Sat frozen at my desk yesterday after a call went sideways, trying to “calm down” by staring harder at the problem. 20 minutes of that and I was more wound up, not less, just now with a stiff neck to go with it. Finally got up and walked to the end of the block and back. Two minutes. Came back a different person.
That’s the thing we forget about stress. It’s chemistry, and it’s physical. A hard moment dumps adrenaline and cortisol into your body to get you ready to move. When you sit still and stew, that chemistry has nowhere to go, so it just keeps circling and wearing you down from the inside.
So the reset is to give it somewhere to go. Move. A 2-minute walk, or 10 air squats right there by the desk. The point is to let your body burn off the fuel it loaded up to fight something that turned out to be an email. Call it exercise if you want, but two minutes is plenty.
Moving the stress out is what buys you the gap between reacting and responding. The call that spun me up got a much better reply after the walk than it would have gotten at minute 19 of the stew.
My instinct is always to sit and grind it out, like leaving the desk is quitting. Leaving the desk for 2 minutes is usually the fastest way back to it.
So the next time you’re flooded and frozen, can you get up and move for 2 minutes before you try to think your way out of it?
Wednesday, we get back to the reps.
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