When anxiety, stress or worry takes hold, most of us either push through or shut down. This four-step model gives you something more useful: a way back in.

Name It, Claim It, Tame It, Aim It is a simple framework for shifting your nervous system out of fight-or-flight and back into a state where you can actually think.

Here is what each step does.

Name It.

Put a label on what you’re feeling. Labelling a feeling changes your brain’s relationship to it. When you name what you are experiencing, you begin to engage the rational, regulatory part of your brain, And if you can find a new word for it, better still, because when we’ve used words like anxiety and stress so many times that the brain already has a pre-loaded response to them — hear the word, create the feeling, behave accordingly. The mind hack here is to find a new word for it. Your brain doesn’t have a ready-made response to something it hasn’t encountered before, which gives you a fresh slate to work with.

Claim It.

Anxiety and stress are processes. They require specific patterns of thinking and physical response to keep running. Claiming that means recognising you have some influence over those patterns and by claiming it, you can connect what you’ve named it’s cause (if there is one). That connection shifts the nervous system because it creates more certainty. Your brain goes “Ah, that’s what this feeling is, at least I know what I’m dealing with and the cause of this feeling“.

Tame It.

Once you’ve named and started to claim it, you begin bringing the thinking part of your brain back online. The thinking brain and the fight-or-flight centre can’t both run at full capacity at the same time. Fight-or-flight tends to win. Naming and claiming re-engages our pre-frontal cortex (thinking part), means we know better what we’re dealing with, so we can start taming it.

Aim It.

This is the shift from being stuck with the anxiety to being able to put it to good use. We start aiming it and putting that energy to good use. Once the threat response is less dominant, we can begin to use strategies — to problem solve, if it’s something we can troubleshoot, or to simply aim it elsewhere now we’ve realised it as just passing anxiety. We can use different tools cognitive, physical, behavioural — to work through it, regulate or simply know that it will pass and to get on with our day.

Watch the video below for a full walkthrough of the model.

Watch to find out more

TIME TO WATCH: 4 MINUTES