By now we’re well-rehearsed in all the reasons for our personal and collective anxiety. I started writing this in the middle of the night because my brain was wide awake. Sometimes even the most earnest mindfulness attempts at calming your mind can only sit there and observe what's going on--but not necessarily stop it.

There is a great deal of specific content and research on how to work on yourself from the inside out. Articles on forming better habits, and practicing mindfulness abound. Not so many, however, show us ways to get outside ourselves, if not always literally outside.

May they be a guide for transport and help you as much as they’ve helped me.

1. Find Calm in Nature and Letting it Make You Feel Small

It’s strangely calming to be absorbed in the contemplation of something vastly bigger than ourselves. Belden C. Lane explores the concept between spirituality and geography in-depth in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. His thesis is that geography shapes our vision of the transcendent, and in especially “fierce” or dramatic and unforgiving landscapes — like deserts and high mountains and remote places “far from the madding crowd” — we are even more drawn to God or what you could call the transcendent.

It’s not only dramatic landscapes that transport us. It can be something as simple as a sunset. We tend to associate sunsets with coasts because we are perhaps more aware of the open sky on a coast. Often when we’re in a coastal community we’re there to relax in the first place, and we pay attention to the sun’s multicolored splendor as it descends into oblivion.

Not everyone lives near the coast. Not everyone lives near the mountains. But you can get outside. You can seek sunlight, engage your senses. You can be present for unexpected, ordinary moments. This morning, when I dropped my eighth-grader off at school we were talking about his daily routine. I reminded him to keep consistent with his homework, and as we topped the hill, there it was in the open sky — the sunrise. It was like looking at something bigger than myself and being momentarily comforted by the fact.

On the Sublime, attributed to the 3rd-century Greek rhetorician Cassius Longinus, ascribed the purpose of poetry to be of “a lofty, ennobling seriousness.” The concept took hold in the 18th century among English philosophers, critics, and poets who associated the sublime with “overwhelming sensation.” In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke identified the sublime as the experience of the infinite, which is both terrifying and thrilling because it threatens to overpower the importance of human enterprise in the universe.

By contrast, the rationalist school of thought asserts that knowledge of innate ideas can be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Burke argued that the passions, as revealed through our imagination, truly shapes how and what we see, hear, and feel in the world.

The sublime, then, is our strongest passion, and it is grounded in terror. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes in the very first line of The Duino Elegies, “Every angel is terrifying.” Yet the terror is not exclusively an unpleasant emotion, for danger or pain can, in certain circumstances, give us delight. And the sublime has other qualities: it overwhelms our faculty of reason.

The Romantic ideal attempts to swing the pendulum back from being in the head to being in the “heart” (for lack of a better word), and that way is achieved through the calm found in nature. Just considering the timelessness and emptiness of a desert is enough to put things in perspective. Year by year little will change. Take a simple path in the woods. The same rock you step over at age five will be the same rock you step over at 85.

Whether comparing ourselves to others or caught up in the minutiae of details we have to tend to, we find ourselves in distress. Sometimes we push harder to “prove our value” as we say. Sometimes we give ourselves pep talks, or by contrast, the inner critic comes out and we self-loathe. We’d be more successful if only it weren’t for ___________.

Then you’ll learn some small fact about new evidence of how rivers ran on Mars for hundreds of thousands of years about 3.5 billion years ago. Or you’ll gaze first hand down at the little valley below. Next to the mountain or the relative timelessness of a distant planet (and the prospect of a teaming life there much like our own now), and the fact that you forgot to take out the garbage doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

As Wendell Berry puts it in “The Peace of Wild Things”:

“When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things…”

And “for a time” he (the speaker of the poem) rests in the “grace of the world” and finds freedom.

Nature transports us out of ourselves and gives us perspective. The concerns of all humankind become small in comparison, much less those of a single person. Nature calms us not merely because it is sometimes “tranquil,” but because it is indifferent to us, and because of its sheer scope and scale.

2. Find Calm in Travel

Speaking of being transported, many find calm by finally breaking through the confines of conventional and ordinary living and choosing to travel.

You might cringe at the idea of travel as being a process of calm. Going to the airport hours in advance, getting practically mugged going through security and flying in the tightly confined space of a plane. Or it could be the slog of many long tedious hours in a car or on a bus.

But the act of being in a foreign environment and meeting new people surprisingly help many become more confident. That confidence allows you to overcome fears and fight anxiety, especially if you’re doing it under the duress of socially distancing and wearing a mask.

When you travel you also have to live much more in the moment. You notice things around you, you have better conversations, you focus on your appreciation of the world. There is also freedom in not constantly being tethered to devices and (therefore) media. When you’re not looking down at your phone or computer screen you find yourself using all your senses to take in the world.

Travel challenges you to pay attention to people, places, and ideas that we tend to brush over in our day-to-day. Where we are is critical to understanding who we are. And we are in many places at once within the contexts of our lives. While many wonder what travelers are “seeking to find,” the truth is that the seeking is the finding for many. Traveling, too, leads also to many of the revelations discussed in nature above. It transports your self-understanding.

3. Find Calm in Music

Baroque music, especially the slower movements, the largos, adagios, and andantes, have been proven to slow the mind. In fact, they were intentionally created to do just that. Commissioned as it was from the church, you could almost call the Baroque period (generally from about 1600 until Bach’s death in 1750) a grand experiment in creating music that calms the mind.

