the spectrum, your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) prepares your body to relax and rejuvenate. Breathing slows, blood pressure and heart rate decrease, and digestion increases—when your PNS is activated, your body basically undoes the work of the SNS and returns to state of balance and healing.

Sleep is the best example of the rest/digest state at work, but the PNS is also activated during other daily activities such as reading, relaxing, daydreaming, having easy conversation with a good friend, getting a massage or spa treatment, cuddling with an intimate partner, meditation, and more.

The Vagus Nerve

Extending down from your brain to your heart, lungs, liver, and gut is an important nerve called the Vagus (‘wandering’) nerve. This nerve is constantly shuttling information back-and-forth between your brain and major organs and serves also to coordinate the function of these organs (including digestion, heart rate, blood rate, respiratory rate, sweating, coughing, gag reflex, and more).

Within your nervous system, the Vagus nerve plays the role of air-traffic control—it’s constantly scanning your environment for threats, and when it perceives a threat (or the end of a threat) it’s responsible for activating your SNS and PNS.

It’s important to note that breathing is one of the key bodily functions under control of the Vagus nerve. As I’ll discuss in the Mindful Breathing section, because your breath can be brought under conscious control, breathwork is an effective tool for influencing the Vagus nerve and activating the PNS.

Vagal Tone

Vagal ‘tone’ is a measure of how well the Vagus nerve is working. Good vagal tone indicates that your body is able to quickly relax after a stress response—in other words, your body more quickly activates the PNS and returns to a rest/digest state after a stressor has activated your SNS.

Vagal tone can be measured indirectly by monitoring your heart rate during inhalation and exhalation. Interestingly, your Vagus nerve increases heart rate during inhalation (to maximize oxygen uptake) and decreases heart rate during exhalation. Vagal tone is thus determined by looking at the variability of your heartrate during inhalation and exhalation.

However, for the purposes of this article, the concept of vagal tone as being a measure of how efficiently the body can shift back into a rest/digest state after a stress event has triggered the SNS—and the fact that you can improve your vagal tone with specific practices—is what is important, not how it is measured.

Restoring a Sense of Calm

Understanding your feelings of stress and anxiety in terms of your body’s stress response (SNS/PNS), the effects of circulating stress hormones (noradrenaline, adrenaline, and cortisol), and the healthy functioning of your Vagus nerve (vagal tone) is helpful for a number of reasons:

• It helps to de-personalize your experience—thoughts such as “I’m stressed” or “I’m anxious” can be overwhelming as you begin to view your entire lived experience in terms of the uncomfortable feelings you associate with these emotional states. Having a basic understanding of the biochemistry involved in your stress response allows you to see your situation more objectively.

• It encourages experimentation with practices that support PNS activation, both to provide relief from acute episodes of stress and anxiety as well as to improve vagal tone.

Setting Expectations

Stress is inevitable and a life without stress would be a life without challenge or growth. Your goal then should not be elimination of stress from your life, but rather:

• activation of your SNS only when it is helpful and beneficial for dealing with your current situation, and

• healthy vagal tone, or the efficiency at which your body returns to a rest/digest state after a stress response has been activated.

The good news is that there are many techniques for activating your PNS and for improving vagal tone, and that the calming effects of these practices can be felt within minutes.

The other good news is that you can identify and eliminate unnecessary triggers that activate your SNS and cause a stress response. This work is beyond the scope of this article, however I provide more information in my article What is causing my anxiety?

Now, with all of that science behind us, let’s move on to some practices that will help your body calm down and make you feel more centered.

2.

Mindful Breathing

As mentioned earlier, breathing is one of the bodily functions controlled by the Vagus nerve. Breathing is unique in that it can also be controlled consciously (voluntarily) by YOU whenever you choose to take the wheel and drive.

This is a remarkable feature of your body, as it provides a back-gate to activating your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).

Your rate of breathing slows when your PNS is activated and your body shifts into the rest/digest state, and it turns out that this relationship works both ways—by slowing your breathing intentionally, you will activate your PNS.

This makes breathwork a potent tool for regulating your stress response and one that is available to you wherever you are and whenever you need it.

5 Breaths Per Minute

There is a sweet spot for breathing where a lot of things start to change inside the body and the PNS gets activated and this sweet spot occurs when your breathing slows to approx. 5 breaths per minute (i.e., 5 seconds each inhale and 5 seconds each exhale).

As a point of comparison, your average breath rate is approx. 20 breaths per minute (i.e., 1.5 seconds each inhale and 1.5 seconds each exhale).

Mindful breathing, then, is the practice of tuning in to your breath, deepening your breathing to extend fully into your diaphragm (not just the ribs and upper chest), relaxing, and consciously slowing your breath down, bit-by-bit, until you achieve a 10 second inhale/exhale cycle, and then remaining there for a period of time.

As you experiment with these breathing exercises you will discover that you can’t force yourself to quickly slow down your breathing—it can take some time, especially if you are starting ina stressed, agitated, or anxious state. But with time your breath will slow and your body will shift into the rest/digest state.

It’s worth noting that the more you practice mindful breathing and improve your vagal tone, the faster your body will be able to calm and achieve a slower breath rate.

Note: There will be times where your body and mind are simply too agitated to sit quietly and focus on mindful breathing. This is normal and not something to be worried about. Some of the other techniques I discuss may work more effectively in these moments.

Additionally, I encourage you to practice mindful breathing as a regular practice and not only in response to feeling stressed or anxious. This will improve your vagal tone and make it easier and more effective to tap into your breath to support a calm nervous system in those moments when you need it.

Basic Mindful Breathing Exercise

Thicht Naht Hanh, a famous Buddhist meditation teacher and author of numerous books, shares several mindful breathing practices that have been practiced by Buddhist monks for thousands of years on YouTube. You can watch that video or read my simplified instructions below:

Preparation

• You can perform these breathing exercises anywhere, for as long or as short a time as you need.

• At first you may only be comfortable doing these exercises for several minutes, however I recommending working up to at least 20 minutes of mindful breathing as a dedicated practice. This provides sufficient time for you to slow your breath and achieve PNS activation, and to feel the difference between your normal state and being in a parasympathetic state.

• As you will see in the aforementioned video, every 30 minutes a chime rings and Thicht Naht Hanh and the other monks take 3 mindful breaths to re-center. I find these shorter, more frequent practices are most beneficial when anchored by a longer, dedicated practice.

• If you will be practicing mindful breathing at home, I recommend finding a comfortable spot that is free from distracting sounds and where you won’t be interrupted. You can also lie down on the floor, bed, or yoga mat if you prefer, though this may increase the chances of falling asleep.

• Set a timer for 20 minutes (or your desired amount of time) so you will know when your practice has ended. You can always continue after your timer goes off if you want to extend your practice.

Phase 1: Aware of Inbreath/Outbreath

• Once you get comfortable, close your eyes and bring your focus inwards to your breath. Follow your breath as it moves in and out of your nose (mouth closed), paying attention to the initial rate of your breathing.

• As you continue to inhale/exhale, hear the words “I am breathing in” and “I am breathing out” with each breath. Feel free to modify these words to suit your preference (i.e., “in” and “out” or “breathing in” and “breathing out”, etc.)

• Stay with your breath doing just this for several minutes, occasionally noting the duration of your inhale and exhale.

Phase 2: Follow Inbreath/Outbreath

• After several minutes (or whatever length of time feels right), shift your focus from just noticing the inbreath/outbreath to now noticing the full duration of each inhale and exhale.

• I find it helpful to hear the words “in in in in in…” and “out out out out out…” slowly repeated as each breath moves in and moves out.

• As you start to pay attention to the duration of your breath you’ll find that it naturally leads to deeper breathing and a slower rate of breathing.

• A technique that helps to shift your breath out of your upper/mid chest and down into your diaphragm (allowing you to take deeper breaths) is to imagine each breath coming in through your nose, moving down through your chest, through your belly, and expanding your belly like a balloon until you feel this expansion down at your pelvis. Then, as you exhale, imagine your breath traveling up your spine, through your neck, into your head, and out the top of your head. This visualization not only helps to keep the mind from wandering, but also moves your breath down to where it can get deeper and slower.

• From time to time you may want to replace “in in in in in…” and “out out out out out…” with counting (“1…2…3…4…5…”) to gauge your rate of breathing. If each inbreath and outbreath take 5 seconds to complete, you’ve achieved the goal of 5 breaths per minute (10 seconds per breath cycle). If not, don’t worry or try to force your breath slower, continue to stick with the mindful breathing practice and your breath will eventually slow.

Phase 3: Aware of Body

• After several minutes (or whatever length of time feels right), shift your focus from noticing the duration of each inbreath/outbreath to now noticing your body.

• During each inhale start to notice the feeling at your nostrils as the breath draws in. Notice the feeling of your lower belly as it begins to expand and fill with air. Feel your chest expand and rise and see if you can notice the sensation of your clothing moving slightly against your skin. Notice the bones that are supporting your body against the chair (or floor/bed/mat if you’re lying down) and feel the weight of your body for a moment. Notice the feeling of your hair on your head. Tune in to sensations that normally pass unnoticed.

• As you begin to exhale, feel the entire process reverse—notice your upper chest drop and your belly start to constrict as the breath moves out of your body. Continue to notice your belly as it pulls to exhaust the breath until you find the bottom of your breath.

• If you’re familiar with Ujjayi breathing from yoga, you may find it helpful to incorporate some gentle sound with each exhale, as this tends to further lengthen your exhale.

