Noah St. John shares three quick stress fixes for holiday family tension. Anticipate what will trigger you and decide how to respond beforehand. His Afformations method uses self-questioning to calm your brain in 60 seconds. A simple breathing exercise—five counts in, hold, five out—activates your relaxation response instantly.
Yes, the holiday stress meltdown. Exactly. Yeah. And it really, remember, it comes down to that word obligation or obligare, which is to bind. So, number one, one thing you can do right now is to, and I call it expect the expected, right? And, you know, you have heard the term expect the unexpected. Well, I say to expect the expected, meaning, you know, if you have a certain family member, isn't there always a family member that just pushes your buttons, right? Oh, yeah. It is like, oh my God, Uncle Bob, I know he is going to, you know, and it is like, And so what's so funny is like my mother, this happened for years, you know, and her father, you know, my maternal grandfather, he would always say these things that would annoy her. And she would say, why does he always have to do that? And I said, because he's 90. Because he's— you think he's going to change? Is he reading self-help books? I mean, come on. You know, he's not going to do anything different. He's not, you know. So whoever it is, just realize they're going to do it. So don't let it trigger you. Walk into that situation going, okay, we know what's going to happen now. what am I going to do differently? You know, because now you're an adult and you're like, okay, I'm not a kid anymore. Now what am I going to do? A second thing you could do is use my Afformations method, right? And you can literally calm yourself down literally in less than 60 seconds. In fact, if you go to our website, we've got tons of free resources, including a free IA Form audio download. It's called a 60-Second Stress Buster. So again, if you go to noahstjohn.com, N-O-A-H-S-T-J-O-H-N.com, You can download. We've got tons of free resources. You can even get my new book for free at NoahStJohn.com. So just using those affirmations like, why am I so calm? Why am I so confident? Why am I happy? Why am I centered right now? See what I did? I just asked a question and then your brain actually starts to answer it and you start to literally relax in less than 60 seconds. And just one final, really easy, quick tip that's free is breathe. Breathe. I know that sounds silly and sounds like almost stupid. Like, what do you mean breathe? You know? But what's funny is when you get in a stressful situation, you actually forget to breathe. And what that does is it cues the fight or flight response in the brain. And so what you want to do is just very simply, if you find that stress going up and up and up, just go breathe in through the nose, count for 5— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5— and then hold it for 5 and then let it out for 5 through the mouth like that. And see, you can instantly— it literally triggers the relaxation response. And that, just that simple thing, again, less than 30 seconds, and you can calm yourself very quickly.
