I have a confession to make.

I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about tending to our inner worlds.

About noticing.

About agency.

About the quiet art of not reaching for the phone before you’ve even taken stock of where you are in your waking moment.

And then I lay awake at 3am, my heart racing, and found myself reaching for my phone to check whether Iran still existed.

I’m not telling you this because I think it makes a good story. Rather, I’m telling you because I think it’s highly likely that you might have been doing something similar. And also, because I believe that the gap between knowing something and actually living it, especially when the world feels genuinely frightening, is not necessarily a failure. It’s just being very human in very difficult times.

The night the world felt like it was tipping

There’s a particular quality to the deep-seated fear that exists when a world leader makes a threat so enormous that it barely feels real.

It’s not a simple personal anxiety, the manageable kind where you breathe through it. This is something much older and bigger than that.

This is the kind of fear that sits in your chest like a stone and refuses to be reasoned with.

I know about nervous systems, I work with them constantly. I know about the 90-second rule. I know how the body responds to perceived threat before my thinking brain catches up. I’ve written about all of it.

But still I lay there! Scrolling away, checking, as though my phone had some kind of power to make the world safer.

When morning finally came and Iran was still there, still whole, still standing, what I felt wasn’t simple relief. It was relief mixed with a kind of grief. It’s an anger that we are living in a moment where this should even be a question we wake up asking.

A sadness for what America has become in such a short space of time. Something that felt, quietly and permanently, like trust being broken in a way that doesn’t easily mend. That, I believe is an honest response to something that really does deserves to be felt.

The second ‘awake’ night

Then the next night I was lying awake again and knowing that my partner in a completely different country was also worrying away in the middle of the night. This time not Iran but a major move for us from Spain back to the UK.

Let’s get the house valued we said, It was and we were pleasantly surprised. Then it sold overnight, before it even reached the market, which felt like a clear and unmistakeable signal that a new chapter was slowly emerging. But signs don’t dissolve those niggling practicalities. Converting euros to pounds. Our ages now at 60+ brings with it an essence of worry when planning a major life transition, especially when, due to work, you’re temporarily in different countries and can’t yet do much to move things forward anyway.

Two people lying awake in the dark, each carrying their own version of what if, each trying not to pass it to the other.

I imagine that you’ll probably know that feeling. It a 3am version of yourself which is rarely your wisest or most grounded or regulated self. Mine certainly wasn’t.

Where I actually found my ground

To be perfectly honest it really wasn’t a breathing technique.

It wasn’t a body scan or a long exhale even though those things have a place and they certainly work.

But for me this week has been a point of total overwhelm from the world ending, to doubting our decision to move home/country.

What actually brought me back and grounded me. In fact what has held me constantly in my darkest moments for more than thirty years now is my practise of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. This Daimoku is, quite simply, what holds me together when everything else feels like it’s spinning.

Not because it makes the fear disappear, it doesn’t. Neither does it deliver instant calm. But it does return me, gradually and reliably, to a point of power that exists way beneath the panic. It’s a place where wisdom is still accessible, even when I seem to have lost sight of it. Where I can stop pushing and remember that life has its own intelligence.

It’s the belief that winter always turns to spring, that what is meant to unfold will unfold, and that my role isn’t to control the outcome but simply to show up as fully and as grounded as I can.

Eventually, not immediately, but eventually, the calm returns. The wisdom returns. And I remember that I am not alone in this and never have been.

So, what I’d like to share this Saturday morning

If you’ve had a hard week, and my guess is that I’m not alone in having connected to events far greater than ourselves. I want you to know that no matter how grounded some one is, there are always moments that cause us to wobble. We forget about tending our inner gardens and living inside-out. Instead we lie awake worrying about geopolitics, moves and mortgages.

But you know, the inside-out life isn’t a destination we can just arrive at and then maintain serenely.

It’s an active, ongoing practice. Some weeks you do it beautifully. Some weeks you check your phone at 3am and lie there with your heart racing until dawn breaks and it’s just light enough to get up.

Both are very real. Both are allowed.

What matters, perhaps the only thing that really matters, is that you know where your ground is. That however quiet and personal yours is, you can return to it when the night gets long.

For me it’s my practice. For you it’s probably something different.

A walk. A person. A prayer.

A piece of music that finds you when you need it.

The particular quality of early morning before the world gets loud.

Whatever it is, tend it. Return to it. Let it hold you tight when you can’t hold yourself.

This is the most sophisticated form of agency I know.

A gentle question for this week

No practice. No technique.

Just a question to sit with quietly.

What is the thing, the real thing, not the should-be thing, that actually holds you together when the night gets hard?

You don’t have to share it. You don’t have to justify it or make it sound impressive.

Just know what it is.

