Breathe to Stop Racing Thoughts

Day 29 of 31 Days of Action

Welcome to the last three days of the Action for Happiness’ calendar of resilience tips. I have a firm belief in the wisdom of starting small and building up a skill or habit by gradually increasing, over time, the “size” of what you’re doing. Each of these resilience tips is certainly something small, and I invite you to start with one that speaks to you, and to continue doing it every day. You will be surprised by how powerful it eventually becomes.

Here’s today’s resilience tip:

Day 29: Catch yourself overreacting and take a deep breath

Many mental behaviors — letting an argument get out of control, for example, or having a bothersome thought that you can’t get out of your head — lead to bad results because you’re caught in a feedback loop that keeps getting stronger.

A powerful technique for dealing with these harmful behaviors is to find a way to insert into the loop a new action that interrupts it and gives you a chance to break out of the loop.

Taking slow, deep breaths is an excellent interrupting action, and you can do it no matter what you’re doing. If you can take 20 — or even 10 — of these breaths, you will feel calmer, and just doing that will quiet your impulse to overreact.

Sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t do that. But you can probably do three deep breaths, and that’s enough to interrupt the cycle, thus giving you a brief moment to do something to break the loop. Depending on the situation, it may make sense to:

• lower your voice and talk more slowly
• physically leave the situation
• do something that you find calming (for example, listen to a favorite song, go outside for a few minutes, look at a photo of a loved one, or anything else that works for you)

You’ll do better if you create a list of interrupting actions that you know will wor for you. That way, you’ll know exactly what to do when you get that all too brief moment of clarity.

My wife and I have a set phrase we use whenever we realize an argument is escalating. Whoever notices it first says, “This arguing is just getting worse and worse. We have to stop now. We can come back to this later.” Then one of us leaves the room, and we’ve stopped the argument before it can go over the top.

Watch for opportunities (which you’ll find every day) to try this technique. If you continue doing so, you’ll eventually turn this into a habit. And that means that sometime in the future, you’ll do the right thing without even thinking about it. In other words, practice leads to habits, which leads to big outcomes for virtually no effort.

Realize this: you can develop a skill you will benefit from for the rest of your life. Why wouldn’t you do this?