When was the last time you totally lost it? And by it, I mean your sense of calm, ability to reason, and maybe even your perspective on reality.

Welcome back to savvy psychologist.

I'm Dr. J. Boo.

Every week I'll help you meet life's challenges

with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Today I'll share three quick simple things you can do to calm yourself in an emotional crisis.

So last time you lost it and spiraled into an emotional crisis.

Perhaps you got into a big argument with someone or suffered injustice at work, got swindled out of a lot of money, or

got cheated on by a romantic partner.

What thoughts were running through your mind?

What emotions did you feel? What did you feel? What was happening in your body and what did you do with it?

In other words, how did you handle this emotional crisis?

I know that I found myself spiraling before. No one's immune. Like there was a time at the depths of my dissertation writing despair when a single unsuccessful statistical analysis led to this

avalanche of regret and anger and sadness, self-doubt, I found myself crying in my windowless office at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, convinced that I had wasted my entire adult life on the white whale of science.

Don't worry, eventually things were okay. I published my dissertation, got my

PhD, continued to cultivate a healthy relationship with science, but in the moment it was

impossible to see the big picture.

And there are other times when I experienced awful injustice, like racism.

In those times, it wasn't my loss of perspective that hurt.

It was uncontrollable forces that plunged me into crisis mode.

And that felt intense too, like an unstoppable welling up of white-hot tension that made me just want to throw nice breakable things.

And we may have pretty good ideas about how we'd like to approach an emotional crisis. We envision ourselves

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