And then when that 3am version of yourself reaches for the phone, reach instead for your special ground.

The calm returns.

The wisdom returns.

It always has. And it always will.

Have a grounded and gentle weekend.

Kathy 😘

Before we begin let me ask you something…

Are you here, actually here, or are you already elsewhere?

Maybe somewhere lost in a news headline, or some in conversation you’ve been dreading, or perhaps chewing over something that happened yesterday that you haven’t quite finished processing yet.

There’s no judgement. Just simply noticing.

Because that noticing is the very small act of turning the gaze inward and that is exactly what this week’s post is all about.

The direction we’ve been living in

Most of us, probably unconsciously, seem to have learnt to live from the outside-in.

We wake up and immediately reach outwards.

We grab the phone. The news. Read a message that arrived while we were sleeping.

We read the temperature of the world before we’ve even taken stock of our own inner world. We let external conditions set the pace, the terms for how we feel and how we move through the day, whether we feel OK or not.

When the world was ‘manageable’ enough we could borrow our equilibrium from it. If things outside were reasonably steady, then we too could be reasonably steady.

But we’re not in that world right now.

Right now, the outside is not offering steadiness. It is offering noise and uncertainty. And it comes with a particular type of anxiety as we watch things unfold in real time while knowing that you/we/I can’t influence any of them.

If we’ve been living outside-in, if the external world has been our primary compass, then this moment is asking something of us that we may not have been trained for.

It’s asking that we find some ground inside ourselves as our launchpad.

That is what living inside-out means. And it is, I think, one of the most important shifts or gifts, that any of us could give ourselves right now.

What is agency, actually

I want to be as precise as possible here, because this is a word that gets used in ways that aren’t always helpful.

Agency isn’t control.

We’re not in control of many of the events happening in the world right now and pretending otherwise really can’t be called agency.

Agency isn’t really ‘positivity’ either. It’s not the capacity to reframe everything as a growth opportunity, or to locate the silver lining while the building is burning.

Agency, as I mean it here, is something much quieter and more honest than either of those things.

It’s the knowledge that I have some say in what happens inside me, even when I have no say about what happens outside.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

It sounds almost too small. A bit insignificant? But I’ve come to realise that it’s one of the most radical things a person can practise. And, particularly in today, where things shaping our external world feel so vast and overwhelming, while our influence over them feels somehow negligible.

The shift from outside-in to inside-out is simply this:

‘..stop waiting for the world to settle before you begin doing it.’

How the outside-in life erodes us

After a while living outside-in has a particular texture after a while that I’m sure you’ll recognise it.

For me it often feels like I’m somehow reaching for more information, in the hope that gaining a little more understanding might help me regain some sense of control.

But in fact, the more information I find, the more it seems to deliver threat rather than relief. I get more dysregulation, and more of the ambient anxiety that was problematic to begin with.

At times it feels like comparison. I’m looking at people who seem to be managing, who are clear, purposeful and grounded, thinking they must possess something I don’t and I take this uncertainty as evidence of my own personal failure.

Of course this is almost never true. What we’re seeing is simply their outside, while experiencing our own inside. It’s definitely not a fair comparison.

And most of all it feels a bit like waiting.

Waiting for things to settle before you begin. Waiting for this particular crisis to pass, for this patch to ease, and for ‘external’ permission to start tending to ourselves.

But the outside rarely settles on schedule. And waiting for it to do so is almost like the white flag of surrender. It’s a quiet handing-over of autonomy and it happens so gradually we may not even notice it’s gone; until of course someone asks a simple question, ‘…what do you want…’ or ‘…how are you feeling…’ and you realise you genuinely don’t know.

I think it’s because we’ve been living so far outside ourselves for so long that the question feels almost strange, as we’ve learnt to live with it in an unquestioned kind of way.

What turning inward actually looks like

There’s a version of this conversation that could easily slip into the glib, so, I believe it important to be honest.

Turning inward is never just a single moment of clarity.

It’s often a significant decision, and almost always, it’s practised in tedious small steps.

It’s learning to catch the thought, just a second earlier than you used to.

It is noticing that your jaw is clenched and taking a moment to unclench before you open the email.

It is pausing, before responding to a message that triggered your anger or fear, instead of instantaneously firing back and hitting ‘send’.

It is asking yourself, before you open the news:

‘… am I doing this because I want to be informed, or because I’m looking for a hit of certainty, which I know, at this time, really isn’t there?

These things don’t necessarily feel significant in the moment. In fact, they probably feel small, maybe a little silly.

However, over time they will accumulate into something that does feel significant. We begin to live with a growing sense that we’re the author of our own ‘inside’, even when everything ‘outside’ is being written by others.

