My Top 3 Tips for Calming Anxiety Quickly
May 09, 2024
My genuine wish for you is that one day, you’ll live life free from anxiety. You’ll experience life on the lighter side. Joy will be your natural state. Peace will flow easily to you.
Sure, we all have ups and downs but if you’re here, you may be feeling more than your fair share of anxious moments. Maybe being anxious or on edge feels like your natural state.
In order to live in a state of daily peace and joy, you’ll need to heal those deeper wounds. This is great for long term prevention as well as lowering your baseline emotional state to calm, instead of anxious.
BUT, you can do things now to reduce anxiety quickly when it does arise. You don’t have to wait for complete healing to feel relief. Below are my Top 3 Strategies for Quickly Calming Anxiety.
#1: EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique- EFT is the practice of tapping on specific points on your body while labeling your fears and distresses. It helps us acknowledge the discomfort and address it without getting “stuck” feeling anxious. There are people who have healed specific fears using this technique alone. I find it super helpful for everyday anxiety. If you’ve never heard of it, you can google it to check it out. I’m also including a sample from my course, Anxiety Detox, which is a guided tapping session.
#2: EMDR music: EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is what I offer in private sessions. It’s the best way I’ve found to heal the root cause of anxiety to offer that daily freedom. However, a quick and easy way to calm an anxious mind is listening to EMDR music. It won’t offer long-term healing but it will give you a sense of calm pretty quickly. I do this when I feel scattered and need to focus. Note: it’s important to listen with headphones to get the full effect because the music oscillates back and forth between your left and right ear which is how EMDR works. I’m linking to my favorite EMDR spotify channel.
#3: 5/10 breathing: I have taught this to 80 year olds and 5 year olds. It’s so simple but it works so well, I wish everyone knew about this. Our inhale is intimately connected to our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight). Our exhale is intimately connected to our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). If you exhale longer than your inhale, you’re favoring that parasympathetic side of your brain. Inhale for a count of 5, exhale for a count of 10. Do this until you feel yourself relax. If you have a watch that measures your heart rate, you can actually watch your heart rate decrease as you practice.
And that’s it! Those are my Top 3 tips to feel calm quickly. I know there are lots of other quick tips and practices, but these are my favorites. Mainly because I can always count on them to work, they are pretty easy to implement and they can be done anywhere and anytime!
Let me know if you try one of these! What’s your favorite? What other strategies work for you?
You deserve the joy and peace you desire! I’m cheering you on!
Much Love,
Stacey