Coaching practices for Sit Anxiety Protocol

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Sit Anxiety Protocol, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I always wait until I’m already in full panic to try to calm down, and by then it’s too far gone for anything to work
• The anxiety hits in the middle of a meeting or while I’m standing in line, and I can’t exactly close my eyes and name what I smell in front of everyone
• My anxiety spikes so fast and over so little that I’m tired of just putting out fires
• When I make myself face the scary scenario I end up still wound up and rattled afterward, and then I dread doing it again
• There’s a big thing coming up

Practices that may help

1. Use grounding before anxiety peaks, not after
   Start the technique at the first sign of anxiety — not once the wave is overwhelming.
   The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique
2. Use a 30-second micro-grounding version for public settings
   In public or meetings, a single-sense version — three named things you can see — takes 30 seconds and shows nothing.
   The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique
3. Improve CO2 tolerance to reduce anxiety sensitivity
   The 7-count hold in 4-7-8 builds CO2 tolerance — a key factor in anxiety reactivity and panic thresholds.
   4-7-8 Breathing, Made Practical
4. Combine worry exposure with relaxation skill
   After the exposure period, apply a relaxation practice to close each session with a deactivation phase.
   Worry Exposure, Made Practical
5. Apply EFT to specific performance anxiety triggers
   EFT has the strongest self-guided evidence for test anxiety, public speaking, and sports performance stress.
   EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
6. Acquire a core relaxation skill (and actually practice it until automatic)
   SIT requires one somatic coping skill — diaphragmatic breathing or PMR — trained to automaticity before stress practice begins.
   Stress Inoculation Training
7. Rapid relaxation: achieve a relaxation response in 20–30 seconds
   Deploy a practiced, condensed relaxation sequence the moment anxiety begins rising.
   Applied Relaxation, Made Practical
8. Attention Training Technique (ATT), Made Practical
   The Attention Training Technique (ATT), developed by Adrian Wells, is a structured auditory exercise that rebuilds voluntary control over where attention goes — directly countering the self-focused, threat-locked attention that sustains anxiety and health anxiety. Randomised trials support its effectiveness as a standalone and as part of Metacognitive Therapy.
9. Havening to clear pre-performance anxiety
   Run a short havening sequence before a high-stakes event to lower physiological anxiety.
   Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
10. The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique
    The 5-4-3-2-1 technique directs deliberate attention to five senses in sequence — five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste — pulling awareness out of anxious thought and into present sensory reality. It is a widely used clinical tool for acute anxiety and dissociation, with strong theoretical grounding and practitioner consensus, though large RCT evidence is limited.

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