Baroque’s slower tempos have roughly the same number of beats per minute as the human heart. The music has also been shown in various studies to shift the brain from its normal beta rhythms to alpha rhythms. The alpha rhythms are the most conducive to creativity and learning.

Of course, from long before that in a broad range of cultures, music has been created as a bridge to other consciousness, often to calm and focus the mind. We tend to think of instruments involving harp, flute, guitar, sitar, or piano. Musical meditation expressions through Hindi religious practices, especially in India have developed highly sophisticated practices. Ragas have become a source of many studies into their efficacy in impacting a listener’s emotion, regardless of cultural background.

At the precipice of a third decade into the 21st century, one can now stream limitless approaches to meditation music and the sounds of nature. In general, these characteristics tend to be what is associated with creating the conditions of calm from a scientific brainwave analysis: tempo, rhythmic regularity, and tonality.

4. Find Calm in Challenges, Exercise, and Relaxation Techniques

Many find calm through focused attention on expressive creative activity: building birdhouses, creating a music collection, drawing, and painting. Others can find the focus and fulfillment through an earnest challenge, even if it’s not “creative” per se.

The development of a new skill at something like woodworking or beer brewing or learning a language or instrument can bring calm. Some find calm in challenges like reading or meditating with personal goals. I’ve found a great deal of calm the past year in practicing the bass daily. It’s something completely different than what I do throughout the rest of the day, and the required focus and concentration take me out of myself and helps me enter into that state of flow.

Exercise is a direct source to calm. The physical benefits of exercise have long been established. Studies show that exercise is effective at reducing fatigue, improving alertness and concentration, and enhancing cognitive function.

Exercise elevates depressed moods. There is evidence to show that active people have lower rates of anxiety and depression than those who are generally sedentary. Exercise helps the brain cope better with stress. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America:

“In one study, researchers found that those who got regular vigorous exercise were 25 percent less likely to develop depression or an anxiety disorder over the next five years.”

Many successful and responsible people feel anxious if they are not always at work, doing something “productive.” Even at home, they feel they must always be cleaning, working in the yard, repairing things. There is virtue in work, and it is better than aimless pitter-pattering. But constant busyness is not a recipe for discovering the benefits of calm.

My wife and I have been walking the dog together now for several months. It doesn’t tone your biceps or shred your abs, but it does keep your body and mind in condition, and it brings on a meditative calm.

5. Find Calm in the Stress Response from Cold Water Therapy

Cold water has been used therapeutically for centuries and has come back into popularity using many different therapies and research programs, in no small part to Wim Hof and a famous practitioner of his methods, Tony Robbins. Hippocrates, “the father of medicine,” used cold water in his treatment of the most serious illnesses.

The latest form of cold therapy is cryotherapy and consists of exposure to extremely cold air that is maintained at -110° to -140°C (roughly -166° to -220°F) in cryochambers, generally for 2–3 minutes. It has become popularized among athletes for its possible beneficial effect on recovery and performance.

The Netherlands has seen an increasing trend for cold bathing over the past few years. Part of this growing popularity is owed to the scientific approach of a health and mindset technique developed by Wim Hof. Methods involving concentration, breathing, and cold-exposure have shown to modulate the immune response.

The Wim Hof approach, backed up with compelling research, makes numerous claims:

• Reduced stress. Regularly taking cold showers imposes a small amount of stress on your body, which leads to a process called hardening. This means that your nervous system gradually gets used to handling moderate levels of stress.
• Higher alertness. Cold showers wake your body up, inducing a higher state of alertness. The cold also stimulates you to take deeper breaths, decreasing the level of CO2 throughout the body, helping you concentrate.
• More robust immune response. Cold showers increase the number of white blood cells in your body. These blood cells protect your body against diseases. Researchers believe this process is related to an increased metabolic rate.
• Increased willpower. It takes a strong mind to endure the cold for extended periods of time. By incorporating cold showers into your daily routine, you are strengthening your willpower.
• Weight loss. Research has shown that cold showers (and exposure to cold in general), in addition to increasing metabolic rate directly, stimulate the generation of brown fat. Brown fat is a specific type of fat tissue that in turn generates energy by burning calories.

I began taking cold showers on a regular basis early in 2020 when there was less understanding about how you could catch COVID-19. I wanted to maximize my body’s immune system response.

I started by just putting my head under the cold water for a few seconds and then a minute. Then, I would take a warm shower and slowly make it cold at the end. The best approach was to hop right in after a workout when I was hot. At first, two minutes was all I could stand, but after a few weeks, it was relatively easy to stay in for four or five minutes. I did some experiments with staying in for as long as ten minutes. For a time, the best results I found were in the 3–5 minute range.

Then, I joined Ice Buddies. We gather together at 8 AM on Saturday mornings throughout the year. Usually, we start in the Prentice Cooper State Park trail system just off Suck Creek at the base of Signal Mountain. If this sounds remote, it's not--at least if you live in Chattanooga. It's less than ten minutes from downtown. We hike about five minutes and find ourselves in a rainforest the likes of which you find in Costa Rica.

There we do our breath work, plunge, and then offer up gratitudes and also things we're letting go. I call it the "trifecta." You find yourself in community with others, in nature, and in cold water. It's healing, calming, and energizing.

I never walk away in anything less than a fabulous mood. You simply feel great. While it is uplifting, it is also calming when it comes to anxiety. It’s a decompressor. It’s hard to be depressed and getting in cold water on a daily basis.

These are but a few ways to exercise your options and find the calm and clarity that await you with just a little intentionality.