Welcome to Anxiety Slayer. I'm Shan Vanderleek 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, Shan. 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 shared 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, count 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. Because when we're anxious, we tend to breathe shallow. We tend to have

our shoulders up around 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

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.

Because 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. Usually it doesn't, just the mind playing games with us.

So what I'm hearing from you is that you're saying in the moment,

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