1)  Slow Down – That fight or flight response speeds us up.  Under the influence of an adrenaline rush, our thoughts race, our bodies tense, and blood flows shift to the motor areas of our brains.  When we sit still, breathe deeply and slowly, and focus our attention, we slow down the body’s fight or fight responses.  Cooling down when events heat up is a great way to stay mindful and planned.  The best way to cool panicky feelings is to keep the body in a chilled state incompatible with those feelings.

2) Treat Emotions As Information – Your emotions are either telling you about a genuine threat in the world or a perceived one.  The key is sorting those two out.  If you can stay mindful and use the emotion to trigger an analysis of the situation, you can either appropriately act on the threat or remind yourself that your reaction is more to the past than the present.  When you treat emotions as information, you go into information processing mode, not blind action mode.

3)  Rehearse To Perfection – Too often we step onto life’s stage without proper rehearsal.  Any situation that generates a threat response can be mentally rehearsed through vivid visualization.  If we can keep ourselves chilled when we imagine stressful situations and visualize ourselves acting constructively, we create new mind-body connections that eventually carry over to real life.  If you conquer a fear 20 times in vivid mental rehearsals, it’s much harder to overreact to the 21st situation that occurs in real life.