 Of all the different things that you can do to support someone who is anxious or worried or panicking or angry, one of the most effective though perhaps most challenging to master is actually to be calm yourself. So to respond to that anger or anxiety or panic with calmness. And the reason for that is pretty cool. It's to do with neurobiology. I love a bit of neuroscience. Essentially we have what's called mirror neurons in our brain and they mean that we respond to other people and our bodies kind of fire in similar ways to their bodies are firing. So if we are with someone who is anxious, angry, kind of you know, things are tricky for them, then things begin to feel tricky for us. But if we're with someone who's calm, then things begin to feel calmer for us. Now the issue with this, and I've mentioned this recently in other videos, is that if we're anxious and the person that we're with is anxious, then our anxiety kind of, yeah, butts off each other and we become more and more anxious between us and that's really challenging. And what we want to do is to co-regulate, to calm things down and to help the person we're supporting to feel less anxious. So this is about us being calm so that their mirror neurons have a chance to respond to our calm. Now we can't walk into situations of distress when someone else is overwhelmed and not managing and just become, not unless we're like a sociopath or something. So we need to learn strategies in order to create calm or at least present calm so that the person we're supporting can respond to our calmness with their calmness and things begin to calm. And then what we find is as they calm, our mirror neurons respond to their calm and it's a virtuous cycle. So it's a good thing. There are lots of different things that you can do in terms of creating the calm for yourself. My favorites are to have some broken record phrases and to say those in our slow, low, low voice so that's slowing down our speech, lowering the tone and lowering the volume because that's what calm sounds like. So slow, low, low and broken record phrases are just phrases that you feel really comfortable saying. Perhaps you know the person you're supporting well and you know these are phrases they want to hear they might be around you're safe it's okay I've got you or you've managed to get through this before you can get through it again or we just need to get through the next minute. There's all sorts of different phrases you can use and I've got other videos on that but having phrases that you've practiced so you're not having to find them at a time of worry and distress is really helpful. So those are helpful things slow, low, low and your broken record phrases and then the other thing I find really, really super helpful is to work through kind of scripted grounding or breathing exercises. So you might for example talk someone through five finger breathing where we breathe in as we move up the finger and then we pause and then we breathe out and we pause and we work our way around our hand or you can use your box breathing where we breathe in for the counter four hold for the counter four out for the counter four hold for the counter four and carry on so there's those kind of ones there's all sorts of different breathing exercises find one that works for you learn it and use it in those moments and do the breathing yourself and encourage the other person to do it and things will come or walk really being kind of helpful here or you can talk through other kind of grounding exercises so a favorite for me here is five four three two one where we draw on our senses and we look for five things we can see we listen for four things we can hear we try and name three things that we can smell and you work through the senses it doesn't matter in more order but the the key thing here is again you're talking through a scripted exercise and you're doing so trying to seem calm supportive in control so this calms you as well as the person that you're supporting all sorts of other mindfulness and grounding and calming and relaxation exercises could work here it's about finding what works for you and then just leaning on that as much as you need to again and again and again each time the more that you practice these strategies and these scripted techniques the easier you will find to draw on them in times of distress and remember what you're looking to do here is to convey that sense of calm to really calm things down that the other person that you're worried about know that you're calm you're in control you've got this and they will respond in turn and in time by calming in response which in turn will calm you you'll find that the situation begins to calm if in doubt and if things begin to go wrong remember this know that your mirror neurons and their mirror neurons will mean that if you are distressed by their distress that things will just get worse so if you need to take time out you could just take 30 seconds as long as you know that they're safe if you just need to walk away for a moment and compose yourself and put on your game face and go back to the situation that's okay that may mean that you're able to better manage the situation or sometimes it may be that you need to pass the baton on to another adult who takes over and perhaps you might need to kind of take it in turns depending on the level of distress in your ability to cope in the situation so the most effective way I think of helping someone to calm when they're distressed angry anxious or otherwise struggling is if you can to be or at least present as calm calm response to calm with calm give it a go let me know how it works for you what goes wrong what you need more help on and I'll see you next time and goodbye from the walk as well say bye-bye mark