15 Tools for Regulating Your Emotions

How to Calm Yourself When Overwhelmed

October 22, 2024 | Emotional Health
By Adam Gragg

If you want to excel in life, being able to regulate our emotions is an essential skill. The consequences of unhealthy coping mechanisms (e.g., addiction, avoidance, etc.) are significant.

Knowing your triggers (people, places, and things) and how you typically react emotionally when overwhelmed, prepares you to handle these situatuations when they come. Maybe you shut down and avoid, catastrophize, or lash out at people.

When I’m stressed and anxious, I can get controlling, negative, critical, and stuck in my head worrying. Remembering these tendencies prepares for handling tough situations.

When emotionally flooded, your brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, overrides the rational part of your brain, the pre-frontal cortex. I call this “brain lock”, as my brain becomes useless, except for fleeing the situation, fighting whatever seems threatening, or freezing up.

When In “Brain Lock”

I lose my sense of humor
My problem-solving abilities stink
I take almost everything personally
My social skills dwindle
I’m much less creative
I see almost everything as negative or threatening
I’m miserable

15 Calming Actions

Here are 12 actions that help me when I’m anxious. My challenge is to recognize my anxiety in the moment and do something healthy rather than destructive.

1. Focus on Your Goals

Write your top 3 goals for the next 6 months on an index card. Pull it out whenever you’re flooded.

2. Help Someone Out

When I’m stressed there’s always an opportunity right in front of me to reach out and help someone. This takes the focus off myself and places on having an impact on someone else. This action lowers my anxiety every time.

3. Organize

Take 10 minutes to organize your pictures, files, iPhone, desk, room, or a bookshelf.

4. Reading

Take 15 minutes to step away and read something inspiring. In fact, get uninterupted time reading a good book every day. Here is list of some of my all time favorite books.

5. Engage a Hobby

Take a few minutes to focus on a hobby. If you love fishing, sort through some of your fishing gear. If cooking is a passion of yours, take a few minutes to search for a new recipes.

6. Think About a Hobby

Flip through a magazine or research a favorite hobby. Go fishing, hiking, golfing, or dream about eating a great meal – all in your mind.

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7. Stop Avoiding

Often we’re overwhelmed because we are avoiding facing a core issue. Being overwhelmed is “safer” than facing a fear. Face whatever it is you know needs to be addressed. Be assertive, vulnerable, and let go of the outcome.

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” – Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning)

8. Get Physically Active

Exercise helps prevent “brain lock” by engaging your pre-frontal cortex once “brain lock” has set in. A walk for 10 minutes, might be all you need.

9. Pictures & Videos of Friends & Family

Go back and watch some pictures and videos from your past. Set an alarm for 15 minutes and focus. This will calm your mind and probably make you laugh as well.

10. Listen

Listening to an audiobook, podcast, or music can help. Choose uplifting content, not content that fuels your fears and negative emotions.

11. Watch How To Videos

YouTube can be a valuable resource. You can learn new skills and find inspiration on YouTube if you a disciplined in you content consumption. I’m a fan of some Ted Talks as well.

12. Journal

Journaling your thoughts, ideas, emotions, and more is great for calming down a flooded mind. Our thoughts are clearer on paper. Journaling moves brain activity away from the emotional center (amygdala) and activates our rationality (pre-frontal cortex). Here are some journaling prompts.

13. Gratitude

Thinking about and write down what you’re grateful for can do wonders. Gratitde impacts your brain in a similar fashion to journaling.

14. Breath

Take 2 minutes to focus on your breathing. Breathe for 4 seconds in, stop at the top of the breath for 1 second, and breathe out for 4 seconds. When you blow the breath out, act as if you are blowing it out through a straw. This will calm down your central nervous system.

15. Call a Friend

This is usually the last thing I want to do when stressed, yet the most helpful action I can take. I dislike admitting I need help, yet “going it alone” is not the path out of my stress.