How to stay calm in 'Stressful' situations By Anette Martinsen

‘Stress’ is just a word that means feelings, and by releasing all our negative feelings we can be totally calm and happy. By learning some simple tools that you can incorporate into your life you will become calm.

Do people ‘make’ you feel not good enough, angry, guilty, annoyed, unloved or left out? The people that do that are just facilitators or, as I call them, ‘button pushers’. They are there to show you the areas in you life that need looking at. We cannot blame anybody for the way we feel because nobody can make you feel anything - people just push your buttons. These buttons have been programmed to go off all the time, but sadly we do not wake up and do something about it. Sometimes we never look at why we feel the way we do or where it comes from.

This is our wake-up call - it is time to take responsibility for our lives.

We have to own up to our feelings; we cannot blame others for how we feel. ‘You make me feel angry’ or ‘you make me feel unhappy’ does not work as these are our feelings, and saying that only makes the other person feel guilty and angry. We must stop blaming everyone else for how we feel and take responsibility for our feelings.

The feelings we have need to be expressed all the time, otherwise they build up in our subconscious mind and they will get trapped in our bodies causing us physical ailments. Unexpressed feelings will cause all sorts of problems in our bodies like ulcers, migraines, weight gain, and even disease. Trapped feelings in the subconscious can cause fears, phobias, depression, lack of self-esteem and more.

Learn simple tools for lasting happiness.

There are 2 methods of doing this:

• The Out Loud Method
• The In Your Mind Method

Both methods are just as good.

The Out Loud Method

This means that basically you release your feelings as they happen - Out Loud!

For example: When you are driving in your car and someone cuts you up, you shout ‘I feel angry’ instead of screaming abuse at that person. When you feel angry, say out loud ’I feel angry’.

When you are sitting in your car, say out loud: ‘I feel angry, I feel angry, I feel angry, I feel angry’ until the feeling feels calm and you do not feel angry any more.

Then notice if you have any other feelings after anger; perhaps you feel frustrated. Then say you feel frustrated: ‘I feel frustrated, I feel frustrated’, etc. until that feeling also feels calm. You may notice that there are many feelings that come up. Just feel and say each one out loud until they all feel calm. This could take a few minutes.

Try this at home with your kids. When you ask them to do something like tidy up their rooms or do their homework and they don’t – notice how you feel…First you will feel angry, then frustrated, then irritated and maybe annoyed and then right at the bottom of the feelings you will find ‘I feel not good enough’. So go through each feeling one by one saying them out loud until each one feels calm.

One client said to me once: ‘I don’t really feel anything except anger’, so I asked her to close her eyes and then tell me how she feels. I wrote down 39 feelings and she was very shocked at the amount of feelings she had and that there were in fact so many feelings that existed.

The In Your Mind Method

I use this method all the time when I cannot share my feelings with anyone because it is not appropriate, for example, when I am talking to the bank manager, a teacher at school or a friend.

It is exactly the same as above, but you say it in your head so you hear it as if you are talking to yourself and nobody else can hear what you are saying. It is fantastic because nobody can see or hear what you are doing and you stay calm at all times.