How to Actually Calm Anxiety in the Moment

When you start to feel anxiety, your first thought is, how do I make this stop? You instantly go into fix it mode. You try to breathe, you try to fix, you try to distract, but it's still there. It doesn't go anywhere. That moment, right when anxiety hits, can determine whether it passes in minutes or whether it sticks around for hours. And in this video, I'm going to teach you how to respond to anxiety in the moment so that it actually calms down. And I'm gonna teach you my six step process that you can use very easily in these moments of anxiety. But first, I need you to understand why your old response of fixing isn't gonna work. There are three default responses that come up anytime we feel anxiety, either fighting, fixing, or fleeing. And each one of those responses sends the exact same message to your nervous system. We are in danger. And when the nervous system senses that, it releases adrenaline, it releases cortisol, and now your body is flooded with stress chemicals. So even though you're trying your best to calm down, you're accidentally, innocently reinforcing the threat. You're just speaking the wrong language. So we need to talk about how do you speak the right language so your nervous system actually gets the message. The first thing you need to do is you need to understand this response loop. So your body feels a wave of anxiety. It's a combination of sensations, feelings, thoughts. And then your mind immediately interprets that as danger. If that's gonna look like looping thoughts, catastrophizing, your mind just starts going wild. Then what you do is you resist. You say, oh my gosh, this can't be here. You start future casting, wondering what the future looks like, if you're ever gonna be able to get out of this. If you're gonna have this for the rest of your life, if your life is over, and then your body sends more alarm, more anxiety, more other chronic symptoms. And now you are stuck in that loop. And that loop can keep you anxious all day. You are staying in a perpetual state of perceived threat, and your body and nervous system are never getting the message that they are safe. So your job in the moment is not to stop the anxiety as bad as I know you want to. It's to show your body safety through your response. By the way, if you're hearing all of this and you're like, oh my God, if this is me, and you really want to regulate your nervous system and stop getting caught in this loop, I am opening a new program called the self-regulation program. It's gonna be open soon. And if you wanna get on the wait list to be able to be the first one notified, once it releases, there is a link in the caption for you to add your email. But for now, let me walk you through the exact six step process you can follow when anxiety hits. Number one, we are gonna notice it and we are going to name it neutrally. My body is experiencing an anxiety wave. I'm having a wave of anxiety. Label this as a body state, not some external crisis. It's just the state that your body's in right now. And we wanna view it as neutrally as we can. And step two is you are going to allow whatever is coming up, whatever you feel to exist without resisting it. I want you to drop the inner fight. I don't want you to do a ton of reassurance and trying to convince yourself that you're safe, but it can be helpful to say, I can let this move through. My body knows what to do with this. That's one of my favorite ones because it gets me out of the way. My body knows how to handle this. My body knows how to process these emotions. Ultimately, seeing it as just a chemical release, it's like my body will work through these emotions. They'll burn out and I'm gonna let them burn out without continuing to fuel them in this loop. This can be helpful in shifting from a state of panic to more of a state of partnership with your body, which we're constantly working to get back into alignment with that partnership where we hear what our body is saying and we let it process through. Step three is you're just gonna drop into your body. Shift your attention from the looping thoughts and the panic in your mind to the sensations in your body. Even if the sensations in your body feel a little scary, you can feel your feet on the floor. You can notice your breath. You can lengthen your exhale. That's a very easy way to send a little bit of safety to your brain because if you were being chased by something, you wouldn't be exhaling longer than you inhale. And this helps to just ground you in the present where you are actually safe despite what your anxious mind is telling you. Number four is any way that you can speak the language that your body speaks. Your body picks up on how you hold yourself, the tenseness, the bracing, the clenching, all of that kind of stuff. Practice softening, softening into your body, relaxing. This is going to be a challenge because everything in you is saying brace up and prepare for something. Prepare for something awful. That's what anxiety tells us. Something bad is coming. Stay ready. And through this process, we are trying to tell our body there's nothing to stay ready for. The threat has passed. It is safe here now. So soften your face, unclench your jaw, release your shoulders from your ears. Move slowly, slow down. Every small movement that you make like this signals safety to your nervous system. Each one of these cues says there is no danger here. Step five is you're just going to let time pass. We're not going to watch the clock. We're not going to constantly be checking in. Is it gone? We are already allowing, we are already softening, and now we're just going to let time pass. Let it fade on its own. Get out of the way. Calm is like this natural state. It's not something that we can chase and it's not something that we can force. It's like sleep. You can't force sleep. You can't force calm. You have to allow yourself to become calm by letting your body do the work of processing this for you. And then step number six is you're going to return to your life, gently continue whatever it is you were doing. And if all you were doing was sitting around waiting to get anxious, we're going to need a little bit more routine and structure to your day. Go back to your day, your work, your walk, your life, whatever it is you have going on. The goal is not to sit in your anxiety and allow forever. It's to stop letting anxiety decide what you do next. And for most of us, when we get anxious, we shrink our lives. And the faster you resume living, the faster your nervous system will recalibrate. Really think about this. If you remove all of your focus and attention and researching hours from your anxiety and you live your life as normally as you possibly can, your nervous system goes, okay, there's obviously no threat here. Maybe we don't have to keep sending this alarm of anxiety. The reason why this works is you are retraining your nervous system through experience. So every time you feel that anxiety and your response changes from fear and fixing and running from and shifts to allowing it to be there, grounding yourself and moving forward and living your life, you are in that moment teaching your body that this isn't danger anymore. And that is how your nervous system will learn how to settle a lot faster than what you're used to. We do not need the anxiety to go away. What we need to do is get the fear to drop. Ultimately, anxiety recovery is actually fear recovery. We have to recover from the fear, from being afraid of sensations and the experience of anxiety in our body. So next time you experience anxiety, I want you to notice it. I want you to allow it. I want you to ground into it. I want you to soften around it and then go back to living your life. You're gonna forget these steps sometimes, that's okay. The most important things that you remember is I need to notice what's happening and I need to respond differently. I need to respond with softness. I need to drop my resistance. I need to allow it for a little bit and then I just need to get back to whatever I was doing. You do not need your anxiety to go away 100% in order for you to feel safe again. You need to show your body that it already is safe. And that is exactly what you do when you work this process again and again and again. Remember, repetition is king with all of this. Let me know in the comments if you try this method and I will see you in the next video.