Emotion Hacks: How To Stop Doom Spirals

Let’s not try to sugar-coat the obvious truth: Most of us are more stressed out than ever. While our specific sources of stress vary based on what’s happening in our individual lives, one thing we all share is that a lot of what keeps us up at night is totally out of our control.

The one thing we can manage, however, is our reaction to stress. Being able to regulate our strong emotions is an invaluable skill because they can affect not only our physical health, but also our most precious relationships.

So, when it seems like the world around us has erupted into flames and we feel that meme of the dog drinking coffee at his little table, eyes glazed over, saying “this is fine” — how can we actually mean it?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi-Johnson and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast — asked Ryan Martin, a psychologist, dean at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and the author of several books on emotions including his latest, Emotion Hacks.

Press play to hear the full episode and learn how to hack your emotions:

One aspect of emotional regulation that Martin emphasised is choosing healthy distractions (versus coping mechanisms that may do more harm than good in the long run). If we execute these correctly, they can save us from — or at least tone down — panic that tends to swell when stress gets the best of us.

The one common thread that runs through all four tools, as you’ll find, is to shift focus away from your stressor in order to army-crawl your way out of despair and find a calmer headspace.

Here’s what Martin suggests:

1. Phone a friend. Martin wholeheartedly endorses Raj’s go-to coping mechanism of calling (or hanging out with) a friend who can make you laugh. Feeling joyfully connected to another human during a high-stress time can help you feel better fast.

2. Have a visual security blanket. Having a rerun of your favourite show or even some cute pet reels bookmarked on your phone can serve as an emotional life raft when you need it most. “I actually save, on my computer, some sort of motivating clips from YouTube that I can just go check out every now and then when I’m feeling down,” Martin says.

3. Shift your mind’s focus entirely. “I recently started colouring. I am not a good artist, but I found that … my brain doesn’t like rest as much as I want it to,” Martin says. “So I started [colouring] for 10 minutes a day.” This activity, he explains, diverts his mind away from politics or work or whatever he’s stressing about and gives it something new to focus on. “It’s kind of like having a mantra.”

4. Get outside. Martin points to a wealth of data that finds just how wonderful being outside in nature can make you feel. One study took it a step further, suggesting that being in nature and focusing on an activity — in this scenario, it was bird-watching — can be even more helpful. “And that’s because [the people in the study] were giving themselves something to focus on,” he says. “Instead of being in nature but then still thinking about work, they were thinking about birds. … It doesn’t have to be birds. It could be identifying plants. It could be looking for animals.” But it gives you something to focus on besides your stress.

Martin reminded us that these healthy distractions — which are essentially tools to help ground you when you hit an overload of some kind — aren’t just meant to be emergency emotional triage (though they certainly can be). They work best when they turn into habits that you practice regularly.

However, Martin also pointed out that avoiding discomfort shouldn’t always be our goal.

“I want to be careful about the idea of encouraging just avoidance too regularly because avoidance can certainly lead to other kinds of problems,” he said. “One of the things that I do think is important is that people … do need to learn to sit with some discomfort sometimes. We need to get maybe a little better at challenging ourselves.”

Martin said the goal isn’t to experience so much discomfort that it “harms” or “re-traumatises” us, but enough that we can start to get used to the feeling and work through it.

“The most obvious example of this is oftentimes around politics,” Martin noted. “This is something that I find myself regularly getting angry about and sometimes to a point that it doesn’t feel healthy for me anymore to wallow in it too much.”

Still, Martin said he recognises that avoiding all current events wouldn’t be healthy for him either.

“There’s a point at which I need to engage with that sort of thing just to be an informed person and to acknowledge what people are going through. And so I’m always trying to sort of find that balance of exposing myself to things I know are going to make me angry … while also trying to take care of myself.”

We also chatted with Martin about other powerful mood hacks, how to shift our personal narrative, and the ways exercise does (and doesn’t) help improve our mood.

Listen to the full episode above or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more from Ryan Martin, head here.

Have a question or need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.