Staying Calm Through Chaos
Chaos.. it’s a part of life that we all experience. Life would be all too many roses and doves if it weren’t for a little chaos; don’t get me wrong now - I’d love to have a little less of it as much as the next person.
Knowing that we all will experience some level of stress or tension in the future, we have to pose the question:
How do we stay calm in the midst of chaos and pressure?
There are a number of great leaders and figures whom we admire that seem to have this innate ability to stay calm and un-phased. But what about the rest of us who don’t naturally stack up well in the face of chaos?
Conventional wisdom points out that most people lack the ability to stay calm during these stressful situations. However, neuroscience points out that learning to stay calm through pressure and chaos is actually a skill that anyone can learn.
Let’s find out how:
The Physiological Response
Our bodies naturally perceive threats and dangers and induce a physiological reaction commonly known as “fight or flight”. This reaction occurs in the part of your brain known as the amygdala, which causes hormones to secrete to prepare your body to readily adapt to the threat.
You probably can relate if you’ve experienced shortness of breath, your blood flow racing, body temperature rising, peripheral vision starts to fade away, and so on and so forth in a stressful situation.
Given that, in most situations, we aren’t allowed the time and space to properly process and release this internal tension, we often end up in a feedback loop where we’re either stuck frozen like a deer in headlights or anxious to release the pressure by freaking out.
Identifying Your Emotions
In order to remain calm in the midst of the “fight or flight” response, we need to disrupt that feedback loop we just discussed.
As mentioned earlier, the amygdala is where this initial anxiety-induced response begins to form. Through research and studies, such as those done by Jon Pratlett, we now have a better understanding that we can reduce the anxiety in our amygdala during high-pressure situations if we label and identify our emotions.
Try to focus on and label the emotional feelings you experience during chaotic moments to slowly and gradually free up your energy to think more clearly in the moment rather than getting caught up in the midst of it.
Control Your Inner World
Now that we’ve taken the steps to successfully disrupt the feedback loop, we can look to control our inner worlds by calming our bodily sensations. This can be something as simple as breathing in and out deeply and slowly for five to ten repetitions.
Having mentally caught ourselves breaking out of the feedback loop, we can now physically break out of it as a result of controlling our breath, which brings more oxygen into our blood flow. This increased volume of oxygen in your bloodstream, in turn, tells your body that it can decrease the intensity of your response to a chaotic moment or situation.
Reframe Your Mindset
By this point, you will have gone through two steps, or two layers, of interrupting the feedback loop which causes so many of us to panic in chaotic situations. Now, we can work towards reshaping your mindset to eliminate the emotional impulses that initiate the fight or flight response.
Let’s take a look back at step two when we were initially identifying our emotions. Over time, we will want to re-label our emotional responses from that of being negative to something positive, such as:
Pressured -> Alert
Anxious -> Excited
Worried -> Concerned
Overwhelmed ->Cautious
Fear -> Anticipation
By reframing your mindset as to how it perceives emotions, you’re able to control your brain and the amygdala to stave off the fight or flight response and instead call upon the idea that it’s a “be cautious and aware” situation or an “enjoy the ride” moment.
Putting it All Together
Over the course of time as you begin to reframe your mindset, take stock of how you’ve gained control of the speed at which you breathe and the speed at which your heart beats. Watch how quickly it will shift back down to a normal pace as you go through this cycle over and over again. Pretty amazing, right?
Now the other big question I’m sure you’re wondering is how long it’ll take to finally become calmer in chaotic situations. There’s no hard and fast answer as it could take months, years, or even decades depending on the individual, but I can assure you that the process and practice of trying to become a more calm individual in stressful situations is well worth the effort.
Life is inevitably difficult and impossible to predict with all the chaos and hardships that can, and will, get thrown our way. No matter how chaotic or crazy things get, we can all learn to stay calm by applying this four-step practice detailed above, any other supplementary practices such as journaling and meditation, and empowering ourselves to become masters of our own emotions.
Taking that crucial step back to assess matters from an outsider’s perspective is truly the golden pathway to find the calmness we all seek out in our lives. The more I realize how big of a theme that is in our personal development, it makes me wonder if I should finally break down the idea of being demotional - let me know down in the comments below!
As a preview of what being demotional is all about, I’ll leave it to one of my podcast guests, Shrada WTB, and what she would say about it:
Be in the now..
We can all create, identify, and mend the space that exists between ourselves and the issues we’re confronted with every day. By understanding our inner emotional workings and seeing the option to make choices every single day, we can ultimately choose to all live a happier life and find calmness and serenity in the midst of all the chaos.
“Mistakes and pressure are inevitable; the secret to getting past them is to stay calm.“ - Travis Bradberry
