Two simple, surprisingly overlooked tools to stop anxiety & calm your nerves

I'm a woman with late-diagnosed ADHD in my forties. This means I'm really experienced when it comes to feeling anxious. I'm also a former therapist and a co-creator of a mental health game, so anxiety is my bread and butter now, too. Because of this, I'm a collector of interesting self-soothing techniques that help to take the edge off, and what I'm about to share today are two of my all-time favourites.

Fingers tracing 

1. Put your non-dominant hand in front of you with your fingers splayed.

2. Then – very slowly – start tracing the outline of your thumb and fingers, making gentle contact, breathing in as you go up a digit, and out as you go down. So in… and out… in… and out… 

3. When you get to the little finger, swap directions and do the same the other way. 

Keep doing that for just a moment, going as slowly as you need to for the breath to be as calming as it can be. Notice, as you go, how lovely that gentle, tickling sensation on your fingers can be. This sensation is useful here because it's rare: we don't touch these parts of the body very often and that means it's relatively easy to focus on the sensation and get curious about it, which, in turn, means you're NOT following the anxious spiralling thoughts you're trying to stem with this exercise. 

Fun with numbers

If you’re feeling anxious, do something that involves numbers. Emotions and numbers are processed by different parts of the brain, and you can’t do both at the same time. So if you want to calm down quickly, doing mental arithmetic will allow you to divert your attention and other neutral activity away from the stressful thought cycle and emotions.

Here are 3 easy techniques to try:

1/ Count things
For example, pick a colour and count the number of things of that colour you can see around you or just count the flowers on your bedspread.

2/ Mental arithmetic 
As long as you're proficient enough for this not to stress you out (which it would me, to be honest), do a few simple sums as quickly as you can in your mind. What’s 37+18? How about 98-45? Can you count backwards from 1000 in intervals of three?

3/ The 54321 technique
This is one of my personal go-to techniques. List 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.

I hope you find these useful (although I wish you don’t ever need to actually use them but that’s unlikely because…life). And if you have your own tools and tricks for when nerves strike, let me know in the comments what works for you!

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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