Welcome to Anxiety Slayer, I'm Shan Vanderleak here with my partner Ananga Severe.

Today we're answering a listener question that we receive quite often and the question is what's a good way to calm down when you feel anxious?

Hey Ananga, welcome back.

Hi Shen, it's a good question and yes, something we have talked about before, but always a good idea to bring it around again.

I think for me, my favorite way to calm down if I suddenly feel anxious is to immediately tune

into my breath and practice a really simple thing which we shed on Facebook a couple of weeks ago and got some very nice feedback

on people saying it immediately helped them so good to share it here again.

It's called the long exhale and that's all it is.

You just breathe in out to four

hold your breath for a couple of counts and then take a really nice long breath out

maybe counting to seven or more if you can and to just really focus on a calm,

long out breath is when we're anxious we tend to breathe shallow, we tend to have our shoulders up round our ears and our breathing becomes quite fast, quite rapid.

So to just focus on that exhale, long, smooth breath out and that sends a signal to your nervous system that you're okay you're in

control. That's such a helpful exercise and I also will tune into my breath but the other thing I do is get really in tune with what my mind is telling me what that voice might be telling me in my head and just say,

right now I'm peaceful, right now I'm okay,

even though I'm feeling a little freaked out, right now in this moment I'm okay so I have this like dialogue with

myself that okay there are the sensations there's my heartbeat there's that electric

current I sometimes feel but right now I'm okay.

And sometimes that will just help stop it right in its tracks.

Mm.

It's really, if we think about it, a lot of anxiety. It's a future projection. It's what if this happens? What if that happens? It's an uncomfortable

sensation usually about something that may come up in our future.

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