The wifi was down on a 5:30 a.m. flight to Dallas, and I was annoyed about it before we’d even leveled off. I don’t remember what I thought I needed it for. Email, probably. I just know I sat there getting a little hotter every time the connection page spun and failed, like the airplane owed me something.
Then I caught it. I was getting angry about not having internet in a metal tube 30,000 feet in the air. Sitting in a chair. In the sky.
I’d bet money my shoulders were up around my ears and my breathing had crawled up high into my chest, because that’s where it goes when I’m spun up. My nervous system had filed a dead wifi signal under threat and was getting me ready for a fight with... nobody. There was nobody to fight. The flight attendant didn’t break it. (I’d probably also had too much coffee by then, which is its own issue.)
So I did the same thing Will and I open every episode of the podcast with. One breath, and it starts with the exhale.
Breathe all the way out first. Hold empty for a second and notice what that feels like. Then a long, slow breath in, all the way to the top. Hold full. And release, slower than feels natural.
That’s the whole reset. One breath. Maybe 20 seconds.
I think the exhale-first part matters more than it gets credit for. When you’re wound up you’re already holding a chest full of air, and trying to breathe in on top of that just stacks more tension on the pile. Emptying out first gives the next breath somewhere to go. And the long exhale is the half of the breath that tells your body it can stand down.
One breath buys you a gap. A couple of seconds between the thing that happened and what you do about it, and that gap is where you get to respond instead of react.
I still get mad at dumb stuff. Regularly. The breath just shortens how long I stay there.
What’s the dumbest thing that spun you up this week, and how long did it take you to catch it?
Wednesday, we get back to the reps.
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