You are standing at the mailbox with an envelope in your hand. You already know it’s about money. Your heart is going. Your mind is three months ahead, running numbers you don’t have.
Meanwhile, your feet are on the gravel. The sun is on your neck. Somewhere down the road a dog is barking at nothing.
Most of you isn’t at the mailbox at all. That split is what I want to talk about today, because there is a small, old, free tool for it.
Psychologists have a name for part of what is happening. They call it the orienting response. The Russian scientist Evgeny Sokolov studied it in the middle of the last century. When something new or uncertain shows up, you turn toward it: your head, your eyes, your attention. Your body is asking a plain question: what is this, and where am I? A deer does the same thing when it lifts its head at the edge of a field.
Here is the trouble for the rest of us. The thing that startled you usually isn’t in the room. It’s in a phone, a bank account, a test result, the next news cycle. So the body keeps asking its question and never gets an answer. It keeps turning toward something it cannot see.
I want to be careful here. I’m not telling you a look around the room cures anything. Researchers don’t claim it’s the whole story, and neither do I. But it fits what the tools in my book are built on: give the body a real answer to its real question.
I was fourteen when President Kennedy was assassinated, and I watched the adults around me struggle to make sense of it. What strikes me now is how little there was to stand on. The news kept arriving, and nothing in it told a body where it was.
In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, Chapter Six is about regaining your physiological footing. Three of its tools answer that old question directly.
Find the room. Let your eyes move slowly around the room you are actually in, and say quietly what’s there. A lamp. A blue chair. The edge of the window.
5-4-3-2-1. Name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste.
The butterfly hug. Cross your arms over your chest, hands resting on your shoulders, and tap slowly, one side then the other.
These are first help, not the whole answer. They won’t pay the bill. What they do is give you enough ground to open the envelope and ask the three questions the book keeps coming back to: What is happening? What matters? What can I do?
And bodies differ. If one of these makes you feel worse, stop. Try another, or none. The point is to feel more present, not to pass a test.
Try it once today, before you need it. Pick a quiet minute and find the room. Then, the next time an envelope shows up, your body will already know the way back.
Staying Strong in Unsteady Times is the book behind this post: get it on Amazon.
Read the first chapter of Reversing the Drift free, or get the book on Amazon.