I hate the feeling of cold, sweaty dread that comes over me when I get my blood drawn. It feels like there’s nothing I can do to fight it, and the harder I try, the worse it gets.

But I’ve found a technique that’s kept me from passing out the last two or three times I’ve had blood drawn. It boils down to trying to keep my blood pressure elevated, instead of the usual advice to stay calm and take deep breaths.

Here’s what I do:

• Tell myself it’s okay to feel stressed out, sweaty, and nervous.
• Try to channel that nervous energy into staying amped up: fidgeting, squeezing my hands into fists, flexing random muscles.
• Let the phlebotomist or whoever else know I’m a “fainter.” Sometimes they can let you lie down. If not, at least they know what to expect.
• They usually tell me to calm down and slow my breathing, but I let them know my strategy is the opposite: keeping my blood pressure elevated so I don’t faint.
• In the final minute or so before the draw, I start crossing my ankles and flexing my legs and stomach muscles. I silently count to five, relax and cross my ankles the other way, then flex again and count to five.
• Once the needle is in, I keep going, flexing my free arm along with my legs and stomach.
• I’ve fainted even after the needle came out, so I keep up the flexing and counting until I’m confident I’m not going to faint.

I’m not a doctor, and this is just what’s worked for me, not medical advice. But it turns out I stumbled into something with a real name: the applied tension technique, a documented method for preventing vasovagal fainting by deliberately tensing muscle groups to raise blood pressure. If you’re a fellow fainter, here’s a short video that walks through the same basic idea: