74: How to Calm Down

Business is Good with Chris Cooper

How To Calm Down

Every entrepreneur gets triggered sometimes.

The reasons might be obvious: a late employee, a missed detail, a poor customer experience.

Or they might not be: we could show up to work escalated; we could be carrying dread or guilt around; we could have a fight with our spouse before we left for work.

Many days, our emotional meter is already cranked up to 9 before we start our day, and one little thing pushes us up to MAX 10. Then we have an over-the-top response to some little thing; our staff thinks we fly off the handle; and we feel guilty about it later; and then we overcompensate. That makes us feel even worse, and we keep escalating.

We need to calm down.

I’m not going to tell you to start meditating or get into shape – those won’t help you TODAY, and you already know that you *should* be doing both.

Here’s how to do it in the short-term, long-term and medium term.

Short-term (the quick deescalation):

1. Box breathing. Breathe in through your mouth, as deeply as you can, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. Breathe out through your nose, trying to empty your lungs, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. That’s 1 round. Repeat for 10 rounds. Watch this:

2. Imagine the worst-case scenario. can you live with that? Put yourself in the scenario for a few seconds. Then come out of it. This is a Stoic process of acceptance. It doesn’t calm your unconscious right away, but it will calm your conscious mind quickly.

3. Tell yourself that you’re excited instead of nervous or angry. Your body can’t tell the difference.

4. Break the rumination cycle. Go have a conversation about something else, or distract yourself with a story. Rumination just escalates you. Here’s a quick meditation that will break the rumination cycle for a few seconds.

5. Think of the next step instead of what might happen later. Break the problem down into “what will I do in the next minute?” instead of “what might happen if/then?” See the ‘domino’ analogy later.

6. Go outside, eat a banana and have a walk. This is my wife’s advice whenever I’m stressed.

Medium-Term

1. Adopt a meditative practice. I start the day by writing 750 words. That’s a ‘brain dump’. You can do this forever, but you’ll start to see the benefits within a week.
2. Slow down your thoughts. One reason we stress is because our thoughts line up like dominoes, and we quickly amplify the worst-case scenario.
3. “If I say this, she’ll say that. And I’ll respond with this other thing. She’ll get mad, but I can’t back down. So she’ll walk away and not speak to me for a day. I’ll have to address that. It’s not acceptable in a workplace. I’ll deal with it Monday.” Then you spend all weekend ruminating, imagining Monday’s confrontation.
4. Imagine each of these thoughts as a separate domino. Space the dominoes out, so that each doesn’t automatically push the next one over.
5. “I will say this.” – full stop. You can’t predict how people will react, and trying to do so just escalates your stress.
6. My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. ~ Michel de Montaigne

Long-Term

1. Watch your thoughts. In “Drive”, Daniel Pink says that most people never have a single positive thought all day. It’s a constant cycle of judgment, guilt and resentment. “That guy shouldn’t have made a turn without signalling!” – and then the domino effect happens: “He must be a jerk! Since he’s a jerk, he probably treats everyone disrespectfully! I bet he did that on purpose! He clearly doesn’t care about other people!”
2. When this happens, don’t judge yourself: just shift your thoughts to something you like.
3. Stop keeping score. We tend to remember the bad things people do forever, but forget the positive stuff immediately. We store up reasons to dislike them. But there’s no cosmic scoreboard, and holding onto the actions of others just creates more stress and overwhelm for you.
4. The danger of wrestling with a pig is that you just get dirty…and the pig likes it.
5. Stop “should”-ing yourself. Just as you keep score on other people’s behavior, you assume they’re doing the same to you. And so you do it to yourself. Your biggest critic, who knows everything about you, all your weaknesses, all of your sore spots…that person lives in your head. They’re going to say “you should have done X!” or “You should do more Y!” and you’ll feel bad about yourself. “Should” is a falsehood – it doesn’t exist. There is no “should”; there is only what you do. “Should” is judgment, not action.
6. Get into shape. You know this already. But when you get off the couch and off the sugar, you’ll walk away from the emotional roller-coaster caused by your underperforming body. Your metabolism, your confidence, your endurance, your patience…all of these are rooted in your physicality and manifest in your brain. Go for a walk. Get off the couch. Pass by the carb closet. Avoid boredom.

If you’re stressing right now, follow the short-term suggestions. But if you don’t start practicing the medium-term and long-term habits, you’ll be right back in this position in a few hours.

Stress will never go away. The way you handle stress can change – but it’s up to you to change it.

Do you really want to feel this way for the rest of your life?Connect with Chris Cooper:

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