The science behind the body’s stress response tells us that all we need to do to shut down a stress reaction (the body’s own “hissy fit”) in its tracks is to take slow, deep breaths. It’s important to begin this process as quickly as possible once the stress response has us in its grip, because the stress response is very costly and very wasteful if there isn’t a real life-threatening emergency going on.

Frequent “alarm reactions” in our body make us like a country with a fantastic defense system that gets triggered every time a pigeon flies across the border. After just a few such false alarms, the defense system gets fatigued and its ability to protect us from a real emergency is compromised. But more seriously, there’s no money left in the national economy for anything but military spending.

If you were the president of this country, your biggest priority would be to fix the problem at the source, so that pigeons wouldn’t trigger the army, navy, air force, marines and coast guard to deploy all their resources again and again. But revamping the early warning system takes time.

Until that job is complete, your  goal is to alert the armed forces as soon as possible that it was just a pigeon, not a hostile invader. Ideally, you’d want them to get the news telling them to relax a split second after the initial alarm, before any resources were wasted.

That’s your job as the president of your body. Calibrating the alarm reactions to real emergencies only is a long-term job, called meditation. It’s crucial, but it’s slow work. The important quick-fix you can implement right now is to shorten the time between your hissy fit and your relaxation.

The way to do that is to train yourself to recognize and short-circuit your personal stress response.