Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.

What the research says

Pooling 306 experiments, a meta-analysis of emotion regulation found that strategies changing what you attend to, or how you read a situation, worked better than trying to suppress a feeling once it had arrived. The looking step is doing the first kind of work rather than the second. That review pooled laboratory tasks, so it supports the principle rather than this particular four step sequence.

Strength of evidence: long taught, never tested. Widely used and long taught. No trial has established that it works.