Dr. Don Wood teaches a 60-second anxiety fix: breathe deeply while recalling three funny movie scenes that make you smile. The combination of deep breathing and laughter creates indifference, which stops anxiety in its tracks.
Chapters
How to stop feeling anxious in 60 seconds. So when you start having anxiety, the reason that comes is because you actually don't even realize that you're breathing much more shallow. It's a natural process. When we get nervous or we get scared or we get anxious, we actually change our breathing. So the idea is, is if you've got lots of oxygen in your system, you're not going to feel anxious. So the first step we want to use is practicing getting some breathing in. So you want to start breathing deeper. When you recognize that you're starting to feel anxious, that's going to make a changed because more oxygen means safety. I want you to think about three different movies, or it can be the same movie of three really funny scenes. I'm looking for some comedies and I want you to have a fairly quick, you know, 10, 15 second clip of it. And I want you to have them prepared in advance. Remember what you saw and heard and experienced. With that clip. You're going to start your breathing and you're going to start breathing in through your nose, Nice deep breaths.
And breathe out through your mouth. So in through your nose, out through your mouth. As you do that, you can close your eyes and then start to remember one of the scenes from the movie. Now what's going to happen is you're going to probably start to smile. You may even start to laugh. Now all of this starts to become silly. And what that's going to produce is basically the key to killing anxiety, is indifference. Indifference is an anxiety killer.