• You may also find it helpful to check in with various parts of your body to see how it’s feeling in this moment. How does your back and spine feel? Your neck? Your shoulders? How does your face feel—is it relaxed? What about your mouth—where is your tongue right now? Use each breath cycle as an opportunity to really check in with your body to see how it feels.

Phase 4: Calm the Body

• As you check in with the various parts of your body, you may notice that you have pain or are holding tension in certain places. Pick one of these places and imagine your inbreath bringing ease and comfort to this area, and then imagine any tension or pain leaving this area with the outbreath.

• Continue to breathe in and out of each area until you notice the pain has reduced or the tension has dissolved, and then move to another area of the body.

• If you don’t notice pain or tension anywhere in your body, you can still breathe in and out of those areas which you would like to support and want to remain healthy. You can breath into your spine, your neck, your heart, or anywhere else that feels right.

At this point, you should notice that your breathing has slowed and become a lot deeper. Your body and mind may feel calm and peaceful, and your stress level diminished.

This is what it feels like when your PNS is activated and your body moves into a state of relaxation. If you can, take a few minutes to savor this mental and physical state before picking up your phone or jumping back into your day.

From time to time, take a moment to reflect back on what you just experienced and anything you may have learned, and as you transition back into your daily responsibilities see if you notice any changes to how you respond to events and common stressors.

There is no right or wrong way to practice mindful breathing, and with continued practice you will discover the duration, location, position, and specifics that work best for you.

This particular breathing practice is the foundation of my daily meditation practice and takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.

3.

Legs Up The Wall

If you enjoy mindful breathing and want to find even deeper relaxation, Legs Up The Wall (a common yoga pose) is a great way to support the body during your practice.

How to do it

There are many articles describing how to do this pose (here, here, and here), but what you are essentially doing is lying on your back, butt against the wall, with your legs extended straight up. When you are in this pose correctly you should be looking up at your toes.

If putting your legs straight up the wall is difficult, you can achieve similar benefits by lying on the ground, bending your knees to 90 degrees, and resting the lower half of your legs on a padded chair.

Benefits

Inverted postures (where your head is level with or below your heart and hips) help to activate your body’s PNS, which is why many people find Legs Up The Wall pose to be inherently calming and relaxing.

Combining this pose with your mindful breathing practice is a powerful technique for shifting your body back into the rest/digest state because both your posture and your breathing are sending signals to your body to relax.

You may find that it is easier to do a longer mindful breathing session when in Legs Up The Wall pose (as compared to sitting) because the body is in a more supported position.

I recommend staying in Legs Up The Wall pose for at least 10 minutes to get the maximum benefits of this posture.

Enhancements

Two other techniques that stimulate the Vagus nerve and help to activate the PNS and can be easily combined with Legs Up The Wall pose are touch and sound. You can experiment with either (or both) of these to see if they help shift your body into a relaxed state.

Touch

• Place one or both hands on your belly and notice your belly moving up and down with each inhale/exhale.

• Alternatively, you can place one or both hands over your heart. You may notice the subtle sensation of your heart beating or the warmth between your chest and your hand.

• A gentle, loving touch from another person often softens our heart and sends signals of safety and connection—your own touch is no different and provides these same benefits.

Sound

• If you feel comfortable doing so, you can explore starting your mindful breathing practice with several loud, audible “HAAAAAA….” sounds during your exhale. Take the sound you make when you sigh but exaggerate it, making it louder and longer. Feel the sound reverberate in your chest and imagine stress leaving your body as you exhale.

4.

Journaling

Journaling is a very effective technique for exploring your emotions. There is no right or wrong way to journal, however there are some specific approaches you can take that will enhance the effectiveness of this activity.

The ABC Technique for refuting irrational thoughts

As explained by Dr. Harry Barry in his books on stress and anxiety, one of the primary benefits of journaling is that it shifts the conversation out of your head (where your emotional brain tends to run rampant) and onto paper (where your logical pre-frontal cortex can get involved and more objectively question the conclusions your emotional brain has arrived at).

This practice of capturing your mental dialogue, putting it on paper, and then using your logical/rational brain to explore, analyze, and often refute unhelpful and irrational thoughts is a tremendously powerful technique. If you’re familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), you’re probably already familiar with the ABC framework used by Dr. Harry Barry and the benefits it offers.

The good news is that anyone can learn to use this technique and it doesn’t require the expert guidance of a trained therapist. Also, that Dr. Harry Barry’s books, which explain this technique in detail and share numerous examples of how it was applied with his patients, are available on Kindle for dirt cheap (Anxiety & Panic for $1.99 and Emotional Resilience for $3.99 as of this writing).

Note: I am a huge fan of therapy and recommend it to just about everyone as a way of supporting their personal growth and healthy development. My own experience with therapy has been tremendously positive and involved varied approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, internal family systems, move towards, and brainspotting.

So often we get caught looking at external sources of stress in our life, when in reality it is our internal dialogue that triggers our body’s stress response, leading to long-term chronic stress, anxiety, and panic. As I briefly describe in my story, unhelpful and irrational thoughts were ultimately the root cause of my own stress and anxiety, and it was this ABC approach described by Dr. Harry Barry that allowed me to turn the corner and start to regain my mental and physical health after all those years of suffering.

I explore this topic more deeply in my article What is causing my anxiety?

Addressing Rumination

When you’re feeling agitated does your mind also tend to race?

Thoughts whizz by at 100mph, veering left, veering right… and try as you might, you can’t seem to slow them down or change the channel. Your mind is compulsively fixated on a particular topic, thought, or experience and you want to set it aside, but you can’t.

This is one of the reasons rumination feels so uncomfortable—it feels like we’re not in control, like somehow our thoughts are stronger than our willpower.

But your emotional brain is powerful for a reason—it’s wired and motivated to keep you safe and alive; to act quickly and decisively, and for this reason it has veto power over other, more evolved (and logical) parts of your brain which require time to analyze and come to a conclusion.

And this, in essence, is the crux of rumination:

• A situation or event arises in your mind that causes your body to perceive a threat (real or imagined)

• Your body’s stress response is triggered and your adrenal glands secrete stress hormones

• Control of your thoughts shift away from the pre-frontal cortex (logical brain) and to the limbic system (emotional brain)

• With your limbic system in charge, you continue to have negative (potentially irrational) thoughts about the situation/event

• These thoughts continue to provoke your stress response and lead to additional secretion of stress hormones

Before long you find yourself stuck in a negative feedback loop that is difficult to get out of (i.e., ruminating).

This is why journaling—which helps to shift your thinking out of your emotional brain and back into your logical brain—can be so helpful with interrupting this cycle of ruminating thoughts.

Shifting back into organized, logical thought from compulsive, emotional thought requires reactivating your pre-frontal cortex. And if you haven’t already, you’ll soon discover that there’s a tremendous difference between having a conversation in your head and having a written conversation with yourself on paper.

The very act of writing down your thoughts as they arise has a slowing effect on your mind; your hands needs time to write and your thoughts tend to slow down as a result of this.

Additionally, when your thoughts are racing, you don’t take time to analyze these thoughts as they occur; every thought is taken at face value and used to somehow justify the next thought. However, when you write your thoughts down, you are also reading what you write and this recruits a different part of your brain that also evaluates what it’s reading.

You may find that you naturally pause as you’re writing, stopping to consider what you just wrote, and have some additional thoughts about it. You may even look at some of what you’ve written and be thinking to yourself “Well that seems a little extreme…”

As I’ll discuss in the next section on journaling prompts, another benefit of capturing your internal dialogue is that you can circle back with questions to analyze specific thoughts that came up. This process of seeking to understand where something came from, what it really means, and having curiosity around it, will help to re-engage your logical brain.

Your emotions are messengers of met and unmet needs. Knowing and accepting this encourages us to get curious about negative emotions—What’s really going on here? What need of mine isn’t getting met? Why do I have this particular need? What demands am I making (possibly irrational or even impossible) to ensure my need is met, that might be contributing to this negative feeling?

Additional information about this topic can be found in my article What is causing my anxiety?

Prompts

For some people journaling can feel awkward and forced. They wonder: “What should I write about?”

If you are one of these people, you may find that creating some structure in your journaling session is useful and helps get your thoughts flowing.

Think of journaling as having an intimate conversation with yourself. And just as you would engage in a series of questions and answers with a close friend, you can structure your journaling session around some open-ended questions to yourself:

• What am I feeling right now?

• Why do I think I’m feeling this way? What am I needing?

• What thoughts keep coming up around this?

• What judgements/assumptions am I making about this?

• What is the worst-case scenario? What is most likely to happen?

• What good might come from this?

• Where might the other person be coming from on this?

• What’s a totally different perspective I could have on this?

• How might someone else respond to this?

• What are my real concerns with this?

If you are new to journaling and it still feels awkward, you might start with a couple prompts that get you focused on why you’re journaling and what you might get out of doing it:

• What good might come from this?

• Why is it important to me that I do this?

• What’s something that felt awkward when I first started it, but now feels easy and natural?

Or if you find that sometimes you’re in a down mood when you want to journal, but this negatively impacts your session, you might start with a couple prompts that help shift your mental state into a more positive mood:

• What was the best thing that happened in the last 24 hours?

• What are some strengths I used today and how did they help me navigate that situation?

• If my best friend was feeling this way, what would I tell them right now?

• What is a challenging situation that I didn’t appreciate at the time, but now am thankful it happened?

And finally, if you find that journaling is causing you to work through difficult or uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, you can add prompts to the end of your session that bring you back into a positive emotional state:

• What are 3 things I’m grateful for today?

