A simple breathing exercise called "smell the pizza": inhale through your nose, hold briefly, then exhale longer through your mouth as if cooling the slice. Longer exhales signal safety to your brain and calm the fight-or-flight response.
Sometimes people find it helpful to have something that helps them calm down a bit, a little breathing exercise. I teach people to smell the pizza, and it basically works like this. You breathe in through your nose like you're smelling a piece of pizza, but then you just hold it just for a second at the top. And now you imagine like, oh, I actually wanna take a bite of this pizza, but it's really hot, so I'm gonna cool it down by breathing out through my mouth like I'm cooling off a piece of pizza. Then you make your exhale just a little bit longer than your inhale. If you do that 3 times, you're using your body tell your brain, "Oh, we're safe." Because when your exhales are longer than your inhales, your brain gets the message, "We're not gonna die, we're not in danger." 'Cause if you were running from a lion, your body's not gonna do that. Your breathing is gonna be much different as you're running away. When you do that and your exhale's longer than your inhale, your brain's like, "Oh, guess we're good here."
