How to Calm Yourself Down When You're Angry or Stressed

I feel calm when I am in the park. I like the big trees. It is quiet and green. I feel happy.

For a bad day: 1) Take a break from work. 2) Drink a hot tea or coffee. 3) Go outside for ten minutes. 4) Call a friend or your mum. 5) Eat something good. 6) Watch a short film you like. 7) Go to bed early. Remember, a bad day is only one day. Tomorrow will be better.

How to make a stressful evening better with a simple meal. 1) Stop what you are doing. Close your laptop, put your phone in another room. 2) Go to the kitchen and cook something very simple — pasta with butter and a little salt works every time. 3) Don't try to cook something new. Familiar food is comforting. 4) Sit at the table, not in front of the TV. Eat slowly. 5) Notice the taste, the warmth, the smell. Your body likes being taken care of. 6) After eating, wash the dishes by hand. It sounds boring, but slow washing water is surprisingly calming. 7) Go to bed early. Everything feels better after sleep. Be gentle with yourself. A difficult evening is not a difficult life.

How to survive a difficult conversation. First, a warning: you are not going to feel perfectly prepared. Nobody does. You will walk in slightly nervous and slightly underprepared, and that's okay — it's often better than being over-rehearsed.

1) Write down the one thing you actually need to say. Just the one. Everything else can be adjusted in the moment, but that central sentence needs to come out, or the conversation will feel wasted afterwards. 2) Eat something small beforehand. You don't need a big meal, but a hungry brain is a bad negotiator. 3) Arrive a little early, so you're not rushing. A rushed version of you is not the version you want in the room. 4) Start softly. 'Can we talk about something?' is a better opening than 'We need to have a conversation.' 5) Listen as much as you talk. People say more useful things when they don't feel interrupted. 6) It's okay if you don't finish everything. Sometimes a partial conversation is the right one. 7) Afterwards, don't replay it endlessly. You did your best. That's always enough.

How to get through a lonely evening when you had planned not to be. This is written for anyone who has found themselves, on a Friday night, quite suddenly alone with no plans and a mind that will not stop reminding them of it. The advice is unsophisticated and, I hope, honest.

1) Accept, first, that a lonely evening is not a crisis. It is a perfectly ordinary human experience that the architecture of modern life tries very hard to hide. Millions of people are having one right now, including many you would not guess.

2) Do not scroll. Social media on a lonely evening is a kind of self-punishment, and you will emerge from an hour of it feeling substantially worse than when you started. Put the phone in a different room if you have to.

3) Eat properly. Make something, however simple. Standing at the stove stirring something is one of the oldest consolations humans have, and it is available to you right now.

4) Move for ten minutes. Walk around the block, stretch on the floor, do the washing-up standing up. Your body does not need to be optimised; it just needs to be used.

5) Contact one person, with no agenda. Not to complain, not to ask for reassurance, but just to say hello. You will be surprised how often it starts a conversation that rescues an evening.

6) Be suspicious of any inner voice that tells you this loneliness means something permanent. It does not. It is a Friday. Fridays come and go.

7) Finally, go to bed at a reasonable hour. This is the least glamorous piece of advice ever given, and it is, more often than anything else, the one that actually works. Tomorrow is a different day, and it rarely arrives in the same shape as the evening you feared it would.

How to fall asleep when you cannot fall asleep. I am writing this at 2am, which should tell you everything you need to know about my qualifications. I have been failing to sleep, off and on, for most of my adult life, and I have tried, I think, every single one of the remedies the internet will happily recommend to you. This is an account of what I actually do, on the nights when I am willing to admit that heroics are not available.

First, accept, and I know how irritating this is, that you cannot force sleep. Sleep is not a task you complete by sufficient effort. It is a condition that arrives when the conditions are right, and the conditions, contrary to everything we are told, are mostly about lowering expectations. The single greatest cause of a sleepless night, in my unscientific but extensive personal experience, is the increasingly furious determination to have one that is not sleepless. Give up now. You can catch up tomorrow.

Second, leave the bed. This goes against every well-meaning piece of sleep hygiene advice ever produced, and I stand by it. Lying in the dark thinking about how you are not sleeping is a direct route to further not sleeping. Get up. Sit in a quiet room with dim light. Do something deeply uninteresting — not your phone, which will activate every anxiety you had been successfully ignoring; a book you have read before, a crossword, the back of a cereal packet. When you feel even slightly heavy, go back to bed. Not before.

Third, stop the inner negotiation. At 3am, we all enter a long, exhausting bargaining session with the clock: if I fall asleep now, I'll still get five hours; if I fall asleep in ten minutes, I'll get four; and so on. This activity is, reliably, the main thing preventing sleep. Release the deal. A bad night of sleep is, in the full context of a life, a very minor inconvenience. Repeat this sentence to yourself as often as needed.

Fourth, and finally, remember that the night always ends. The conviction that this will go on forever is one of insomnia's specialities, and it is always, without exception, untrue. Morning comes. You will, as you always do, get through the day after. Tomorrow, you will sleep better, because the one reliable cause of a better night is a worse one.

It is, I realise, spectacularly unhelpful advice in an era in which we are told that insomnia is a solvable optimisation problem. I maintain, at 2am, that it is mostly a negotiation with our own refusal to accept that some nights are like this. The minute you accept it, the bed becomes possible again. The minute you stop trying to fall asleep, you usually do.