Emergency Drills for Your Mind!
The Emergency Drill Practice Prepares you for Stress, Overwhelm and/or Crisis!
You wouldn’t wait until your house is on fire to learn how to use a fire extinguisher. And yet, that’s what many of us do with our minds and nervous systems. We wait until we’re deep in anxiety, spiraling in a panic attack, or totally overwhelmed before reaching for tools. But in those moments, it’s harder to access what we haven’t already practiced. Just like fire drills train the body to move on autopilot in emergency situations, mental and energetic drills train your system to respond calmly and clearly when everything feels like it’s falling apart.
Why you need “Inner Drills” BEFORE the Crisis Hits:
Stress, overwhelm, and trauma activate our survival brain. We go into fight, flight or freeze. Logic shuts down. Breath gets shallow. Energy scatters. Even the most grounded, spiritual person can lose access to their inner tools if they haven’t built a strong neural and energetic pathway to them. This is where mental and energetic rehearsals, also known as emergency drills for your mind, come in. When practiced regularly, these drills help you respond instead of react. They create a familiar route back to your center, so that even under pressure, your system knows the way home.
What Do These Drills Look Like? They can be as simple or deep as your needs allow. Here are a few foundational ones that flow cohesively together:
Acknowledge the Alarm: In the case of anxiety, spiraling in a panic attack, totally overwhelmed, and/or even physical danger, the body goes into survival mode. That’s normal. The key is to interrupt panic with presence. Instead of trying to calm yourself completely, focus on naming the moment with clarity to engage the thinking brain: “This is happening and I’m here.” “I feel the fear and I choose to stay aware.” I need to act not react.” This split-second naming redirects your awareness from pure reaction to grounded response. It slows down the nervous system just enough to give you access to your instincts, higher thinking, and choice. Even if not physical danger, just naming your emotion will help create neural space and interrupt the emotional response. Examples of these statements are: “I am stressed, I am overwhelmed, I am hurt, I am upset, I am irritated, I am angry - any emotion you are feeling, name it.
Be Your Own Coach (Conscious Self-Talk): This is an automatic flow straight from step #1, once you have named your emotion, realize it is valid. Whatever you’re feeling is real and deserves acknowledgment, which is part of the reason for naming it. If it needs to move, let it. Cry. Sigh. Shake it out. Make sound. Don’t suppress it. Don’t shame it. This isn’t about bypassing what’s real. It’s about making space so your body doesn’t hold the tension and your mind doesn’t spin out in loops. Once the charge has moved a bit, that’s when the next drill begins. This is the moment to shift into your inner coach voice, the one who knows how to hold presence in the storm. Because in most stressful situations, our default inner dialogue is reactive and harsh: “I can’t do this.” “This always happens.” “What’s wrong with me?” But imagine someone you love was going through the same thing. What would you say to them? That’s what you now say to yourself. Try this: “Okay, breathe. It’s okay to feel this way. You’re allowed to feel it and you’re going to move through it.” “This is hard, but it’s not bigger than you. You’ve handled hard before.” “You’re not alone. One breath, one step, one choice at a time.” “We’ve got this. Let’s stay present. We don’t need the whole solution, just the next right move.” You can say this out loud or internally. What matters is the tone, calm, grounded and clear, like a mentor who believes in you and won’t abandon you. And like any drill, practice it with the small stuff, not just the emergencies. Use it when you're running late, navigating a conversation, or juggling too many tasks. Build that muscle, so when the real alarm sounds, your inner voice doesn’t spiral, it rises. This isn’t fake positivity. It’s emotional leadership. It’s mental discipline without suppression. And it’s one of the most powerful ways to return to center and stay there.
Breath Reset: After talking to yourself, the next step is to focus on your breathing. Bring your awareness to your breath, then make sure you are belly breathing. Belly breathing (also known as diaphragmatic breathing) is essential because it signals safety to your nervous system. When you're stressed or triggered, your breath often becomes shallow and trapped in the chest — reinforcing the fight-or-flight response. By consciously breathing into the belly, you send a message to your entire system to reset and calm down. To ensure you are belly breathing, place one hand on your belly and one on your chest. Inhale slowly through your nose, allowing the belly to rise while keeping the chest relatively still. Exhale through your mouth and let the belly fall. Repeat this a couple times to anchor your awareness. Once you’ve settled into belly breathing, shift into a vagus nerve breath (see my post for more information) or box breath to further regulate and stabilize your system. Box and vagus nerve breathing are simple and effective ways to reset your mind and nervous system. These breaths bring structure to your breath and engages your focus, which helps calm mental loops and energetic static. Here’s the pattern for box breathing: Inhale for 4 counts; Hold for 4 counts; exhale for 4 counts; hold for 4 counts ~ Repeat for 4 rounds (or longer if needed), always breathing into the belly slowly and steadily. Over time, practicing either of these breath patterns create a reliable pathway back to calm. Your system begins to associate it with safety, clarity, and presence, making it easier to access even when stress hits hard. These breaths are medicine, and it works best when it's familiar. Practice it when you're calm, so it's available when you’re not.
Central Channel Grounding: Breathe into your belly. Now that you are centered, picture/visualize, imagine a white golden light above your head. Feel your crown open to Source and see the white golden light above. Now, inhale that light and breathe it down into your central channel (your central channel is the main energetic pathway that runs vertically through the center of your body, from the crown of your head down through your spine and out the root). Then feel your root drop into Earth. Feel your spine hold it all. It connects Source energy above and Earth energy below, anchoring you in both realms while aligning your physical, emotional, and spiritual systems. When you ground through the central channel, you're not just stabilizing your energy, you're opening the flow between your higher wisdom and embodied presence. It's how you become the bridge between heaven and earth, centered, sovereign and aligned. This is a return to what’s always been there. Your vertical alignment. Your central channel. Your power to ground, from the inside out.
Anchor a Pure Happy Memory: In a moment of stress or crisis, your brain wants to loop fear. Your job is to interrupt that, not with denial, but with deliberate redirection. One powerful way to do that is with a pre-loaded memory of joy, a touchstone of true happiness that can instantly shift your emotional frequency. Here’s the key: this memory must be clean, no emotional aftermath, no complications, no caveats. Let me explain: if you had asked me years ago, prior to my spiritual awakening, to name my happiest moment, I might have said the day my son was born. But the truth is, that experience was wrapped in trauma — 23 hours on Pitocin to induce labor because my water broke, an emergency c-section, and a near-death experience in the operating room. Yes, his arrival brought joy. But the moment as a whole wasn’t pure happiness. It was a mix of intensity, fear, and survival. That’s not the kind of memory you want to reach for when you're rewiring your nervous system or practicing emotional resilience. Instead, choose something that’s simple, joyful, and energetically clean, no hidden grief and no unresolved pain. It might be: a warm hug from someone you love, a sunny afternoon on the beach, the sound of hummingbirds at your feeder, a peaceful walk in the woods, or maybe watching squirrels play outside your window. Whatever it is, immerse in it fully. See it. Feel it. Smell the air, hear the sounds, remember how your body felt in that moment. Let it flood your system and then intentionally file it away in your mental library under “Happy Moment.” Visit it daily, even if briefly. Make it so familiar that when stress hits and you say “Go to a happy place,” this one shows up automatically. It becomes a neural shortcut to peace, safety, and self-regulation. Make is that you have practiced it so often that your system knows exactly where to go when the alarm rings.
Math or Counting: When your nervous system is activated, whether you're anxious, overwhelmed, or spiraling, one of the fastest ways to bring yourself back into the present moment is by engaging the thinking brain. Simple counting or math requires focus and logic, which helps pull you out of the reactive emotional centers of the brain and back into regulation. This isn’t about solving complex equations. It’s about interrupting the pattern. Here’s a few ideas/options: Basic Counting Backwards ~ Pick a number (like 100) and count backwards by 1s, 2s, 3s, or even 7s. Name 5-4-3-2-1 with Numbers ~ instead of objects, do 5 even numbers, 4 odd numbers, 3 multiples of 3, 2 square numbers and 1 number that feels “safe” to you. Math Puzzles ~ ask yourself what is 2 x 2, and go all the way through the twos table, or what is 144 ÷ 12, and go through all the twelves. This occupies your mind just enough to shift focus away from panic and into rhythm. These micro-exercises break looping thoughts, restore a sense of control, and reroute mental energy. If done consistently, they become a reliable way to “snap out” of reactive states and reengage your executive function. Bonus Tip: Combine with breathing. For example, every time you say a number, breathe out. This links the drill with nervous system regulation.
The Point Isn’t Perfection, It’s Familiarity
The goal of these drills are not to never get overwhelmed. It’s to reduce the time you spend stuck there. Each time you practice, you create energetic and neurological pathways. And over time, these drills become muscle memory. Just like athletes visualize and rehearse before the game, you can rehearse clarity, regulation, and grounded presence so that when life throws its curveballs, your system doesn’t freeze. It flows. Do them all together, or pick your favorite, the most important thing is to do it and practice!
Practice Under Peace!
You don’t practice drills because something bad will happen. You practice so that if something does, your system is prepared, not panicked. This is what it means to live in conscious alignment with your energy system. It’s not about bypassing challenge, it’s about becoming anchored within yourself, so you can meet whatever arises with clarity, steadiness, and truth.
