Building Your 'Toolbox of Calm' For When You Need It Most

This is a highly practical, actionable episode from Ben, with advice, guidance and hacks to help busy-brained individuals like him develop their own 'Toolbox of Calm'.

Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, Ben encourages listeners to explore various approaches to calm, including writing, sensory experiences, and playful activities. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to start building their own toolbox of calm today.

Ben refers to a headache/stress cap available on Amazon below: 

https://amzn.eu/d/eSsqaDb

Takeaways

• Calm is learnable
• Finding personal strategies is essential for relaxation.
• It's important to adapt techniques to fit your unique brain wiring.
• Writing can help regulate emotions and clarify thoughts.
• Sensory experiences can enhance relaxation and calmness.
• Building a toolbox of options can support resilience.
• Exploring different environments can help find calm.
• Engaging in activities with others can enhance the experience of calm.
• Starting small can lead to significant changes in well-being.

Sound Bites

• "Calm is learnable."
• "You need to set the terms."
• "Find what works for you."

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Building Calm

05:54
Finding Personal Calm Strategies

10:14
Practical Tools for Decompression

16:57
Exploring Sensory Experiences

20:59
Building Your Toolbox of Calm

26:49
Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

Ben (00:01)
Hi and welcome to episode four of Something for the Busy Brain. Today is going to be a highly practical and actionable episode to help you build your own toolbox of calm. If something isn't working for you one day, you can try something else from your toolbox.

I'm going to give examples of some simple hacks that can help you switch off.

And I just like to start by saying, calm is learnable.

Sometimes we just need a little bit of help to start.

My reasons for recording this podcast are plentiful. And as I've communicated previously, my main reason was I'm a 50 year old adult. Well, actually you don't get a 50 year old child. So, well, I don't know. It depends which way you look at it, because I'm sure many people probably would describe me as a 50 year old child. Anyway, without going off on a further tangent.

I am a 50 year old adult with ADHD, a notoriously busy brain. And there are times when my brain works brilliantly for me. Times when I would challenge anyone to beat me when I'm in the zone, when I'm operating at my best. However,

A busy brain can often mean that you struggle to find calm. You struggle to relax. You can't switch off. And your brain is either ping-ponging around everywhere, or you've gone beyond that and you feel broken, numb, and don't really know how or how you feel or what to do.

If you're like me, then you might have a brain that is hardwired to seek out thrills, hits, excitement, sparkly things, dopamine chasing. There's always an itch that needs to be scratched.

Sometimes, like Christmas time, you can feel all peopled out. Your brain has been working at a hundred miles an hour and you've been out, you've been looking out for everyone else but yourself. And we're on that mental treadmill of people pleasing until we stop because we are broken.

But how do we swap fast-paced stuff for what we perhaps need most? Calm?

It's too easy to get caught up in the whirlwinds as I've done this Christmas. I'm as guilty as the rest of you, but it's important to find calm in a way that works for you.

This doesn't just apply to finding calm. It applies to a vast amount of problem solving and building a better life. You need to set the terms. You need to make things or life work for you. Some people will try yoga. Some people will try mindfulness, meditation, all kinds of therapy, sound bars.

Sometimes we try these things and we feel that they don't work for us. They might work for the people, but they don't work for us. That that internal noise is still ever present.

trick is asking yourself a simple question. How? How can I get this to work for me?

Most busy brained individuals that I've met are wonderfully creative and innovative, particularly when it's someone else's problem we're trying to solve. But we perhaps don't lean into that skill set enough for ourselves.

Maybe we should challenge ourselves more to stick with things.

Why is it so hard?

If you're like me, you might've had 50 years of being told, ⁓ don't do things that way. I don't understand why you don't get it. You're not good enough. We don't do things this way.

and end up believing that. End up believing that you simply aren't good enough.

