In 30 seconds, you could feel less stressed.
Sometimes I’m sitting in the office feeling intense pressure. I’m stressed and too busy to take a break. There’s a deadline looming. There’s no time to go outside for a walk. I can’t even take 10 minutes to meditate. This is what I do.
- Control my vision
When we’re stressed, our pupils dilate. The shape of our eye lens changes. We go into ‘tunnel vision.’
We can relax very quickly, however, by unfocusing our vision. Instead of staring at this word on the screen, expand your vision to take in the whole computer screen, now the wall behind the screen, now the whole room, including the space above you, below you, and on both sides.
By consciously shifting our vision to a relaxed state, we are signaling to our body that we are not stressed. There is no fight or flight. This physical response makes us feel less stressed, and it happens quickly.[1]
- Breath slowly from my abdomen
The natural way to breathe is from your abdomen. Your stomach should expand, your chest should barely move, and your breath out should take longer than your breath in.
When we’re stressed, our heart rate tends to increase. We breathe faster. When we’re stressed and not exercising, we breathe more shallowly.
To calm down, I slow my breathing and remind myself to breathe from my abdomen. I don’t try to take super ‘deep’ breaths, I just make sure that I’m not breathing too quickly, that the air is expanding in my abdomen, and that I’m breathing out more slowly than usual. Thirty seconds later, I’m feeling a lot calmer.
Abdominal breathing research
Research supports the idea that this type of breathing can help people feel calmer. A 2018 study found that men who were instructed to breathe out for six seconds while breathing in for four seconds caused changes in their heart rate variability, and activated their parasympathetic nervous function—a network of nerves that relaxes the body after periods of feeling stress.
A different 2018 study found that participants who were instructed to perform slow abdominal breathing for two minutes before beginning a 30-minute business decision-making test answered a higher number of the questions correctly than the control group, suggesting that performing this breathing might not only make you feel better but temporarily improve your decision-making ability.
Feel better; keep billing
If you can do these two things for thirty seconds, even while you may be typing away, there’s a good chance that you’ll feel less stressed.
Wishing you a productive work session, with less stress and better decision-making, as you keep working on your LawyerBody.
P.S., better sleep may also make you feel less stressed, so check out this post if you don’t already have a sleep routine that helps you get to sleep quickly.
[1] I learned this technique from Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman, who describes how you can reduce your stress response by changing the way that you view your environment, regardless of your current surroundings.
