There was a stretch during my illness where my brain would spiral the second I woke up. Pain, fear, the mental list of everything that might be wrong with me. By the time I trained as an NLP master practitioner, I realised something that changed how I coach: you don't have to wait for your circumstances to calm down before your mind can.
NLP gets a bad rap sometimes, like it's a stage hypnotist's party trick. Underneath the jargon, it's really just a toolkit for noticing how you build your own thoughts and feelings, and then changing the pattern on purpose. Once you can see the machinery, you can adjust it.
Here are three techniques I use with clients (and myself) when stress or worry takes over.
Anchoring: giving your body a shortcut back to calm
Anchoring is based on something simple. Your body links physical sensations to emotional states. Think about how a certain song can drop you straight back into a memory, good or bad, before you've even registered why.
You can use that on purpose. Next time you feel genuinely calm and grounded, maybe after a walk, a hot shower, a moment with your kids, press your thumb and middle finger together and hold it for ten seconds while you really feel that state. Do this a handful of times over a week or two, always pairing the same gesture with the same calm feeling.
What you're doing is building a shortcut. Once it's wired in, you press those same two fingers together in a stressful moment and your body starts remembering the calm state instead of the panic one. It sounds too simple to work. I was sceptical too, until I used it in a waiting room before a specialist appointment that used to send my heart rate through the roof.
Reframing: changing the meaning, not the facts
This one I use constantly, both for myself and with clients who are stuck in a loop of catastrophic thinking. Reframing isn't about pretending things are fine when they're not. It's about noticing that the facts of a situation and the meaning you've attached to them are two different things, and you have more say over the meaning than you think.
When I was deep in my illness, "I can't get off the couch today" used to mean I was failing, that I was weak, that I'd never get better. Same facts, different frame: "my body is asking for rest so it can fight what's happening inside it." Nothing about my situation changed. What changed was the story I was telling myself about it, and that story was doing as much damage as the illness itself.
Try it with whatever's worrying you right now. Write down the situation in one line. Then write three different ways you could honestly interpret it, not toxic positivity, just genuinely plausible alternatives. Usually one of them lands differently in your body straight away.
Stepping outside the timeline
This is a technique I lean on heavily now as a timeline therapist, and it's brilliant for worry specifically, because worry is almost always your brain living in an imagined future.
Close your eyes and picture the thing you're worried about as if you're watching it happen on a screen a few metres in front of you, rather than being inside it. Notice you're the one holding the remote. You can pause it, make the picture smaller, turn the volume down, even push it further away on an imaginary timeline until it's small and distant.
This isn't about denial. It's about breaking the fusion between you and the worry, so your thinking brain can come back online instead of staying flooded by your stress response. I use a version of this with clients before big medical appointments, tough conversations, or when the 2am spiral hits and won't let go.
Why this matters more than you'd think
None of these techniques fix the actual problem sitting in front of you. What they do is get your nervous system out of fight or flight long enough for you to think clearly and make good decisions, which is exactly what you need when you're dealing with chronic illness, a stressful diagnosis, or just the relentless mental load of being a mum.
This is a big part of what sits inside the MINDSET pillar of the Mojo Method. Nourishing your body and moving well matter enormously, but if your mind is stuck in a stress loop, none of that gets to do its job properly. I've watched clients change their whole trajectory once they had a handful of tools to regulate their state on the spot, rather than white-knuckling through it.
If this is something you want more support with, it's exactly the kind of work we do together in private coaching, or you can get a taste of it inside Mojo Detox. Either way, pick one of these three and try it this week. You don't need to believe it'll work. You just need to try it.
