How do you become calmer and live a less stressful life? I’m always asking myself this question. It seems that no matter what stage of my life I enter, there is always something that is causing me a great deal of stress. When I was in school it was exams, when I was a teenager it was anxiety, and in adulthood it’s bills and relationships.

Throughout my life, I’ve realised that I’ve never really been ‘calm’. Instead, I’ve always felt as if I was on the edge, waiting for the next stressful occurance to happen. Is stress something you can avoid if you want to be calmer? Whilst stress from our families and work are usually unavoidable, there are some stresses in life that can be avoided altogether. It’s also about how you digest the stressful situation. Do you normally react in a stressful manner to something you don’t like? Or do you mindfully accept that it is just something you need to sort out?

If you want to know how to be calm, and not freak out when something ‘bad’ happens, you need to start evaluating your life for all the areas which are causing you stress. By doing so, you can cut out the avoidable stress triggers. For me, being calm is all about removing any triggers I can, whilst trying to react to the stresses I can’t avoid properly. For example, I’ve spent most of my life reacting to stressful situations by going inwards on myself. I would go into a shell, lash out, or worry for days on end. Sometimes, I still do, and that’s okay too.

Why is is so important to be mindful of stress in our day to days lives? Stress is a killer. Stress can increase cortisol, often referred to as the ‘stress hormone.’ This hormone in excess can lead to heart disease and lower immune function. Over time, your blood pressure can increase which can then lead to heart attacks.

So how do you stay calm in an ever stressful world. Here’s some of my best ideas to help you stay calm, whether they’re things you can use, techniques, or triggers you can remove.

1. Close Your Circle Smaller

One of the best ways you calm live a calmer life is to close your circle smaller. By this I mean removing people from your life that cause you to constantly be on edge. Let’s face it, there are some friends that just enjoy drama. Forever pulling you into their madness, you find that you’re stressing over a situation someone else has created. You know the people that drag you into the arguments that they have started? They are the ones that you need to let go of. You might think that they are your good friends, but in the long run, they could be causing you a lot of stress that you could easily remove in an instant.

I have personally had to do this several times. I thought that I might upset some people by doing so, however, I have never looked back. Whilst it might make you look ‘more popular’ to have people tagging you in every Facebook post they upload, in the end, it’s more stress on you.

More money, more problems? I’d say; ‘More friends, more problems’.

What’s more is, it’s easy to make our friends problems our own. Whilst we should help those in need, always being involved in someone else’s avoidable drama just keeps the cycle going. I keep my friend group small for this very reason. As I get older, it’s also become more and more apparent that I don’t need reassurance from my peers. Whilst it’s nice to have your friend back you up on something, if you are constantly needing to be ‘backed up’, it might be time to start asking yourself why. Is it drama that could of been avoided if you didn’t get involved?

2. Breathe And Evaluate The Situation

It’s easily to react hastily in the moment. It seems that some of us just can’t seem to control our emotions. I’ve been there myself, I used to get enraged when something I didn’t like would happen. I couldn’t seem to pause and evaluate the situation. If you want to know how to stay calm, it’s important to take your time and think about the consequences of your actions. When something happens that you don’t like or can’t tolerate, just try and stay quiet. Give yourself time to think of a rational response to the situation.

Some people would say that I used to have an anger problem. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t tolerate the way some people acted. I would get upset, shout, and be slamming doors until the sun came up. I used to react with my gut, and not with my head. As I’ve grown up I’ve come to terms with the fact that you simply can’t control outside events.

Allowing yourself to understand this basic truth can bring you much peace in the long run. What you can control is what is inside your head, and that’s it.

3. Practise Your Patience

Patience is a virtue isn’t it? However, in a world full of instant gratification, it seems that many of us just can’t seem to wait for anything. With an intolerance to waiting, we get agitated and angry. Staying calm in stressful situations is often about being patient with the situation or person.

For example, when was the last time Netflix couldn’t load and you ended up cursing at the TV rather than troubleshooting the problem? We live in a world where we can get everything in an instant. Want dinner? Just call for a pizza! Wanna know what your friends did today? Look at Facebook! Want to feel good about yourself? Post a selfie a bathe in the kind comments! The point is, it’s so much easier to get frustrated when things do just fall in our laps these days.

So how do you practise being patient when you want to stay calm? We need to understand that things take time. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam and you’re in a rush, do you think shouting at the person in front of you is going to make things go any faster? No, it will only cause you to become more stressed. All you can really do is wait.

Marcus Aurelius once said;

“You have power over you mind, not outside events. Understand this, and you will find strength.”

When we can accept that we have little to no control over outside events, we can bring a sense of acceptance to the situation at hand.

4. Keep The ‘What ifs?’ At Bay

Assumptions are dangerous. Have you ever been so worried about something that instead of looking to solve the problem, you just sit there and make up the ending to the story? You think the stressful situations outcome is ‘all or nothing’ and it looks like it’s going to be bad. I’ve done this my whole life. I’ve worried and worried and worried and worked myself up into a panic even though there has been no evidence that any ‘bad’ is going to happen.

‘What ifs’ are just assumptions with no real weight to them. You could say ‘what if’ about anything if you think about it. Just because you are stating an outcome, does not make it real and it does not mean it’s going to happen.

You might say;

“I’m going to be late for work again. What if they fire me?“

This is an assumptions that we create ourselves because we allow the worry to spiral out of control.  We can only see a negative outcome to the situation. In reality, our boss might be understanding if it’s only happened a few times in the last few years.

5. Practise Mindfulness

When stress starts to mount and your head starts to race with ‘what ifs’, it’s time to start practising mindfulness. You don’t even have to be a monk to start doing it either. Mindfulness is the practise of being present without judgment of your own thoughts and feelings. It’s the idea that we can connect with ourselves when we’re feeling like life is slipping out of our control.