That’s the agency I’m talking about. The quiet kind that gets built from the inside and holds up, even when the outside doesn’t.

A practice for this week

So, before you react to something this week, first of all try pausing to take a single breath, a long exhale and a single question:

‘Is this response coming from the inside, or am I just reacting to the outside?’

You don’t have to change your response.

You don’t have to feel calm.

You just have to notice, even briefly, the difference between responding from your centre and being swept along by the current.

That noticing is not nothing.

Right now, it is everything.

Which takes us back to where we began in January...agency underpins our ability to regulate and comes way before willpower.

Love

Kathy 😘 Have a great weekend

Something feels different right now.

There’s a particular quality to the anxiety many of us are carrying at the moment that feels less like the personal, manageable kind, rather it’s something more ambient, a low hum in the background of everything. You wake up and it’s already there. You scroll for thirty seconds, and it seems to double. The world, quite frankly, feels like it’s standing at the edge of something, and nobody seems entirely sure what happens next.

Our nervous systems were not designed for this. They’re designed to respond to immediate, physical threat, something we can run from, fight, and survive. What they were not designed for is the relentless, globally broadcast version of threat that many of us are navigating right now. The geopolitical noise. The humanitarian weight of what we’re witnessing. The feeling that the people with the most power have rapidly become the least trustworthy.

We can’t simply exhale our way out of a world that feels genuinely precarious.

But here is what we can do. And it matters more right now than it perhaps ever has.

The room feels it before you speak

In my last couple of posts we talked about the hive of activity that is our nervous system. The scanning, the broadcasting, the interpreting, and the variety of ways in which we can interrupt those processes at the physical level before the negative chatter takes over. If you haven’t read those yet they’re worth going back to, because this post builds on them.

Today I want to make a slight shift, perhaps a little more outward facing.

Because here’s something I’ve noticed in my own life, and in the work I’ve done with people over the years.

When someone walks into a room in a regulated state, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not because they’re performing confidence or projecting authority. But because the nervous system of every other person in that room somehow picks up on it and connects.

We talked in my previous post about how the nervous system processes threat cues before the thinking brain catches up. The same is exactly true of safety cues.

We read the room constantly, at subconscious levels. We pick up signals from the bodies around us. When someone arrives who is genuinely grounded, not performing groundedness, other nervous systems notice. The temperature in the room changes slightly. The conversation takes on a different quality. And somehow something settles.

This is definitely not mystical. It is biology.

And right now, in a world where collective dysregulation is at a level most of us have never experienced before, the person who has done even a little of this inner work carries something genuinely valuable. Not because they have all the answers. Not because they’re unaffected by what’s happening. But because they’ve learned to resource themselves before they walk through the door.

This is what I mean consider the ‘voice in the room’. Not volume. Not authority in any traditional sense. Something quieter and far more durable than that.

Being regulated versus running on fumes

Most of us know the difference intuitively I think, not in our heads, but in our gut and our bodies. That feeling that tells us something before we’ve even found the words to explain it.

There’s a version of you (and me) that shows up to a difficult conversation having already run it three hundred times in your head, jaw tight, ready for conflict, half gone before it’s even begun. That version technically says the right things, but the other person feels the tension underneath, and they will respond to what the body is broadcasting, not just to the words.

And there’s the version of you that shows up having taken three long exhales, having felt feet firmly on the floor, having interrupted the ‘chatter’ before walking in. That version isn’t calm in the performed sense. It’s simply more present. More available. More able to actually hear what’s being said rather than just waiting to defend.

The difference other people feel in us is real. It isn’t about being polished or professional or having it all together. It’s about whether we’ve resourced ourselves or whether we’re running on empty and asking others to work around us.

This matters in one-to-one conversations, in leadership, in parenting. And right now, it matters in how we hold ourselves and each other while the world feels so uncertain.

The oxygen mask

There’s an instruction we’re all given on an aeroplane that most of us half-listen to and quietly hope we never need.

Put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

Not because you matter more. But because you’re no use to anyone if you can’t breathe.

The inner work is the oxygen mask. It isn’t selfish, it’s actually sensible. And right now, it might be the most important thing you do.

What does it mean to be ‘resourced’?

For me it simply means this, that before I walk into the room, before that difficult conversation, before I open the news or pick up the phone, I’ve done something small to come back to myself. Not to feel perfect. Not to feel calm. Just to feel present. To feel like I’m here, in this body, in this moment, with some ground under my feet.

I want to be a bit careful here because this could easily tip into the bland kind of advice of ‘just take care of yourself’, which, when the world is genuinely frightening, falls somewhere between hollow and insulting.

And this is not what I mean.

Being resourced doesn’t mean being unaffected. It doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing or reaching for calm as a way of not feeling what’s real and hard.