• How is life today better than it was a year ago?

• What strengths am I using in working through this difficult period?

• What positive feedback have I received from others recently?

• What is something I’m looking forward to in the coming month?

Over time, you will identify a handful of prompts that work well for your and help you to have more productive journaling sessions.

Appreciative Inquiry

When you explore an issue, you have a choice whether to focus on the positive or the negative aspects of that issue and your choice will have a significant impact on your mental state and mood as a result of your exploration.

• Focusing on the negative (i.e., the problems) tends to bring your energy down, decreases creativity, activates your defense mechanisms, and causes you to feel worse than you did before you explored the issue.

• Focusing on the positive, however, can increase your energy, enhances your creativity, makes you feel hopeful and optimistic, and leaves you feeling better than you did before exploring the issue.

Appreciative inquiry, then, is an approach for intentionally framing questions with an eye towards the positive in order to evoke positive emotions and the associated benefits.

Below are some examples of how you might explore an issue using appreciative inquiry:

Issue #1: Today I was feeling particularly anxious and had a panic attack at work.

• What am I learning about my triggers for anxiety and panic?

• What practices are most effective at helping me calm down and find balance when this happens?

• What new skills am I learning as a result of my anxiety?

Issue #2: I just received my annual performance review and it wasn’t as good as I had hoped.

• What might be true in my manager’s appraisal of my performance?

• How can I harness my desire to excel to do things differently this next month?

• When else in my life have I responded to not meeting expectations with renewed effort? How did that go?

• What are the opportunities here?

• How might I get more frequent feedback from my manager moving forward?

Issue #3: Today when I got home from work I promptly lost my temper with my kids.

• What is this telling me about how much stress I’m really feeling?

• What could I do to better transition from work to home?

• What do my kids most need from me when I get home after a day at the office?

• How would I ideally greet my kids when I get home from work? How does this support being the type of father I want to be?

As you can see from these three examples, appreciative inquiry helps frame a situation in terms of what you can learn or do differently moving forward.

It may take a bit of practice at first—both to remember that you have the choice of using appreciative inquiry, and then to formulate questions that have a positive direction—but this is a very valuable tool that you can integrate with your journaling practice as you identify prompts to help make your sessions more productive.

Making Hard Decisions (Decisional Balance)

Journaling is also a powerful tool for helping you sort through difficult choices when the ‘best’ course of action doesn’t seem clear.

When faced with multiple choices—especially when none stands out as a ‘clear winner’—we often feel paralyzed and hesitant to make any decision at all. This applies not only to large, life-changing decisions, but also the small, daily decisions that decorate our working and personal lives.

Consider the following scenarios:

• Your manager said something that you felt was unfair and you’re wondering whether or not to address the issue with him/her.

• You’re feeling disconnected emotionally in your marriage and want to recommend couples counseling but aren’t sure how your partner will respond.

• You’ve received a fantastic job offer from a competitor but it will require moving your family across the country.

• You have concerns about the type of friends your child is spending time with, but aren’t sure how they will respond to hearing your concerns.

• You would really like to start going to the gym after work, but know this will cut into family time, delay dinner, and put more responsibility on your partner, and you’re not sure how they will respond.

These are all ‘hard’ decisions because there is no clear best choice. Any choice (including the decision to do nothing) comes with its own unique set of benefits and drawbacks, which makes making a decision all the more difficult.

As Ruth Chang illuminates in this TED Talk, hard choices are hard because often either course of action is ‘on par’ with one another—in other words, there are good reasons for/against either course of action (though the nature of the pros and cons may be different) and neither stands out as a ‘best’ option.

Consider the first example about addressing the unfair comment with your manager:

Pros of addressing your manager

• If you say something, you may hope that your manager sees their error, apologizes, and makes a commitment to righting the wrong or paying more attention to their comments in the future

• You will feel as though you stood up for yourself

Cons of addressing your manager

• You worry you might be labeled a ‘complainer’

• Or that your manager may dismiss your feelings and encourage you to ‘toughen up’

Pros of not addressing your manager

• You won’t have to worry about how your manager might respond

• You won’t have to have this uncomfortable meeting with your manager

• You may get to feel morally superior to your boss by being the ‘bigger person’ in this situation by not making an issue of it

Cons of not addressing your manager

• You may continue to harbor ill feelings towards your manager for weeks or month, and these feelings may impact how you relate to your manager

• You may process your feelings by gossiping with coworkers about how insensitive your manager is, further risking your relationship with your manager

As you can see, both options (speaking to your manager or not) have pros and cons, and neither choice is a clear winner. This is a hard problem.

Ruth Chang’s genius is her suggestion to then have us ask: “What type of person am I?”

Asking this question allows us to bring our values and sense of identity into play, potentially making the most appropriate decision more clear.

Returning to our example, we can now view our choices in terms of the type of person we view ourselves to be:

• Am I the type of person that avoids conflict, harbors ill feelings against other people, gossips about their manager, and likes to feel morally superior?

• Or am I the type of person that stands up for myself, addresses unfair comments, and seeks reconciliation, even if it means some people may view my actions as ‘complaining’?

Framed this way, it should be much easier for you to decide on what course of action to take based on the type of person you are or the type of person you want to become.

Because this is a very analytical, logical process, it lends itself quite well to journaling. If you’re not accustomed to sitting down with pen and paper to analyze tough decisions, I encourage you to give this a try and see how it works for you.

One final note, it can be tremendously helpful to engage other people (friends, colleagues, your partner, your manager, etc.) in your analysis of pros/cons to help identify any benefits/drawbacks that you may have missed. Often, bringing in additional perspectives provides much-needed clarity around difficult choices.

Burn Baby Burn (Sensitive Topics)

There will be times when you need to journal about a sensitive topic and you become self-conscious about the fact that your thoughts and feelings could be discovered by someone else.

There is magic in letting these emotionally charged issues out and exploring them with pen and paper, so in these situations I encourage you to be bold and do your journaling anyway, and then to burn the evidence!

You may even find that the act of burning your words helps to release this issue from your body and mind and allows you to move on with less attachment.

If you’ve never done this before, I encourage you to try it—you may get a kick out of it!

(Just be sure not to catch your house or a forest on fire! 🔥)

5.

Body Scan

A body scan is a meditation that promotes deep relaxation throughout the body and activates the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).

It is possible to guide yourself through a body scan, however recordings lasting 20 - 45 minutes in duration are widely available on YouTube, Insight Timer and elsewhere online.

How to do it

Body scans are typically performed lying down on the floor (or on a bed). Find a quiet, comfortable location where you aren’t likely to be disturbed. It can be helpful to use headphones (if they are comfortable) to block out additional noise and distractions.

Most body scan guided meditations begin by directing your attention to your toes or the bottoms of your feet. You will breathe into and out of these areas and notice any sensations that might be present.

After several breath cycles, you will shift your attention up the body to your ankle, where you will again breathe into and out of this area and notice any sensations that might be present. As you go along, you might envision any stress, pain, or tension in this particular area dissolving away and leaving your body with your exhale.

From your ankle you will move up to your calf, then to your knee, then to the front of your upper leg (quadriceps), then to the back of your upper leg (hamstring), etc. eventually making your way through the entire body—toes to fingertips to top of the head.

Body scan meditations will differ slightly in the specific body parts they focus on and the guidance provided, however the intent and general process are the same: to relax the body, dissolve tension, and promote a state of relaxation.

PNS Activation

As previously discussed, activating your PNS shifts your body out of the fight/flight stress response and back into a rest/digest state.

Mindful breathing is a wonderful practice for PNS activation as it is always available, requires no tools or supplies, and can be done anywhere, however—especially when first practicing mindful breathing—it may be difficult to sit still and breathe for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

Body scans—because they are done lying down and often make use of a guided meditation—lend themselves to longer periods of practice. When your body has been in a state of chronic stress for a long time (months or years), it can be beneficial to engage in longer periods of PNS activation during your waking hours.

In my last year of work I noticed that my first thoughts of the day were about work (sometimes before even opening my eyes!) as were my final thoughts before sleep, and it was no secret that much of my day was filled with frustration and concern about work issues.

When I started exploring PNS activation as a way of calming my body I made a commitment to doing approximately 1 hour of body scan and/or meditation each day. This was a big commitment, but there were three factors driving my interest:

• I really enjoyed how I felt during and after each session

• I felt like I owed it to my body to be awake and in a non-stressed state; I needed to re-connect with what being calm, balanced, and present felt like

• I had suffered for years with digestive issues and knew that PNS activation was correlated with increased digestion; I wanted to know if spending more time in a relaxed state during the day could reduce my symptoms and improve the way I felt

Body Awareness leads to Emotional Awareness

Emotions are often felt in the body.

While it would be difficult to miss noticing the sensations of extreme anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, or surprise, it is easy to miss subtle presentations of these emotions in your body.

Body scans will improve your body awareness by re-establishing a connection with every part of your body; greater body awareness will then naturally make you more sensitive to noticing tension, pain, or other sensations occurring in your body, which may indicate an emotional response.

Why is this important? Because emotions are influence our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors, even when they are unconscious. And emotional responses are often unconscious, sitting just below our awareness, yet causing us to act and react in energized and often unhelpful ways.

As you can see from the Emotion-Sensation Wheel below, emotions are felt on a broad spectrum of intensity.

It’s these subtle presentations of emotions (the ones that often go unnoticed) that we can learn to connect with by becoming more sensitive to what’s going on in our body.

Emotions are energy in motion.

