3 Easy Ways to Cool Down in an Emotional Crisis

When was the last time you totally lost it? And by “it,” I mean your sense of calm, ability to reason, and maybe even your perspective.

Perhaps you got into a heated argument, suffered injustice at work, got swindled out of a lot of money, or got cheated on by a romantic partner. What thoughts were running through your mind? What emotions did you feel? What was happening in your body, and what did you do with it? In other words, how did you handle this emotional crisis?

No one is immune from emotional crises

I know that I’ve found myself spiraling—no one's immune. There was a time, at the depths of my dissertation-writing despair, when a single unsuccessful statistical analysis led to an avalanche of regret, anger, sadness, and self-doubt. I found myself crying in my windowless office, convinced that I had wasted my entire adult life on the white whale of science.

In the moment, it can be impossible to see the big picture.

Eventually, things were okay—I published my dissertation, got my Ph.D., and continue to cultivate a healthy relationship with science. But in the moment, it was impossible to see the big picture. There are other times when I experienced awful injustice. In those times, it wasn’t my loss of perspective that hurt; it was uncontrollable forces that plunged me into crisis mode. That felt intense too, like an unstoppable welling up of white-hot tension that made me want to throw nice, breakable things.

We may have pretty good ideas about how we’d like to approach an emotional crisis. We envision ourselves calmly taking stock of the situation, making reasonable arguments and fair negotiations, weighing pros versus cons lists, and tying up everything nicely with a step-by-step problem-solving plan. In reality, it's not so easy to “keep calm and carry on” when it feels like your hair is on fire, or like the ground just dropped from beneath your feet.

The trick may lie in using our physical bodies.

To regulate emotions, you have to get out of your head

Emotion regulation is a complicated business. There's a whole sub-field of psychology that studies how we stabilize our own out-of-control emotions, whether it’s through cognitive strategies like reframing our thoughts, or more spiritual strategies like cultivating mindful acceptance.

We won’t go into the whole list of strategies researchers have studied, but I think it’s worth highlighting the almost-magical power of using our bodies to regulate our minds. So, let's review three body-oriented tips, and the science behind them, to learn how to survive an emotional crisis.

These tips are borrowed from...

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