How Do Calm People Stay Calm Under Pressure?
Alex Arenz is the calmest person I have ever met. I have told her this many times, and I have watched it up close. Thirty minutes before her own wedding in Bali she was taking a quiet swim in the pool while everyone else panicked about hair and dresses. So when she joined our community as a guest speaker, I asked her the question everyone wants answered. How?
Her answer surprised me, because Alex was not born calm. She grew up with severe phobias, and later a period of anxiety with panic attacks, sometimes several a day. A ringing phone could set one off. Today she works as a mind and body coach helping people build the kind of quiet she built for herself, and she has not had a panic attack in years. You can watch our full conversation below, or read what stayed with me.
▶ Watch the full conversation with Alex.
Can you learn to be calm, or are some people just born that way?
You can learn it. Alex is living evidence. Her turning point was deciding that if she wanted a life she could actually live in, she needed to know herself: her body, her mind, and what set them off. She studied, she practiced yoga and meditation seriously, and piece by piece she rebuilt her relationship with stress. The panic attacks faded and never came back.
What I love about her story is that it removes the excuse. Calm is not a personality type you either got or did not. It is a practice with two parts, and both can be trained.
How do you stay calm under pressure?
Alex breaks it into two skills. The first is knowing yourself well enough to notice early when something is off. The second is having tools you trust for the moment itself, breath, movement, journaling, whatever genuinely works for you. Notice early, respond early.
“Only a calm body and mind can respond. A stressed body and mind will always react.”
Her wedding is the perfect example, because weddings go wrong, and in Bali hers did. Wine was poured into the wrong glasses, food came out in the wrong order. Her secret was not luck. It was a decision made in advance. Her intention for the day was to enjoy it and to let nothing ruin it, so when things broke, she laughed. The intention was set before the pressure arrived. That is the part most of us skip.
What is actually happening in your body when you are stressed?
Alex gave the simplest explanation of the nervous system I have heard. Think of a gas pedal and a brake. The gas pedal is the stress response. It speeds your heart, sharpens your muscles, pauses your digestion, and it is meant for short bursts. The brake is what brings you back down afterward, into rest and recovery.
The trouble with modern life is that the gas pedal stays pressed. Under constant low-level stress, the brake stops engaging properly, and you live permanently on edge. Then one small trigger, a ringing phone, a sharp email, is enough to tip you over. This is why her daily practices matter more than any single technique. They are how you keep the brake working. A body that gets regular quiet learns how to return to quiet.
If your gas pedal has been pressed for months, this is exactly the work we do together.Book a conversation with me when you are ready.
How do you stop people pleasing and start saying no?
This part of our conversation could have been its own evening. Alex sees people pleasing as something surprising: a form of dishonesty. It is not true to you, and it is not true to the other person either. And it rarely even earns the affection it is chasing. In her experience, a clear and kind no earns more respect than a resentful yes ever did.
“Whenever you say yes to something when you actually want to say no, you say no to something else, and you say no to yourself.”
She also said something that took courage to admit. Having been on the receiving end of people pleasers, she found it is genuinely hard not to take advantage of someone who never protects their own time. Your yes teaches people how to treat you. Most of the time, when you finally give a clear no, the catastrophe you imagined never arrives. People simply say, alright, I understand.
How do you simplify your life?
Alex has a small toolkit for this that I have already started using. For anything taking up space in your life, ask: is it necessary, important, or relevant? Or am I carrying it out of habit, obligation, or someone else's expectation?
Her to-do list version is even more practical. Split the list into must do, want to do, and should do. The must and want lists mostly take care of themselves. The should list is where your life quietly leaks. Most shoulds either belong in another column or belong in the bin.
And one rule underneath it all: whenever you add something to your life, remove something. You cannot stack a meditation practice, a workout, journaling and a new course on top of an already full life. Trade an hour of scrolling for the walk. Trade the draining acquaintance for an evening with yourself. Space has to come from somewhere.
What does it mean to design your life?
Alex calls it life by design, and it starts with three questions. What are my values? What are my non-negotiables, the things I will not live without? And what do I know for sure? She knows, for example, that she needs access to nature. So any decision, a job, a move, a project, gets checked against those anchors first, and suddenly a torn decision becomes much simpler.
Then she does something lovely. She writes down her ideal next six months in the present tense, as if it were already true, and puts the page away. Not as magic. As direction. And then, the step people forget: choose one or two very small actions and take them immediately. You do not need to see the whole path. You need the next few steps, taken now.
How to practice this in an ordinary week
Set an intention before pressure arrives. Before the big meeting or the difficult call, decide in one sentence how you want to move through it.
Give yourself ten regular minutes a day. Breath, a walk, a page of journaling. Regular matters more than long. A daily ten minutes beats a monthly workshop.
Rewrite your to-do list into must, want and should. Delete or delegate two shoulds this week.
Practice one honest no, somewhere low-stakes. Notice that the world does not end. Notice what the yes-to-yourself feels like.
Where this might not hold
Alex would say this herself: her path is hers, and no single toolkit fits everyone. If anxiety or panic is severely affecting your life, self-practice sits alongside professional care, not instead of it. And building calm is slow work. She spent years on it. Expecting serenity in a fortnight is just another form of pressure.
A few questions I hear often
How long does it take to become a calmer person?
Longer than a productivity hack and shorter than you fear. What changes things is regularity, a small daily practice kept for months, not intensity. Alex's rule of thumb is that what you do regularly matters far more than what you do occasionally.
Does saying no damage relationships?
Usually the opposite. A clear, kind no tells people who you are and what your time is worth, and most people respond with respect. The relationships that only survive on your constant yes were costing you more than they gave.
What if I do not even know what I want?
Then you are at a normal starting point, not a broken one. Alex's advice is to stop forcing the answer. Give it space, do the things that connect you to yourself, and be comfortable not knowing for a while. The answer tends to arrive once you stop interrogating it.
Is being calm the same as being passive?
No. Calm is what makes good action possible. A stressed body and mind can only react and defend. A calm one can respond, create and decide. In leadership especially, calm is not the absence of intensity. It is what lets you use intensity well.
What is the difference between a gut feeling and fear?
Alex was honest that this is tricky, because fear loves to impersonate intuition. Her practical answer: when you cannot tell, give it time and space rather than forcing a verdict. A true inner yes tends to stay steady across days and moods. Fear tends to flicker.
Calm is a skill, and it is learnable
The person I once watched swim calmly before her own wedding used to have panic attacks at the sound of a telephone. That distance was crossed with practice, honesty, and a lot of small daily choices. Which means the distance is crossable for the rest of us too.
Calm minds move markets. It is the sentence our whole practice is built on, and Alex is one of the people who taught me it is trainable. If you want to build it for yourself or your leadership team, book a conversation with me whenever you feel ready.
Related reading: does slowing down mean falling behind, and our conversation with Ken on passion and discipline.
This piece draws on our full community conversation, Slow MasterMind with Alex Arenz on Lifestyle Principles. Watch it in full above.
