Deep breathing exercises can be tremendously helpful for getting your sympathetic nervous system unstuck. Here is a simple one. Place one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest. Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose for the count of four, hold your breath for the count of seven, and blow out through your mouth to the count of eight. Repeat for at least five minutes or until the anxiety passes.
To someone struggling with anxiety, suggesting that they should breathe deeply can seem remarkably stupid and banal, but it turns out there is solid science behind it. Recent research by scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine found a small patch of 175 nerves, deep in the brainstem, that act as an emotional pacemaker. These nerves monitor how quickly you are breathing and relay that information to a different part of the brain that monitors your state of mind. It turns out that you can trick these nerves into thinking that you are calmer than you actually feel by intentionally breathing deeply and slowing down your respiration rate. Although you might be tempted to dismiss the power of simple suggestions like “take a deep breath” for relieving anxiety, science shows you may be missing out if you do.
Reflective prayer (as opposed to “Help! God, save me!”) is also very helpful to “tap the brake” and slow down your brain and body. We’ll discuss spiritual interventions for anxiety in more depth later, but a simple way to employ prayer is to close your eyes and intentionally recall the times God has been faithful to you or carried you through a difficult time. Take a moment to praise God for these things. Your heart won’t be in it at first, but that’s okay. It’s what Saint Paul called a “sacrifice of praise” (Heb 13:15), and it helps to remind you of the fact that if God has been present to you so many different times in the past, he isn’t going to fail you now. It also reminds you of all the other times you were sure your life was going to irreparably fall apart, but miraculously it didn’t.
Grounding is another simple way to “tap the break” on your slowdown nervous system. Grounding reconnects you with your body and the present moment instead of letting you fly away with your thoughts. Count five things you see, four things you hear, three sensations you are feeling in your body. Identify two people who care about you, and one simple thing you could do to feel even a tiny bit better right now (for instance: have a hot cup of tea, listen to your favorite music, do something you enjoy for a few moments). This technique works because anxiety wants your thoughts to race ahead to anticipate all possible future problems. Forcing yourself to re-focus on the present moment, especially at this level of detail, activates your para-sympathetic nervous system and slows the anxious brain’s tendency to race ahead.
Finally, reconnecting with others can be tremendously important. Go to your spouse or a good friend and ask them to give you a hug. Don’t be quick about it. Relax into the hug until you feel yourself exhaling the stress. Hugging actually syncs your heart rate to the other person and increases the presence of oxytocin, a powerful “calm down” hormone produced through interpersonal bonding.
Each of these simple exercises, alone or together, have been shown to have a powerful impact on the autonomic nervous system, causing it to let up on the gas and depress the brake and at the same time rapidly decelerate the stress response.
The problem is, most people think doing any of these things is nonsense. “How is breathing and getting a hug going to stop me from losing my job when I screw up my presentation? Don’t be an idiot!”
Remember, unless there is an immediate threat to your life or wellbeing, you should not be experiencing fear. If you are, something in your nervous system is misfiring. The more you ignore this simple biological fact and instead try to control all the outside factors that might be causing the anxiety, the more anxious and out of control you will feel. Because you are ignoring the real cause of your anxiety, the unnecessary or disproportionate triggering of your autonomic fear response, any attempts to “fix” the problem by trying to control your external world will simply backfire. First, remind yourself that having a legitimate concern about X does not mean that X is an imminent threat, and then refocus on getting this fear-threat system back under control. You will be able to consciously and intentionally restore a sense of peace and confidence.
At first, with any of these exercises, depending on the intensity of your experience and how long you have been suffering from anxiety, it might take up to fifteen to twenty minutes of concentrated effort to get yourself back under control. With consistent practice, however, you can reduce this time to mere seconds.
The point is, anxiety — unlike fear — is not a reaction to your environment. Anxiety may be triggered by context, but it is caused by a misfiring of the autonomic nervous system (the combined speed-up/slow-down nervous systems). Because of this, your best hope for reclaiming a sense of peace is to focus primarily on getting control of your body rather than your environment.
Step Three: Respond
The final step in the Relabel-Reattribute-Respond process is addressing the situation that triggered the misfiring of your fear-threat system. Again, just because your anxiety wasn’t strictly caused by something outside of you doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem to deal with. It’s just to say that the particular stressor shouldn’t be producing the kind of intense, fearful panic usually reserved for an imminent, physical threat.
Now that in step 2 you successfully reattributed your experience of anxiety as a misfiring of your fear-threat system and used several of the suggestions you read above to get your fear-threat system back under control, you’re ready to do something productive about the situation that inadvertently triggered the misfiring of your fear-threat system.
When you are stuck in an anxious response, you can’t effectively problem-solve. You can only react to a problem, which will probably cause you to do something impulsive that can only make things worse. But if you take the time to calm your body down, turn off your fear-based reactive brain, and turn on your thinking brain, you will be in a much better place to respond to the specific event that triggered your anxiety.
The key is “think small.” In fact, the smaller the better. You might not be able to identify the “one big solution” to the problem of your un-supportive marriage, but you can place a call to a marriage therapist right now. You might not be able to figure out how to not prevent your antagonistic boss from firing you, but you can ask yourself how you could do your absolute best on the next step of the project you are working on and write down some ideas, or you could even get your resume together and start looking for a different position. If you can’t think of even the smallest change you could make to affect the problem, then at least ask yourself how you could take a little better care of yourself. Perhaps you could take a walk, call a friend, pray, or do something you enjoy, even for a few minutes.
One of the chief antidotes to anxiety is thoughtful, productive action as opposed to the “chicken-with-your-head-cut-off” reaction that occurs before you have gotten your body under control. If you can convince yourself to make even a small change that helps you respond more effectively to the problem or improves your mood, you will feel more powerful. When you make yourself pursue even a tiny change, you’ll be surprised at how little it actually takes to regain a sense of power in your life, and how much of an impact this sense of personal power has on helping you overcome anxiety.
This three-step process of Relabel-Reattribute-Respond is a simple but powerful way to begin to master those feelings of anxiety that threaten to master you. Begin practicing these tools today. Even if they don’t take away all of the anxiety you feel, they will decrease your overall emotional temperature and help you use the more sophisticated anxiety-busting techniques we will discuss in future chapters. You will be taking some of the first, important steps down the road to a life without anxiety.
Exercise: Relabel, Reattribute, Respond
Directions: Use the following exercise for any situation that causes you anxiety.
1. Relabel.