You can start practising mindfulness right now. Mindfulness techniques help me personally to manage anxiety when it enters my mind. When your head starts to race with anxiety and assumptions, try grounding yourself with the following exercise;

• Find 5 things you can see
• 5 things you can taste
• 5 things you can touch
• 5 things you can hear

We need to ground ourselves sometimes. Don’t you feel like you’re spending most of your life on autopilot? You find that you’re just living to a busy schedule, without taking time out to recalibrate your mind. Mindfulness can help with this. It’s helped to broaden my perspective and I know it can be of value to you too.

6. It Is Not The End Of The World

As mentioned previously, stressful situations can feel like they are ‘all or nothing’. We put a great deal of stress on ourselves that could be avoided in the first place. I know myself, I have made mistakes and not done things when I should of which have come back to bite me in the butt. However, at the end of the day it’s not the end of the world, even though it feels like it.

If you really think about it, have you gone a year without feeling any kind of stress? If you want to know how to be calm, you need to accept the basic through that stress is a part of daily life, whether on a small scale, or a big scale. So even though it’s a daily occurrence, why is it we haven’t learnt to deal with it yet? Admittedly, some things are more stressful than others, but there’s no reason why we can’t approach them all in the same manner.

To stay calmer in any stressful situation, we need to be able to put our emotions aside. We need to realise that it’s not the end of the world, mainly because we know we’ve had and dealt with stressful situations in the past. To stay calm, we need to look for a solution to the problem in a logical manner.

7. Get Some Freakin’ Sleep

The western modern worlds demands we stay up late watching Netflix, and get up early for our shift work. Sometimes things can get a bit out of whack and we have to reassess what we’re doing. Sleep could be the number one reason why you can’t stay calm in stressful situations. I’ve struggled with this one myself in the past. When I used to work at a local grocery store, I would do late shifts quite often. I would then have to go back into the store at sunrise. I’m talking 5am….yawn.

I would get in at 10pm, watch TV, eat, go to bed, watch TV in bed, and not pass out at midnight, leaving me with only four hours of sleep. Of course, I was stressed the next day, moody, and I couldn’t bare to face anyone. I just felt awful. So, why is it we push ourselves so much? After all, we can only take so much before we crash out. For me, it was about still feeling like I had an evening after work, but really I should of just got to bed earlier so I could enjoy the next evening.

Sleep is what helps us to re-energise. It repairs cells in our body and betters our mood. If you’re not getting enough sleep, put your phone in another room, turn the TV off earlier, and get a good night sleep. If you still find good sleep eludes you, you may wish to try a supplement such as l theanine and gaba which can aid sleep by helping to bring a sense of calm without impairing cognition.

8. Meditate

If you want to know how to stay calm for the long haul, meditation could be your saving grace. Whilst I’m not a big meditator myself, I can appreciate the benefits which are similar to practising mindfulness. There’s a good reason why meditation has been around for thousands of years – because it calms your mind… and it actually works. Maybe meditation is even more relevant in this day and age then it was when it was first being practised. With all the demands of daily life, meditation has never looked so good.

Here are some of the benefits to meditation;

• Helps you to stay calm
• Improves gratitude
• Calms your body and mind
• Relieves stress
• Improves blood circulation

You don’t even have to be a monk to do it. These days, there are tons of classes you can attend, books and courses. Check out a beginners guide below for an easy entry point into meditation.

9. Start Being More Simple Already!

Another way to stay calm is to just start being more simple and straightforward. Do you have an ego? expensive taste? Maybe you’re the type of person that has to have their steak fried ‘just right’ or you fall into disaster mode. Yes, if you’re a ‘fussy’ person, you might say, ‘I just know what I like’. And that’s great, but a lot of your stress could be avoidable if you loosened up a bit. This is not me trying to be mean to anyone who behaves this way, but I have found that having less demands in life has lead to me being calmer in the long run. When we think that things are just ‘expected’, we can become terribly upset when they don’t materialize.

The key is to keep your expectations at a realistic level and be mindful of the fact that life doesn’t always go the way we had planned. It is great to set goals and aspirations for yourself, but it’s more important to do it in a logical way and not expect your every day to be perfect.

10. Designate Yourself A ‘Stress Time’

Of all the ways to stay calm, this could be the most practical when you’re actually in a stressful situation. Let’s say that you’re in an important meeting. You find that you’re becoming incredibly stressed out and all you want to do is snap or shout. Of course, it would not be beneficial to do something like this in the meeting. Instead, you can designate a time slot later to ‘stress out’ over it. You could go home and then allow yourself the time to get it out of your system. Stress can become dangerous to our health if we leave it pent up, that’s why you should always give yourself time to expel the stress.

You could ring a loved one can just unload onto them for a while, or you could go home and cry it out if you feel you need to. Rather then carrying it into tomorrow, set yourself a time to relieve the stress on the same day. There’s nothing worse than taking it to bed with you!

11. Is It In The Caffeine?

Hey look, I love coffee. If I could I would drink it all day long. However, I know that there is danger in doing so. Coffee is liquid caffeine, the stuff that stimulates your brain and gives you a burst of mental energy. Caffeine could be keeping you up at night and damaging your sleep. More importantly, caffeine could be causing you avoidable stress. As well as stimulating your brain, caffeine stimulates your nervous system causing stress to easily simmer. Instead of going after that afternoon cup of joe, consider grabbing some water to rehydrate your brain and relieve any headaches that could be brought on by caffeine.

Have you found some interesting ways to stay calm? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Here’s to your success,

Sean