You can take advantage of this fact to reverse-engineer an understanding of what’s going on inside of you.

Viewing your bodily sensations as messengers of (un)conscious emotions, you can respond by asking: "What’s really going on here?”

• When you get the cold sweats before meeting your boss to discuss your performance review…What’s really going on here?

• When you start trembling before giving a status report to senior leaders…What’s really going on here?

• When you notice yourself rubbing your forehead or temples when one of your employees is talking…What’s really going on here?

• When you leave the office at the end of the day feeling exhausted and heavy…What’s really going on here?

• When you notice that you were really sensitive to feedback about your idea…What’s really going on here?

If you can tie your bodily sensations back to an underlying emotional response, you suddenly gain perspective on your underlying needs, which puts you in a position of having a much more productive conversation around your needs, whether those needs are rational or irrational, and how best to meet those needs.

For example, in the first example above, what are your cold sweats telling you? What’s really going on here?

The first word that comes to mind might be ‘nervous’, but nervous isn’t a core emotion—we need to explore this further.

• Maybe you’re feeling insecure because you haven’t received feedback throughout the year and you know there might be some surprises today.

• Maybe you’re feeling scared because you’ve goofed on a couple projects this year and believe it’s going to catch up with you today in a less than satisfactory performance review.

• Maybe you feel inferior because your boss is a dominating personality and you don’t feel comfortable standing up for yourself, which has follow-on feelings of disappointment in yourself.

If you use a feelings wheel, you’ll see that underlying these feelings are core emotions including fear, anger, and disgust, and it’s these emotions that are causing your cold sweats.

The beauty (and value) in identifying core emotions is that each one has a concrete meaning and corresponding need, as shown in the table below:

Armed with this information, you can explore each emotion and see if there’s anything you can do to address the underlying need in advance of meeting with your boss.

Fear (need): to feel safe; increase sense of safety. Grounding techniques.

• Recognizing how exposed you feel in this moment for not having received or asked for feedback during the course of the year, you might resolve to acknowledge how you’re feeling with your boss and discuss options for getting more frequent feedback. This may not help with your feelings today, but you can start to get ahead of feeling this way again next year.

• Recognizing how your project goof-ups seem to be looming large and causing you anxiety in this moment, you might reflect on why you didn’t place more priority and effort in these projects at the time. What can you take responsibility for? What can do you do differently moving forward to avoid repeat situations? If there were factors beyond your control that impacted your performance, did you address those at the time with your boss or have you saved them for today with plans of contesting your boss’ comments and ratings? How might you be more proactive in these situations in the future?

Anger (need): to set a boundary, defend. Assertiveness.

• Recognizing that it’s difficult for you to speak up for yourself around your boss, you realize that you’re faced with a choice: keep my mouth shut and avoid conflict but feel disgusted with myself, or lean into the discomfort of speaking up and find some peace in the fact that I expressed myself. Knowing the latter option is uncomfortable for you, how might you learn to get better at asserting yourself? You might read some articles online, watch a video, read a book, or seek counsel from a colleague whose confidence and candor inspire you.

Disgust (need): to feel safe, expel, keep at a distance.

• Recognizing that feeling disappointed in yourself only serves to make you feel worse about the situation, you might question why you hold a high standard for being able to confront your dominating boss when you’ve never actually trained or learned how to assert yourself. You might realize that you don’t assert yourself in a variety of other situations and this tendency isn’t specific to your boss or issues at work. Maybe you resolve to take some assertiveness training through work or to read a book on the topic at home.

Without this detailed exploration of your feelings, underlying emotions, and corresponding needs, you risk walking into this situation feeling emotionally activated (insecure, scared, inferior) and having an emotional response to your manager’s appraisal. You might shut down, smolder inside, and say nothing or seek to defend yourself and blame your performance on various extenuating circumstances—neither would be a productive, helpful response, nor would these responses help prepare you for success in the coming year.

I hope this example has been helpful in illustrating how awareness of your bodily sensations can help to identify feelings, underlying emotions, emotional needs, and productive responses your situation.

Consider for a moment how different the experience of this performance appraisal with your boss would be if you noticed your cold sweats and responded by drinking another cup of coffee and distractedly answering emails until it was time to meet, versus finding a quiet room and taking 15 minutes to explore your feelings, needs, and any helpful actions you could take—perhaps even today in the hour before your meeting.

Bonus: As you become more skilled at identifying bodily sensations that are signaling feelings and emotions in yourself, you will naturally become more sensitive to the signs of unexpressed feelings and emotions in others. Most of us struggle to connect the dots between what’s going on in our body and what’s going on in our heart and benefit greatly from speaking with others who can help to bridge this gap and help us to respond to emotions in a more productive, healthy manner.

6.

Yin Yoga

Last (but certainly not least) is one of my favorite activities for nourishing the nervous system: yin yoga.

