Before

Press both feet flat into the ground and put all your attention there for thirty seconds. Pulls you out of your head and back into the room. Nobody can tell you're doing it.

A thirty-second sweep through the three places you hold tension — jaw, shoulders, hands — letting each one go. You're almost certainly clenching something right now.

Two breaths in, one long out. Drops your physiological stress level faster than anything else here. Works in roughly 60–90 seconds.

Before you send it, read it once as the person receiving it — not as the person who wrote it. The tone you meant and the tone that lands are rarely the same thing.

In four, hold four, out four, hold four. A slow, even pattern that gives a racing system something steady to lock onto. Three or four rounds is enough.

Put one specific word on what you're feeling. fMRI studies show this measurably turns down the alarm part of your brain. Free, fast, slightly weird.

Write down the single sentence you actually need to say — the boundary, the no, the ask — before you're in the room. One line you can hold onto when nerves try to soften it into mush.

Write the looping thought down, in full, somewhere outside your head — then deliberately set a later time to deal with it. Your brain loops because it's afraid you'll forget. Prove you won't.

Shrink the dreaded task down to the smallest possible first move, then do only that. Starting is the hard part; this makes the start small enough to be embarrassing to avoid.