Her phone buzzed with a news alert. A short vibration, a small sound.
Six months earlier, that sound would have taken Sarah's next hour. She would have opened the story, followed the links, and sent anxious messages to people she loved. By the end she would have been more frightened than informed, and no closer to knowing what to do.
This time she paused.
Sarah is a woman in Chapter Fifteen of my book, Staying Strong in Unsteady Times. She is not the Sarah in my other book, Reversing the Drift. Two different women who happen to share a name.
In her pause, she asked three plain questions. What is happening? What matters? What can I do? But look at the very first thing she told herself. She did not say, "This is terrible." She said, "This alert hit my alarm system."
That sentence is small, and it does real work. It puts a little room between Sarah and the feeling. The alert is still there. The fear is still there. But now there is someone standing beside the fear, noticing it.
Psychologists call this self-distancing. Ethan Kross and his colleagues have studied it for years. The idea is simple. When something upsets you, you can stay inside the feeling, or you can step back and look at it the way an observer would. People do it in different ways: picturing the scene from across the room, speaking to themselves by name, or asking what they would say to a friend in the same spot. As far as I know, the research suggests that stepping back tends to lower the emotional charge. It is not a cure, and it is not denial. It is a way to keep your thinking available when your body wants to take over.
This is not only about politics, either. The buzz might be a news alert. It might be a patient portal message, a text from work about "a quick call," or the school's number on your screen. The body does not sort them by topic. It just sounds the alarm.
I studied history and political science, and I trained to teach them. Knowing how to read the news is one skill. Knowing what it does to your body is another.
Here is what Sarah did next. She decided she could read the story later, or check one reliable source now and stop. Then she put the phone down for ten minutes.
Nothing was solved. I want to be plain about that. But she had not handed the next hour to the loudest signal. In the book, I call the root of this coherence, and it comes down to three sentences: I can understand enough. This still matters. I can do something. Sarah's ten minutes gave her all three.
If you want to try it, start small. The next time something buzzes and your stomach drops, say one sentence in your own head: "That hit my alarm system." Then wait one breath before you touch anything. That is all. You are not trying to feel calm. You are trying to get one step of room.
Sarah's story, and the other people in Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, are the kind of company I wish I had had at certain hours. If this sounds like the life you are living, the book is on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0GY49XSVZ
Read the first chapter of Reversing the Drift free: https://rayhoskins.net/free-chapter
Or get the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FXYPSPZQ