Let me take you to a bus in the mountains of Colorado.

This was early in the hardest season of my life, the one I've written about before. My whole world had come apart, and I was living in a bus on a friend's property. And I want you to picture the evening this story happened, because the setting was almost insultingly beautiful: the sun going down over the mountains, one of those Colorado sunsets that looks like God showing off.

And I was falling apart in front of it.

I honestly can't even tell you the thought that started it. Some memory surfaced, and it panicked me. I started crying, and then I did the thing so many of us do: I didn't like that I was crying. I didn't want to feel the feelings. I didn't want the memory. So I started fighting all of it, resisting my own body in real time. And of course, that drove me deeper. The harder I fought the wave, the bigger it got, until I was hyperventilating at the front of that bus, struggling to breathe, the gorgeous world outside the windshield getting darker at the edges.

Now, here's the confession that makes this article worth writing. At that point in my healing, I had just started learning about breathing techniques. Box breathing. Regulated exhales. And I want to be honest with you: I did not like them. I thought they were silly. I'm a doctor of psychology, for crying out loud. I wanted insight, understanding, breakthrough. Not counting my breaths like a kindergartner calming down from recess.

But standing at the front of that bus, freaking out, genuinely scared, I had nothing left. So I tried the silly thing. Big breath in through the nose. Longer, slower exhale out through the mouth. Again. Again. I even talked to myself like a children's book: "In with the good, out with the bad."

Maybe one minute. That's all it took. One minute of the ridiculous little breathing thing, and the world came back. My chest loosened. The darkness at the edges receded. I came back to the present, back to the sunset, back to my own body. And then, and this part matters, I let myself have the cry. Not the panicked, drowning cry from before. A clean, honest, grieving cry that actually finished.

I was sold. Not by a study. By a sunset and a bus and sixty seconds of the thing I'd been too proud to try.

First, Let's Talk About How You Survived

Before I hand you the menu of "silly" tools, I need to clear something out of the way, because it's the thing that keeps most people from ever trying them.

It's the shame. Not shame about what happened to you. Shame about how you coped with it.

The overeating. The drinking. The endless scrolling. The people-pleasing that let everyone walk on you. The shutting down. The staying too long in something that was hurting you. I've sat with hundreds of people who have made a strange kind of peace with their trauma but are still flogging themselves daily for their coping. "I can't believe I let myself get like this." "I should have been stronger." I carried my own version of that self-hatred for years.

So hear me say this as clearly as I can: survival is not a character flaw.

Every one of those strategies was a creative solution to an impossible situation. The food soothed a nervous system nobody taught you to soothe. The numbing turned down pain that had no other volume knob. The pleasing kept you safe in rooms where being yourself wasn't safe. Were they costly? Yes. Are they what you want running your life now? No. But they are evidence of one thing, and it's not weakness. They're evidence that you were determined to make it to today. And you did. You're here, reading this. Your survival strategies, for all their side effects, got you here.

You don't need to be ashamed of them. You need to thank them, and then gently tell them they're being replaced by something that costs less.

The Strange Irony Nobody Notices

Now watch this, because once you see it, you'll laugh.

We have zero embarrassment about our old strategies. A person will scroll their phone for four hours to escape a feeling and think nothing of it. They'll eat a sleeve of Oreos on autopilot, snap at their family, or shut down for an entire weekend, and none of it strikes them as strange. Why? Because it's practiced. Those strategies are decades old. They feel like home.

But suggest sixty seconds of slow breathing, and suddenly they're self-conscious. "That feels silly." Humming? "Weird." Shaking out their arms? "I'd feel like an idiot." Naming five things they can see? "That can't actually do anything."

Do you see the irony? We're embarrassed by the tools that work and completely comfortable with the ones that are wrecking us. Not because the new tools are actually strange, but because they're unfamiliar. Silly is just the feeling of doing something you haven't practiced yet. That's all it is. Every strategy you now do automatically felt awkward once too. You've just forgotten.

And here's the reframe that changed everything for me: these new tools aren't some foreign category of thing. They're survival strategies too. Same job your old ones did, calming a scared body, at a fraction of the price. No hangover, no shame spiral, no four lost hours. You already proved, over a lifetime, that you'll do whatever it takes to survive. I'm just offering you an upgrade on the equipment.

The Menu (And Why Each One Seems Odd)

So here's a sampler. My only ask is the one I'll explain after: don't judge any of these by how they sound. Judge them by what they do.