You're just not good enough perhaps at making things work for your unique brain wiring. Maybe you do have a neurodivergent mind that's trying to make things work in a neurotypical world. So perhaps it's time to build that resilience and commit yourself to finding things that do work for you. And if they don't work, adapt them until they do work for you.

and try not to ask chat GPT. We're all guilty. Challenge yourself. And when you find something that works, you get to praise yourself, feel proud, learn about yourself. AI has its place. I use it a hell of a lot. But doesn't have a place in helping you think for yourself, being self-sufficient and developing that deeply human, emotional understanding of yourself and what you need.

Let me give you an example. And that example is how after 49 years, I finally learned how to relax in the bath. This might sound absolutely ridiculous to a lot of people, but I'm confident that so many of you will be able to relate.

For decades I've heard people say after a busy day, I think I'm just going to go home, have a nice chilled evening and run myself a nice hot bath. The concept always sounds lovely.

But the idea of relaxing in a bath was way beyond me.

You hear people do it. You see it on TV. Think of those Canberra's Chocolate Flake adverts. I think it was Chocolate Flake. Or was it Galaxy?

He knows.

There's the time genes again.

It looks great.

you see people relaxed in the bath. However,

I'd run my bath.

I'd lie there for a few minutes and don't get me wrong, initially I'd think, great, the hot water would start doing its thing. ⁓ hello, Bath. Two minutes later, I'm bored. I need to do something. I'm just wasting time. How long before I can get out?

and get really twitchy. Hello, busy brain is back. It's craving something else and I couldn't relax.

So, about a year ago, I started building on the crap bath experience. I tried podcasts to keep me in the bath.

Try music. Did work.

And that's okay. If you try something and it's not working for you when it might work for other people, don't feel guilty.

The key is exactly that. Find what works for you.

But what wasn't working? Well, I could only stay in the bath for two or three minutes. The bath felt uncomfortable. So I looked up bath pillows. Okay, with my ADHD, I naturally researched the arse out of finding the very best one for me.

Then step two, having a bath with the pillow. Nah, the brain was still busy. We're not done yet. I added bubbles to my bath and found a scent that I loved, a nice smell to make it more of a sensory experience. Yeah, this was starting to work a bit better. The heat of the water, the aromas, the comfort from my well-researched bath pillow. But then something new.

silenced my brain as I slowly sank into the bath, my ears tuned into the microscopic popping of bubbles around my head. With my brain feeling calmer, I then found myself adding breath work. In just a few minutes, breath work was working for me on a whole new level where it hadn't worked before. Breathing in through my nose, inflating the stomach like a middle-aged Buddha, not the chest.

diaphragmatic breathing, holding it briefly, then a long, slow audible breath out. Like the sea on the shore, whatever rhythm works for you, but the out-breath needs to be longer than the in-breath. Some might say 4-6 breathing, others 3-5, I go with a 2-4-12. Kids today would probably say 6-7. It's whatever works for you. Find your sweet spot, not someone else's.

You don't have to follow the rules. You can make your own up.

Now a bath is my calm place for as long as 15 to 20 minutes because I've invested in developing a way that works for me.

But you know what? Sometimes it's easier to talk these things through with other people. So you can think it through out loud.

When we're frustrated, we're not exactly in a problem-solving mindset. Surprise, surprise.

I learnt to relax in the bath last year. 49 years down the bloody road, I finally learnt how to relax in the bloody bath. When previously I hadn't been able to. But that's just my example. We can build calm into our lives if we can get it to work for us. I know I've said that a few times now.

But maybe start by thinking about where calm already exists in your life or where it has done in the past.

What do these things have in common? What environments are you in when you feel calm? What activities are you doing? Whose company are you in? What are you listening to? What are you feeling? When are those times that make you feel happy with yourself? Content? A peace? What gives you that time out? And we start with the things that have worked in the past.

would go to those times first of all.

And you might find, for example, you love reading, but you find you can only really get into them when you're on holiday somewhere warm and you can totally switch off on the beach. On the beach. So maybe mix it up. And instead of reading your book on the sofa or in your bed, maybe think about other environments where you can take yourself and read. I'm not talking about the toilet. My dad used to do that and it deeply disturbed me.

It doesn't matter how far-fetched your ideas are. If you can't get to that hot sunny beach, just explore, explore, explore. Run wild with ideas. Get friends to help you out. Talk it out. Use that support network of yours, or even journal for 10 minutes and see what comes out. But explore, explore, explore to get it to work for you. The more options we have, the more we experience.

The greater the chance of finding what does work, the more hopeful we become and the more resilient we become.

What do you want to try? and work for you.

Two practical decompression tools I use. Writing. Writing is an immensely simple way to regulate your emotions, to calm yourself. And let me give you an example. You set a 10 minute timer, no more. You get your pen, you get your blank piece of paper and you just write. You don't pause, you do not stop. Let your stream of consciousness flow through the pen.

and just see where it takes you. It might be that you're trying to unpack what on earth is going on inside your busy head. But just start. Do not let the pen lift off the paper, but set that timer for a set period of time and just write and write and write. And what you'll find is the pen can only move so fast. So if your brain is working overtime, the speed of the pen is naturally going to slow it down. It might be that you don't like writing.

So maybe that's not your thing. Maybe your thing is if you don't want to share things with other people and what's going on inside your head.

you might try voice recording. Maybe you could do exactly what I did with this yesterday, where I was sat recording this outside screw fixing Cardiff. Just recording a voice notes and unpacking and offloading what's in my head to see if there's any sense in there at all that I can use for the podcast.

We don't always have the luxury of having someone else with us as a sounding board. Someone to offload to. I'm a single parent and know what that's like. I know what that time inside your own mind can do to you sometimes, particularly if you're burnt out. But the restorative qualities of speaking and recording, even if you never play it back.

You can speak and record. Just hearing your voice out loud gives you that time and space to think, to make sense of things, hearing your own voice. It's not that dissimilar to having someone sat alongside you. As you speak, you're keeping yourself company is the only difference here. You're building self-reliance. You're equipping yourself with tools that can support you when too much is going on inside that head of yours.

You might have AI recording software so you can record yourself talking for as long as you want. And the AI can send you back a transcript of what you've said or bring some structure to what you've said and help you make sense of things and do some of the thinking for you if you're burnt out.

There are simple and free options out there to help us decompress, to help us switch off. These are just two examples of things that work.

things that could work for you. One or both of these will work for you. They might feel unnatural at first, but I challenge you to try them first.

So how do you find the calm? How do we switch off?

What other ways can we perhaps make calm more appealing to us? If you're like me, it's often hard switching off in front of the TV. I'm just following what's going on with the program. But my mind is constantly processing other things.

and I often miss the thread of what's going on. Sometimes I'm guilty of being on my phone because my brain is trying to work on something else at the same time as watching TV. Surprise, surprise. It doesn't work. I don't switch off.

But what find does work is I've been watching TV for the last six months with subtitles on. And I know I'm not the only household that does this, but I find it immensely useful in tuning in and being more present with a program. Sometimes I watch programs in a foreign language, so I have to watch the screen and the subtitles. But I find I'm often more into those programs because I'm watching

and reading and concentrating at the same time.

Now here's an interesting one for hot therapy or cold therapy and it involves... a head mask.

I think it's just a neoprene head mask.

but I'll provide a link in the episode description. You can heat it in the microwave and slip it onto your head and it just provides a nice light pressure around your face and your eyes or in the back of your head and it blocks the light out. So a bit of sensory deprivation there.

You can also, and this is my thing, you can also put it in the freezer or the fridge. So perhaps if you feel cold water therapy and jumping into ice baths is a bit too extreme for you, there's a step in between. And you don't even have to go beyond this.

think it costs 10 maybe 12 pounds. I put it on for 10 minutes and I have to concentrate so much when I first put it on because of the cold shock that I have to concentrate on my breathing.

But for me, it's often a sensory experience that works best for me. Excuse the sound of the cat crunching biscuits in the background if that comes through. But at least you can't see the messy washing and presence all over the place. Now I go through phases of having cold showers and that working for me. It's about

being really open and taking the time to explore, however crazy, how you can get things to work for you. How you can find that calm or maybe go crazy. Like I said, and with a friend, just think about all the other options that you have.

meditation.

mindfulness. It might be that you've tried these things, but you've tried them on your own. It might be that if you go to a class and other people are doing it and you make new friends and you build lovely connections and you have that shared experience and that accountability, that weekly commitment, that that becomes your time a week where you can find that calm as a collective.

swimming.

Swimming really works for me. It's one of the few times my brain is... ...mostly quiet. Again, it's a sensory thing. I'm in the water. The pressure from the water...

The sound, concentrating on my technique, concentrating on my breathing, I soon find I'm calming my thoughts, subconsciously processing things. All my thoughts are simply not there.

I would like you to build your own toolbox of care and repair options.

I want you to build up a toolbox of all the things that could work for you, however you want to record them. But start today.

Maybe think about those days you might feel like, ⁓ I don't know what I want. Those days when you're just too overwhelmed and you're feeling beaten. And sometimes you really don't know what's the best way forward. But if you've created a suite of options yourself,

You can turn to them and something might just stand out that you can do. And it could be as blissfully simple as having a pint of ice cold water or sticking your face in a basin of cold water. That might be just what you need for quick reset. It doesn't have to be an ice bath, but building a list of things, a list that you can turn to will really support that resilience.

that ability to bounce back. You'll find different things work better for different situations. It might be you wear ear loops to make noisy environments not so overstimulating for you and just dialing it back a bit so you can feel more in control of yourself.

Sometimes one of the best things we can do is get back to basics and get to know ourselves better. As I've covered previously, it helps us find our stabilizing or anchor words, words to live by. And we can use these words in discovering peace, calm and harmony.

The word playfulness. For me, I know a huge stress release is being playful. The more play I have, the more playful I am in my life, the more I'm the real me.

and I only have to think about being playful, mischievous, being the joker, the entertainer, testing children's imaginations, being the prexter. I only have to think about these things and it lightens my mind almost immediately.

So for me, my way of navigating things is often to think, okay, I'm trying this, this isn't working. What's missing? Is there any way I can take a more playful approach to this? And you find those words.

The yourself that will help you navigate life. Playfulness is one of my values, one of my core values, and is a critical anchor word for me.

That reminds me of who my authentic self is. When you're living your life authentically, aligned with your strengths and your values, that's a pretty happy and fulfilling life. Yes, that massively oversimplifies things.

But it's another way of bringing calm. I struggle with stress headaches. I've got a busy life as a single parent, running my households with my two kids, running my business and with significant care responsibilities for both my two parents. And those commitments aren't going to go away. So I need to find those things that keep me calm or calmer.

to help me find calm when I'm feeling overwhelmed.

I tend to think a lot and stress a lot during my sleep and I clench my jaw and this can bring about headaches in my temples and in the back of my neck.

And that could be tough.

But there are three things that help me the most. Swimming regularly.

It helps me process things and decompress. Being playful. It just floods my body with the happy chemicals. And the third thing is coaching. The feeling I get at the end of a coaching session when I see the difference it's made with my clients. That's a beautiful buzz. And that gives me a real sense of purpose. I want you to find your own words to live by. Your own calm places, your own restorative activities.

I want you to build your own toolbox of things that work for you in your way.

Let's create the support that works for you for the times you need it most. Even if you just start with 10 minutes today.

challenge you to do that. I know you can do it.

even if you feel that you can't.

But if you do want help, then please reach out. To me or another coach, let's set up a free discovery call.

and give ourselves half an hour to see what we can do together. I want you to succeed.

You can reach me at ben at goodtothinkdifferently.com.

That's me signing off.

And all I want to say is have a happy new year.

and

perhaps think about how you can make 2026.

work for you.

on your terms.

start today.

Bye-Zi-Bye!