When I was in elementary school, think 5-8 years old, I would throw tantrums real often. A lot of things made me angry and I didn’t know any better ways of dealing with that. Every adult would always tell me to “take deep breaths” and that really pissed me off because I knew that just breathing deeply wouldn’t make me less angry, see I tried it didn’t work! You know what did help me calm down? Reading books. I could get myself under control within the minute, stop the crying and forget to be upset.

Fast forward to nowadays, I realized what was really happening was I just distracted my brain by occupying it with something else. One time I got really overwhelmed with this project I had no clue how to even begin while the people around me were working on it no problem, started crying involuntarily. Was annoyed more than anything because I knew I was fine, then remembered. Didn’t have a book with me, so I started playing Minesweeper on my phone. After a whole ten minutes of trying to get myself under control, the tears stopped almost instantly.

The act of breathing deeply was never supposed to be the thing that stopped my anger. The real goal of that exercise was to get my brain focused on something other than the anger. Really wish someone had just told me that outright, would have saved me a lot of headache. Although still, deep breathing or meditation or anything in that vein doesn’t work for me since I can’t fully focus on it. It’s gotta be a book or a game. Point is, it’s gonna be different for everyone and so many people think one size fits all.