Caught myself this morning hunched over my phone like a question mark, shoulders up around my ears, jaw tight, reading something that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with getting my blood pressure up. Ten minutes gone. My body braced like there was a threat in the room. There wasn’t. There was a screen 12 inches from my face.
So I did the smallest reset I know. I looked up. Lifted my eyes off the phone, sat back, and let them slowly wander around the actual room. The window. A tree outside doing absolutely nothing. There’s a name for what that does, the orienting response, and your nervous system reads it as a plain all-clear. Nothing in here is trying to eat you. You can stand down.
That’s the trap with a screen. It pulls your eyes into a tunnel a few inches wide, and your body treats that narrow, locked-in stare the way it would treat stalking something or bracing for a hit. Do hours of it and you wonder why you feel wired and worn out at the same time.
The reset is to widen the lens on purpose. Look up, look far, let your eyes land on something 20 feet away and rest there for a few slow breaths. Respond instead of react, starting with where you aim your eyes.
I need this one more than most. My default when I’m stressed is to look closer, grip the phone tighter, and dig further into the exact thing spinning me up. Looking up feels almost too simple to count. It counts.
So the next time you catch yourself braced over a screen, can you lift your eyes and give your nervous system one honest look at the room you’re actually safe in?
Wednesday, we get back to the reps.
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