The long exhale. In slowly through the nose, then out through the mouth even more slowly, so the exhale outlasts the inhale. Why it seems odd: it's breathing, which you already do all day, so how could doing it on purpose change anything? Here's the gentle truth: your exhale is directly wired to the calming branch of your nervous system. A long, slow out-breath is the closest thing your body has to a built-in brake pedal. You're not doing something mystical. You're pressing equipment that was installed at the factory. This is the one that saved me in the bus.

5-4-3-2-1 grounding. Name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste. Why it seems odd: it feels like a children's game, and you're a grown adult in real distress. But panic lives in the past and the future, in memories and what-ifs. Your five senses only exist in the present. This exercise isn't a game; it's a forced change of address, walking your attention out of the memory and back into the room, one sense at a time.

Humming, or singing badly in the car. Why it seems odd: obvious. You're a serious person and humming is not serious. But there's a large nerve running from your brain through your throat and chest that acts like a master calm switch for your body, and the vibration of humming stimulates it directly. Monks have chanted for thousands of years. Mothers hum to babies on instinct. You're not being childish. You're being ancient.

Shaking it out. Stand up and literally shake: arms, hands, shoulders, legs, like a swimmer before a race. Why it seems odd: you'll look ridiculous, full stop. But watch nature: after a life-threatening chase, animals tremble hard and then trot off completely fine. Shaking is how bodies discharge the leftover emergency energy that stress dumps into your muscles. Your body already knows this move. We're the only animal too dignified to use it.

Cold water. Splash it on your face, run it over your wrists, hold a cold can to your neck. Why it seems odd: it sounds like a folk remedy your grandmother made up. But sudden cold on the face triggers a real, hardwired reflex that slows your heart rate within seconds. Your grandmother was right. She usually was.

Walking it off, with rhythm. A steady walk, especially outside, letting your arms swing. Why it seems odd: it's too simple to count. But rhythmic, side-to-side movement helps your brain process what it's carrying, which is part of why humans have always paced when upset and why your best thinking happens on walks. You're not avoiding the problem by walking. You're digesting it.

The Rules of the Experiment

Now, three rules, learned the hard way.

First, practice when you're calm. A technique you've never tried is hard to reach for mid-panic. I got lucky in that bus. Don't rely on luck. Do the silly thing once or twice on an ordinary Tuesday so your body knows the move when the storm comes.

Second, try several and keep what works. This is an experiment, not a prescription. The breathing saved me; maybe for you it's the cold water or the walk. Your nervous system is as particular as your taste in music. Nobody flunks this. You're just finding your songs.

Third, expect the "this is stupid" voice, and do it anyway. That voice isn't wisdom. It's unfamiliarity wearing wisdom's jacket. It said the same thing to me at the front of that bus, right up until the minute my world came back.

And one more thing, the thing I did after the breathing worked: let the feelings finish. These tools aren't for escaping your emotions. They're for getting regulated enough to actually feel them safely. The breathing didn't replace my cry that evening. It made a clean, honest cry possible. Calm first, then feel. That's the order.

King David, a warrior not known for being precious, wrote this: "I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother's milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me." (Psalm 131:2, NLT) Three thousand years ago, the giant-killer was describing self-soothing and putting it in Scripture without a hint of embarrassment. If calming and quieting yourself was dignified enough for David, I think you and I can survive looking a little silly in the kitchen.

A Practice for This Week

Pick two from the menu. Just two. Do each one once while you're perfectly calm, this week, as practice reps. Yes, it will feel odd. That's the unfamiliarity leaving your body.

Then, when a hot moment comes, and one will, reach for one of your two. Give it a full sixty seconds before you judge it. Afterward, rate it honestly: did anything shift, even five percent? Keep what works. Trade what doesn't for something else on the menu next week.

You spent years perfecting survival strategies that cost you a fortune. You can afford sixty seconds on one that's free.

If This Is Your Story

If you read the bus scene and recognized yourself, the fighting of your own feelings, the shame about how you've coped, the suspicion that the simple tools can't possibly help someone as complicated as you, I wrote a whole book for you. It's called You're Not Crazy, You're Traumatized, and the audio course is every chapter read by me, including the ones about the strategies I'm least proud of and most grateful for.

Get the You're Not Crazy, You're Traumatized audio course here

Or text me at (303) 435-2630 or email [email protected] and tell me which technique your "this is stupid" voice is loudest about.

Comment challenge: which one on the menu sounds the most ridiculous to you? Say it out loud in the comments. Then go try that exact one first. Report back. I'll be in the comments with you, humming.