What do you do to calm yourself down?

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Right now I'm feeling quite nervous and agitated so I'm sitting here solving my 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube over and over and over again. That often helps. Rocking back and forth helps sometimes as well. Those are two examples of how I calm myself down.

What about you?

If I'm not low on gas, I'll go driving around, through back roads. I used to be able to calm down a lot better when I had my manual transmission Supra, it's very relaxing going through the gears and stuff, hearing a nice inline six motor.

I walk, with my MP3 player on and preferably with a goal to geocache while I'm out.
Right now I can't as I have to stay in for workmen, weather is poor and there's a particularly nasty rapist on the loose thus I'm a bit more cautions of when/where I walk, thus at times like this I get a lot more agitated and have to try to keep myself busy online to distract myself.

Most of my special interests have been characters, so I tend to find somewhere out of the way where no one will bother me for a while and transport myself into their world. If I'm working on a story at the time I'll start working out the plot for the next 30 pages or so to keep my mind off whatever's bothering me. After about a half hour I'm usually ready to go back to whatever I was doing before. I've been doing this for years and never really thought much of it until about 3 weeks ago.

any kind of exercise - "if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it and which is more, you'll be a man, my son."

a good night's sleep also helps put things into perspective. i can't nap, but think it might hjelp some people.

Bejeweled Blitz!

Computer games, writing lists, and/or medication.

You're lucky; I never did get the hang of a Rubiks Cube.

Depends on why I'm tense. If it's just physical, I can get rid of the tension just by thinking and controlling it that way--relax muscles, slow heart rate and breathing.

Mental exhaustion, frustration, etc--I usually go somewhere private, reduce sensory input, wait until things get better, wrap myself in a blanket or curl up on the floor. Sometimes I fall asleep.

If I'm on the edge of a meltdown, I might stim actively, but usually the best thing to do is just get away from things and wait.

I lift weights, or I go for a walk, or I hop on my elliptical.
Sometimes I go crazy and clean everything in sight.

It's a win win, I calm down, and either I am fitter or my house is cleaner.

sounds of piano and water calm me down. Music and bath help me calm down.

i used to go on long walks, & i still think this is best--if you can ignore the traffic of a big city, but outside the city is much better...

i listen to music, of course. and take naps.

somewhat more idiosyncratically, i used to do long math calculations. the subject was astronomy, but really any tough problem that took an hour or more to solve, would do.

later, i learned palindromes & anagrams & the virtue of these is you can do them anywhere, with just a scrap of paper (or even in your head: i've composed palindromes while in the dentist's chair).

maybe it's not so much what you do, but the feeling of doing back to an activity that you're familiar with & containing a strong self-generatve element (one thing leads logically to another, step after step) which is the opposite of randomness & emotional turmoil...

i run away or read a book. or i do both.

This has been helping me this days:

1) If I'm at home I play Alien vs predator, I put all my concentration on it so I forget the things that stressed me.
2) Listening to music with headphones/earphones, it instantly changes the atmosphere.
3) I leave the classroom for 5 minutes and try to find somewhere away from people where I can walk for a while without thinking. Time slows down.

I still couldn't solve the Rubik's cube

I watch youtube videos of my favourite songs and sing along, doodle, play with the family kitten, listen to music and email/text people who I know will understand.

I have a quick fix to calm myself down, it's to take a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth five times. Sounds a bit silly but it really works. If nothing else it gets me concentrating on the breathing rather than what was bothering me.