If you’re not familiar with yin yoga (sometimes also called ‘restorative’ yoga), I encourage you to set aside any mental images you have of a room filled with athletic individuals wearing Lululemon, heated studios, heavy breathing, and challenging balance poses like Tree or Warrior 3.

A yin yoga class is much more reminiscent of a room full of preschoolers taking a nap with pillows!

There are several different branches of yoga with two of the main ones being Hatha yoga and Yin yoga:

• Hatha yoga is what most people think of when they think of a yoga class. These classes focus on movement and take students through a sequence of poses with the goal of marrying breath and movement to calming the mind. Vinyasa, Flow, Power, Bikram, Hot, Ashtanga…all all derivations of Hatha yoga.

• Yin yoga, on the other hand, is about relaxing and being. These classes take students through a series of gentle stretches aimed at not only releasing tension in the muscles, but also in the connective tissues surrounding the muscles (i.e., tendons, ligaments, fascia). Stretches are typically performed while seated, kneeling, or lying down and props (padded bolsters, blankets, straps, and yoga blocks) are used to support the body in finding a relaxed and supported position for each stretch.

While there are numerous physical benefits to doing yin yoga (which you can read about here and here), I love this practice for the calming effect it has on the nervous system.

Our physical environment, social norms, and work culture encourages us to be on 24/7. From the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, we are faced with distractions, marketing, advertisements, and unsolicited commentary on our appearance, choices, behaviors, and values.

We literally walk around all day carrying our work responsibilities with us in our pockets (i.e., phones).

All this stimulus tends to trigger our sympathetic nervous system (stress response) repeatedly throughout the day.

The fact that this seems ‘normal’ is an indication that we’ve adapted ourselves to the idea that life is stressful and that most waking hours will be spent doing (or thinking about doing) things that life demands of us.

We rarely, if ever, hit pause and take a moment to relax and release the accumulated tension of the day.

This is where yin yoga comes in.

Yin and Yang

‘Yang’ is the energy of action and doing, whereas ‘yin’ is the energy of being and feeling. Both are important and each energy complements and balances the other, creating a unified whole.

For many people, their waking hours are defined entirely by ‘yang’ energy—the energy of doing, going, achieving, performing, pushing, and persisting in the face of challenges.

The ‘normal’ workday begins with imbibing some caffeinated beverage, checking the phone for news, emails, or social media updates, an avalanche of thoughts about everything that needs to be done today, and then ‘getting to it’ as if there was no time to waste. At the end of the night, people then collapse into bed eager for sleep—the only respite they have from their constant doing and thinking.

Not only is this way of living exhausting, it’s also terribly damaging to your physical health. Our bodies weren’t designed to be in a constant state of low-grade stress day after day.

Yin yoga—like all the other activities mentioned in this article—is yet another way of introducing periods of rest and rejuvenation into your day and for exploring what it means to be during your waking hours, as opposed to the compulsive desire to do.

Because classes tend to last 60 minutes, even the most wired-for-action individuals will experience activation of their PNS and can enjoy the calm, grounded mental state that follows.

If yin yoga classes are available in your area and you are challenged with high levels of stress and anxiety, I encourage you to do as many classes as your schedule allows. Not only are the classes themselves highly enjoyable, but you will also benefit from talking with others in your class about what they notice and enjoy as benefits of this practice.

Conclusion

The activities described in this article can help to calm your body by activating your parasympathetic nervous system and shift you into a calmer, more grounded, more balanced state of being.

When you are experiencing acute stress and anxiety these activities can be used like Ibuprofen, providing in-the-moment symptomatic relief. You don’t need to feel guilty about this—despite our best efforts, life is inherently stressful and coping is a natural response to stress.

Endeavoring to replace your established coping tools (e.g., drinking, Netflix, social media, shopping, etc.) with healthier alternatives not only provides greater relief, but will also do wonders for restoring your body’s natural ability to be resilient in the face of daily stressors.

You may also find that, after you’ve experimented with these activities for a while and become familiar with how you feel when your parasympathetic nervous system is activated, you become more interested understanding how you can spend more of your waking hours in this relaxed mode of being.

In other words, your focus may evolve from practicing these techniques not only when you’re experiencing moments of acute stress and anxiety to practicing them proactively as a form of self-care to support personal growth and emotional resilience. What was once your Ibuprofen now becomes a multivitamin, strengthening your body in advance of challenges to come.

So often we are presented with questions about externalities, such as “What do you want to do for work?”, “What are your goals?”, “What do you want to accomplish with your life?”, and “What type of person do you want to become?”

Engaging with this type of work—work to improve your inner state through mindfulness, movement, and meditation—leads you to a different type of question entirely, one that may never have been asked of you before: “How do you want to be?”

This is a powerful question and your answer will inform the environments, relationships, and activities that support you becoming the best version of yourself, and those that don’t.