The stress break

Breathe first

Breathe in through your nose and top it up with one more little sip of air at the end. Then breathe out slowly and fully through your mouth. Keep going for two to five minutes.

In a study by researchers at Stanford (Balban and colleagues, 2023), people did five minutes of a breathing exercise every day for a month. Cyclic sighing, the technique below, gave their mood the biggest lift.

Fancy adding a scent? Put 1 to 3 drops of Adaptiv in your palm, rub your hands together, cup them over your nose and breathe in.

What exactly are you feeling?

"I'm stressed" doesn't tell you much about what's actually going on inside. The more precisely you know what you are feeling, the more you can do with it. This is the exercise I do with people who come to me with stress. Give yourself ten minutes somewhere you won't be disturbed.

Feel where it sits

Close your eyes. Where in your body do you feel the stress? Pin down the spot as precisely as you can and breathe into it. Does it have a colour? A texture? Is it soft or hard, warm or cold?

Finnish researchers led by Lauri Nummenmaa asked hundreds of people to mark where in their body they felt different emotions. Each emotion turned out to have its own recognisable place.

Find the emotion

Is there an emotion attached? Often it is fear, the sense of not being good enough, or the fear of being laughed at. Is there another feeling underneath? Quite often anger comes up. Sometimes it is the other way round, and something else is hiding under the anger.

In a study by the American psychologist Matthew Lieberman and colleagues, the brain's alarm centre, the amygdala, calmed down as soon as people put their feelings into words.

When did you first feel this?

Let a memory come up. For me it was a talk I had to give at school. I was so nervous that morning I couldn't eat a thing. Halfway through, my stomach started rumbling loudly and the whole class burst out laughing, the teacher too. Even my best friend joined in. I felt completely let down.

A feeling like that is often an echo of an old situation. We keep replaying the echo because we have never really looked at what happened back then.

Rewrite the memory

Go back to that moment as if you had a time machine, and change what happens. I picture myself at the breakfast table again, and this time I eat my breakfast. I walk to school, give my talk, and my stomach stays quiet. Imagine it as vividly as you can, with the smells, sounds and feelings, and run through it a few times.

Psychologists call this imagery rescripting. Across nineteen studies (Morina, Lancee and Arntz, 2017), people were far less troubled by their memory afterwards.

In my practice I notice that this works best when someone is willing to let go of the role that once grew up around that memory. Research points the same way: the more a painful memory becomes the centre of who you are, the more it keeps weighing on you (Berntsen and Rubin, 2006).

Is it a heavy or traumatic memory? Then please don't do this step on your own; do it with a psychologist or therapist who works with this method.

Head outside and find five beautiful things

Look around deliberately until you have found five: light falling through the leaves, a colour, a sound, a smell, a cloud with a funny shape. It gives your head something else to do.

Move for ten minutes

Walk briskly round the block, go up and down the stairs a few times, or do twenty squats while the kettle boils. According to a large review of more than a thousand studies, people who move regularly have noticeably less low mood, anxiety and stress.

You'll find movements to follow along with on my page GOOD. moves.

Drink something other than coffee

Caffeine pushes up your cortisol, the stress hormone that puts your body on high alert, on top of everything the day has already done. Have a big glass of water or a cup of herbal tea instead. Craving something sweet? Go for something with protein, like a handful of nuts or a yoghurt, so your blood sugar doesn't shoot up and then crash.

Get it down on paper

Brooding over what might go wrong keeps the stress in place. A plan gives you something to do.

Say it differently

Say "I am excited" out loud instead of "I'm so stressed". Nerves and excitement feel almost the same in your body, and it is easier to steer that energy somewhere new than to slam the brakes on.

Or talk to yourself using your own name: "(your name), you've got this." In studies by the psychologist Ethan Kross, people felt calmer and did better afterwards.