by Kelsey MacDonald

Maybe you are studying for final exams, preparing for the holidays, or are just overwhelmed with the mountain of responsibilities building up in your life. Despite the circumstance, we all experience times where the overwhelm of life’s demands exceeds our ability to cope. This can leave us feeling physically tense, emotionally depleted, and overly stressed as if we are drowning in a sea of to-do lists and commitments. It can feel like the total opposite of calm. 

Oftentimes, it can be difficult to sense, or even imagine, what calm feels like in our minds and bodies especially when we are in a state of anxiety, panic, or shut down. Calm is an innate emotion that is often defined by feelings of peace without experiencing agitation or worry.  However, feeling calm also includes being in a state of relaxation, serenity, or ease. It’s an emotion that each of us has the ability to experience in our everyday lives, and it doesn’t require waiting to catch a long break in our schedules or becoming a zen meditation master. 

Cultivating calmness only requires an awareness of how you’re feeling and a willingness to engage in practices that can elicit calmness within ourselves. So the question becomes, how do we actually have more calmness in our lives amidst the chaos and stress? Although there are many ways we can access calmness, we’ll talk about three separate ways we can help bring in more internal experiences of relaxation and a sense of ease.

1. Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness involves having a nonjudgmental awareness of our internal and external experiences. This includes having an awareness of our own thoughts, emotions, and body sensations as well as noticing what is happening around us in our environment. Mindfulness is known to be a helpful tool in reducing anxiety and depression as it can help us better manage difficult emotions through staying present. We can practice mindfulness through meditation exercises, taking a mindful walk, and even just by noticing our breath. The goal is to just notice our experience, no matter how many times we may get distracted or if our attention goes elsewhere. We can always come back to the here and now.   

2. Engage the senses: Using our senses can be a great tool to help with grounding in the present moment in order to help ease feelings of overwhelm. We can use our sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch. For example, let’s imagine you are taking a walk outside. What do you notice? You may notice the feeling of the hard ground underneath the sole of your shoe, the cold sensations on your cheek from the cool air, the sound of the leaves rustling, or the smell of a woodsy atmosphere. This is one practice out of many that we can use to help ground ourselves. Others include using the 5-4-3-2-1 method, putting your hands in cold water, feeling different textures, and smelling various scents that bring you comfort. 

3. Implement self-care: Self-care includes recognizing and honoring what we need while also acting on ways to meet those needs for our well-being. We can identify our self-care needs by looking at the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and professional areas of our life. Maybe you notice a need to engage more in your hobbies, increase your intake of water, move your body a little more, or spend some time with yourself. Whatever it may be, see if you can take the time to do the things you enjoy and to make the time to take care of you, even if it means you set a few minutes a day to focus on your self-care. 

Cultivating calmness means offering ourselves the space we need to experience a sense of relaxation and ease in some way. Even when life brings us various challenges, we can access calm for a moment by developing awareness of our own internal and external world, taking note of what we need, and honoring our well-being by engaging in self-care.