How to Reset Your Mind (Quick Resets That Work in Minutes)

If you want to know how to reset your mind, the fastest options take less than a minute and use your body to do it. Two inhales and a long exhale. Cold water on your face. A sharp sensation that drags your attention back to the room you're standing in. Slower resets, like a walk outside or writing the loop down, take longer. Each one below has research behind it.

How to reset your mind in under a minute

Two inhales through the nose, one slow exhale

This is the cyclic sigh, the breathing pattern tested at Stanford. Breathe in through your nose until your lungs feel full, take a second short sip of air on top, then let it all out slowly through your mouth until you're empty.

In the study, published in Cell Reports Medicine in January 2023, Melis Yilmaz Balban, David Spiegel, Andrew Huberman and colleagues had 111 volunteers do one of four exercises for 5 minutes a day for a month. The cyclic sighing group showed the biggest daily rise in positive mood and the largest drop in resting breathing rate, ahead of a mindfulness meditation group. Spiegel told Stanford Medicine that one or two sighs can already make a difference, and that about five minutes gets the full effect. Three rounds at a desk take about 30 seconds.

Cold water on your face

Fill a sink or bowl with cold water, hold your breath and put your face in for a few seconds. Cold water on the face sets off what physiologists call the diving reflex.

In a 2023 study in Biology, Krzysztof Malinowski and colleagues put 65 healthy volunteers, aged 20 to 27, through face immersion in water at 8 to 10 °C while they held their breath. Average heart rate fell from 79.4 beats per minute at rest to a low of 52.7, about 33% lower.

Break the pattern with something loud for the senses

A thought loop runs on autopilot. Anything strong enough to grab your attention will interrupt it for a moment: standing up, stepping outside, a cold drink, a sharp taste. Pick something intense enough that you can't keep half your mind on the loop. A gentle stimulus gets ignored.

Walk outside if you have half an hour

In a r/LifeProTips thread on turning a bad day around, moving your body and getting outside were among the most common answers. The research backs the plain version of it. In 2023 David Strayer's lab at the University of Utah sent 100 students on a 30-minute walk, half along a river path with trees and half along busy streets with shops and parking lots. Both groups came back in a more positive mood and a less negative one, measured on a standard mood questionnaire (Scott and colleagues, Frontiers in Psychology). The river path did no better than the streets, so take the walk outside your door.

How to reset your mindset when the same thought keeps coming back

Often it's unfinished business, like the email you haven't sent. Your mind keeps returning to open tasks until it has a reason to stop.

Writing them down gives it that reason. In 2011, psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister published a set of experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Consider It Done!" People who made a specific plan for an unfinished goal had fewer intrusive thoughts about it afterwards, and they didn't need to carry the plan out for the effect to show.

A Baylor University sleep lab found a similar result at bedtime. Michael Scullin's team monitored 57 adults aged 18 to 30 overnight. Those who wrote a to-do list for the next few days fell asleep about nine minutes faster than those who wrote about tasks they had already finished.

In practice, take a scrap of paper and write each open loop as one line with a next step: "Reply to the landlord, 9am."

How to reset your mind after a bad day

Stack the resets in the order they're easiest to start:

1. Three cyclic sighs before you leave your desk or car.
2. A walk, even 10 minutes, before you sit down at home.
3. Cold water on your face when you get in.
4. Two minutes writing down whatever is still open, with a next step for each.

If the bad day has turned into a bad week, we cover that in how to get out of a funk.

One spray as a reset ritual

The quick resets above give your attention one strong thing to land on. Dragon Breath does that with a single spray. Within about 10 seconds a bright, electric buzz spreads across your tongue and mouth, your mouth floods with saliva, and a clean, fresh feeling stays for a while after. For those ten seconds there is no room left for the thought you were stuck on. You come out of it present and switched on, ready for whatever comes next: back to the desk, into the gym, into the evening.

The buzz comes from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico also called golden root. Its main active compound is affinin, also known as spilanthol, measured at 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of root. Mexican ethnobotanists (Cilia-López and colleagues) record the root chewed, held against the gums and used as a spice. The full story of the plant is in our guide to chilcuague.

One customer's first words after a single spray, caught on a reaction video, were "Oh wow, the saliva flow." It tastes earthy and a little peppery for a second before the tingle takes over.

A spray is the practical way to carry it. The 50 ml bottle lives in your pocket or bag, a few sprays is all it takes, and the extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass, away from air and light, so it keeps its quality from the first spray to the last. Loose root and powder sit open to both. Each bottle holds 250+ sprays.

The root is wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders, then dual-extracted in organic solutions. Dragon Breath is vegan, gluten free, sugar free and non-GMO. Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.

One way to use it between tasks: close the laptop, one spray, three cyclic sighs while the buzz fades, then open the next thing on your list.

Dragon Breath considerations

If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

How do you reset your mind and body at the same time?

Use something physical. A walk, cold water on the face and the cyclic sigh all work through the body first, and in the Stanford study the sighing group's resting breathing rate dropped while their mood scores rose.

How long does it take to reset your mind?

Three cyclic sighs take about 30 seconds, and a cold-water splash or a spray of Dragon Breath takes about 10. A walk outside in the Utah study lasted 30 minutes.

What is a pattern interrupt?

It's any sudden change that breaks an automatic loop of thought or behaviour, like standing up, changing rooms or a strong taste. The stronger the sensation, the harder it is to keep thinking the old thought at the same time.

How long does the Dragon Breath buzz last?

The buzz comes on within about 10 seconds of one spray, and a clean, fresh feeling across the tongue and mouth lingers after it.