Another way to reduce reactivity is to practice meditation. Those of us who are overthinkers or worriers tend to resist meditation because we assume meditation involves stopping our thoughts. In actuality, meditation helps prevent you from reacting to your thoughts. When ideas and thoughts are floating through our heads, our instinct is to react to act upon them right away or add them to our never-ending to-do lists.
Meditation teaches us to let our thoughts come without the pressure that we need to act on them.

The next time you’re in a stressful situation and you feel like anxiety is taking over, try a simple grounding exercise to bring awareness to what’s going on around you. One of my favorite exercises for this is the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 grounding method. Simply focus around you and bring attention to:

• 5 things you can see
• 4 things you can touch
• 3 things you can hear
• 2 things you can smell
• 1 thing you can taste

This is a great technique to distract you from the stressful situation and bring your focus to your surroundings and the current moment.

If you want to feel calmer, try acting as a calm person would. Calm people:

Deal with problems as they happen
Calm people don’t endlessly anticipate problems. They promptly deal with problems once they occur rather than putting off handling issues. People who are bad at coping with stress tend to do a lot of worrying about problems before they happen, and then avoid dealing with problems that have actually occurred.

• Treat themselves kindly
  Calm people don’t beat up on themselves about their mistakes or weaknesses.
• Take bad luck in stride
  Calm people know that life will have ups and downs. They believe in their capacity to cope with bad luck and occasional things that go wrong.
• Stop and smell the roses
  Calm people pause to savor their successes and the good things they have in their life. Recognize that other people sometimes behave weirdly
  Calm people don’t overthink it when other people act strangely towards them. For example, if someone is a bit rude, they don’t assume it must be due to something they’ve done.
• Cut other people some slack
  Calm people don’t beat themselves up about their own mistakes and they also don’t set unattainable standards for others. They expect that even when other people do their best, there will sometimes be glitches.
• See the middle ground
  Calm people look for middle ground options rather than being all or nothing. For example, if they don’t have time to do all of a task, they’ll do a little bit rather than avoid getting started
• Stay active even when they’re feeling down
  Calm people will stay active when they’re feeling down. They won’t let five days of dishes build up. They know that they need to give themselves some emotional space to recover from sadness and disappointment, but they don’t go into complete sloth mode or cut themselves off from other people.
• React in proportion to events
  Calm people distinguish between genuine catastrophes and small blips or frustrations. They don’t make mountains out of molehills.
• Take time to chill
  Calm people utilize their downtime for relaxing rather than stuffing every spare minute with work—or spending their downtime worrying about the next thing that could do wrong.

Your body already has a built-in stress fighter: Your mind and your lungs.
In addition to focusing on your breath, try “grounding” yourself by taking stock of your surroundings and engaging your five senses. Tell yourself “I feel my feet are planted on the ground,” “I hear the television is on in the background” or whatever else you’re noticing about the present moment. This may help ease your stress.