In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

What the research says

Pooling 306 experiments, strategies that change what you attend to or how you read a situation outperformed trying to suppress a feeling once it had arrived. Redirecting attention is doing something quite different from clamping down. That is the whole case for giving your eyes a job rather than telling yourself to calm down.

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