Box breathing.

On my lunch.

30 minutes to decompress, eat, recenter, and calm.

A tool I constantly forget is box breathing.

Box breathing — inhaling for four seconds, holding it for four seconds, then exhaling for four seconds—has been a wonderful nervous system reset for me especially in times of nervousness.

Maybe I’m about to try to do something I’ve never done before, I come across a crush, or I’m just feeling anxious and don’t know why. Taking four or five of these intentionally drawn out breaths is physiologically grounding.

It’s simple enough and that’s probably why I forget it so often.

I once heard Matthias Barker, a psychotherapist, share in a video: “We want a solution [to our mental illness, struggle, or trauma] that is as intense as the distress…[but] healing is never as intense as the pain.”

I think often I dismiss some tools because they’re too simplistic and something as basic as breathing couldn’t possibly stand up to the mountain of complex nerves I have.

It would do me a lot of good to take this at face value:

Simplistic solutions can still be effective.