How to not lose your mind, in five steps.
You can't stop the hard moment from coming. You can train what happens next. Five steps, about five minutes, for the moment it's already happening.
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The 5 steps
1.Find your level
- Sit or stand up straight, take a slow breath and look at yourself from the outside.
- How stressed are you, 1 to 10? Name the number. Accept it.
- Seven or higher: not the moment for a big decision or a hard conversation.
Why: Putting a feeling into words quiets the brain's alarm center (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007).
2.Reframe the thought
- Write down the thought that's running. Watch for blame, "always" and "never", and worst-case predictions.
- Is it a fact or an opinion? What's the evidence on each side?
- Rewrite it as something more accurate and more useful. Not happier. Truer.
Why: Changing how you read a situation changed how people felt about it, with a small-to-moderate effect, in a review of many studies (Webb and colleagues, 2012).
3.Take action
- You have at least some power here. What's the smallest, easiest step that would help?
- What would you tell a friend in your spot?
- Do it, or schedule it, now. Five minutes is enough.
Why: Acting on the part you control is a core of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the best-tested approaches there is (Hofmann and colleagues, 2012).
4.Give gratitude
- Write down one thing you're grateful for, even on a bad day.
- Or list as many as you can in 30 seconds.
- Better still: tell the person.
Why: Writing down what you're grateful for improved well-being in controlled studies (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), with modest effects (Cregg and Cheavens, 2021).
5.Connect
- Reach one person: a text, a call, or face to face.
- Not logistics. Just that they crossed your mind.
- Can't now? Put a time with someone on the calendar.
Why: Across 148 studies, people with stronger social ties were about 50% more likely to survive over the years they were followed (Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, 2010).
A study finding a benefit in the people it tested is not a promise of that result for you. All the sources.
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Fix one thing, or fix all of it
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Sources
Lieberman, Eisenberger, Crockett, Tom, Pfeifer, Way (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli.
Gross (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences.
Webb, Miles, Sheeran (2012). Dealing with feeling: A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.
McRae & Gross (2020). Emotion regulation flexibility: How context-related variability affects outcomes.
Hofmann et al. (2012). The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses.
Craske et al. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach.
Emmons & McCullough (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.
Seligman, Steen, Park, Peterson (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions.
Cregg & Cheavens (2021). Gratitude Interventions: Effective Self-help? A Meta-analysis of the Impact on Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety.
Holt-Lunstad, Smith, Layton (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.
Kumar & Epley (2022). Random acts of kindness produce more well-being benefits than expected.