How To Manage Stress Naturally With With Simple, Calming Tips From Dr. Dave Rabin
From channeling your inner child to humming a tune, his advice is refreshingly easy
Between seemingly endless to-do lists, tight budgets and health hassles (hello, menopause symptoms!), it’s no wonder so many of us feel stressed these days. If you’ve been wondering how to manage stress, there are ways to reduce your body’s stress response so you naturally feel calmer and more at peace. Good news: There are. Dave Rabin, MD, PhD, author of A Simple Guide To Being Alive, shares his best advice to help you do just that—including simple things you can start today.
How to manage stress naturally
Ready to give Dr. Rabin’s simple stress management techniques a try? Here’s how:
Practice bouncing back from stressors
It’s no secret that life comes with an unavoidable amount of stress. But a key part of navigating that stress isn’t trying to make sure it never happens. Rather, it’s making sure that if it does happen, you’re able to recover. Yes, we’re talking about resilience. If you feel like resilience has never come easy, Dr. Rabin suggests thinking about it less like something you naturally have and more like a skill you build over time. “The more you practice anything, the better you get at it,” says Dr. Rabin. “When it comes to resilience building, you have to practice bouncing back to bounce back better.”
Woman's World Answers
So how should you build that resilience? Focus on your senses. “Do a technique that reminds yourself that you’re safe in a situation that used to make you feel afraid,” says Dr. Rabin. He says leaning into sensory strategies is a great way to do this. Consider snuggling a pet while having a difficult conversation with someone, playing some music while doing a chore that you’d much rather avoid or paying attention to pleasant smells in your home (dinner in the oven, a candle burning in the living room) when you start to feel your anxiety building.
“Use somatic, body-focused things that send a message to your nervous system that says, ‘hey, I’m safe enough—I’m not actually running from a lion,’” he notes of soothing the body’s natural “fight-or-flight” instinct. Other helpful strategies he suggests include engaging in activities like spending time in a sauna or trying a cold plunge.
Take a deep breath
What’s the first thing that happens when you get anxious? For many of us, we start breathing faster. And that instinctive reaction makes sense, as Dr. Rabin says, “breath is fundamental to regulating your nervous system.” While we already know that deep breathing is soothing, the idea of “breath work” can seem complicated or overwhelming—especially in tense moments. So what should you focus on instead? Dr. Rabin says the key is taking a deep breath by choice rather than practicing an elaborate routine that feels like homework.
If you want a specific method to follow, he recommends the 5-1-5-1 breathing technique. To do it, inhale deeply for 5 seconds, hold for 1 second, exhale for 5 seconds, then hold for 1 second and repeat until you feel calmer.
Make time for play
If you feel like your inner child has never really left, you’ll love this tip. Dr. Rabin encourages you to find more time for play, one of the most enjoyable ways to naturally reset your body’s stress response. “The first step is just understanding that play is good for you,” explains Dr. Rabin. “Pleasure is good for you. It’s not self indulgence—you shouldn’t feel guilty while doing it.”
Then, create situations in your life to engage with play. He says this might look like hanging out with your grandkids and truly being present with them or making sure you’re still taking time to socialize with your adult friends—whether the activity you’re engaging in is playing pickleball or simply going on a walk together.
“Those all are enjoyable, fun, engaging experiences that help people be more present in the moment and not be thinking about the past or the future as much,” notes Dr. Rabin. “Our inner self-critic can go offline during those times.”
Lean in to ‘good stress’
As Dr. Rabin notes, not all stress is bad. It’s when that tension never alleviates that it becomes an issue.
“When stress is helping us, we grow from it,” says Dr. Rabin. “It might be challenging at that moment, but we get better as a result, we overcome it and we adapt. That’s what we call good stress. The opposite of that is chronic stress, or distress. Distress is stress we don’t grow from. We just feel trapped by it and overwhelmed constantly. Distress, over time, results in disease.”
By learning how to recognize good, short-term stress, it’ll help you realize that not every moment of tension is a reason to panic or harmful to your health.
Try these 2 daily rituals
Oftentimes figuring out how to soothe stress can feel like a herculean task. But the truth is that small daily habits can make all the difference. Two strategies Dr. Rabin recommends:
Get a pen
“First thing in the morning, write down the four pillars of self trust, which come from the Shipibo Indigenous tribal tradition,” says Dr. Rabin. “They include: self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion and self-love.
You don’t have to do anything with those words. You just write them down and it puts them into your consciousness to start the day. That simple ritual—30 seconds in the morning and 30 seconds at night—is enough to start the reframing process for the brain,” says Dr. Rabin.
Hum a tune
“You can’t ruminate when you’re humming, and rumination or negative intrusive thinking is one of the leading causes of anxiety for most people,” he reveals. “Humming and singing are really interesting techniques we don’t teach, but they are both profoundly effective at reducing anxiety in the moment and eliminating negative thoughts that cause a lot of distress.” So pick your favorite song and give it a try!
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