Some things really do deserve our grief.

Some things deserve our anger.

The situation in Gaza. The erosion of order, now replaced by chaos. The feeling that cruelty has been normalised in real time.

These are not things we can lightly breathe away.

But there is a difference between feeling those things fully, which is honest and human, and being so flooded by them that we become unavailable. To ourselves, to the people around us, to whatever small sphere of influence each of us actually has.

Because here’s the thing about this particular moment in time.

The antidote to feeling powerless in the face of frightening things is not to consume more news. It is not to argue more loudly on the internet, although I often find myself so caught up in this trap.

It is, at least in part, to tend to the thing you actually can influence, which is how you show up. In your home. In your work. In your community. In the conversations that are right in front of you.

That is not small. That is, in fact, everything.

The quiet return of agency

I feel that since I began writing this series in January, we’ve almost come full circle.

Everything we’ve covered, the nervous system, the body broadcasting, the inner chatter, the physical tools, it all points toward one thing.

Agency

Not the loud, decisive, dramatic kind that gets celebrated in leadership books.

This is far more the quieter kind. The kind that says

‘I know what’s happening inside me, and I have some say in what happens next.’

That kind of agency is not given to you by circumstances. The circumstances right now are certainly not offering it freely.

It has to be built, carefully, from the inside.

It starts with noticing. Then with interrupting. And then, over time, with arriving somewhere slightly more settled than you used to. Just a little more grounded in who you actually are, beneath all the noise.

And I won’t pretend it’s easy. My own battle to spend even 24 hours without reaching for a news article at the moment is real and ongoing. It is a process. It takes time and determination to take those small steps consistently, even when the world makes it feel almost impossible to look away.

But the person who’s learning this, who’s beginning to understand their own nervous system, who catches the chatter a little sooner than they used to, who walks into the room having done even the tiniest amount of inner work, that person is exactly what this moment needs.

Not a hero. But a someone who has decided to become the author of their own inner world, even when everything outside feels like it’s being written by someone else entirely.

The brushstroke

There is a Buddhist sutra that captures this in a way I often return to.

“The mind is like a skilled painter, able to paint all the worlds…” (Kegon Sutra)

Dr Daisaku Ikeda interprets this simply and beautifully that

“…our hearts, like a skilled painter, freely create representations of all things. Our lives are faithful expressions of what is in our hearts.”

Which means that the inner work, the noticing, the interrupting, the small daily tending to our own nervous systems, is not just self-care.

It is the brushstroke.

It is you, quietly and deliberately, painting the life and living each day the way you actually want to be living.

That is agency. And it begins exactly where you are.

Something to try this week

Given everything that’s in the air right now, I want to offer something slightly different from the usual practical section.

Before you read the news today, or instead of reading it for one morning, spend five minutes sitting with one question:

“What do I actually know to be true right now, in my own life, in my own body, in this present moment?”

Not what might happen. Not what the headlines are saying. Not what you’re afraid of. Just what is actually, verifiably, true right now.

The floor is under your feet.

The people you love are, in this moment, okay.

Your breath is moving.

You are here.

This is not nothing. In fact, right now, it might be everything.

A closing thought

At this moment in time the world is loud.

It is frightening in ways that are real and not imagined, and the nervous system knows it even when the thinking brain is trying to stay calm and rational about it all.

You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But you do get to decide, in small, daily, unglamorous ways, what you bring into the rooms you walk into. What tone you carry. Whether you arrive having tended to yourself or whether you bring the unprocessed noise of everything booming in with you.

That choice, made quietly and consistently, is not just self-care.

It’s a form of hope.

And right now, hope offered in a grounded voice, not naive, not performative, but real, might be the most radical thing any of us can do.

Have a wonderful, grounded weekend.

Kathy 😘

Next in this series:

Discovering our own pathway; what it means to start living from the inside out rather than the outside in.

At some point, most of us have been told to ‘calm down’. Perhaps less often in those exact words, more often in the form of advice.

Try to relax.

Take a breath.

Just don’t think about it.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that ‘kindness’ while your nervous system was running at full pitch, you’ll know just how frustrating it can be.

Not because the person saying it was wrong, but quite simply because calm isn’t something you can just decide to have.

Calm isn’t an on-demand choice that’s available at the flick of a switch. In fact, it’s often the case that the more you try to reach for calm the more your nervous system digs in.

It’s important to recognise that calm and safe are not the same thing, they’re not even the same type of thing.

Calm is a state. Safe is a signal.

Calm is what our nervous systems look and feel like when they’re not on alert. It’s the output, the result. You can’t manufacture it directly any more than you can with tiredness by lying still and insisting you’re asleep!

Safe is something completely different. It’s what the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment (inner and outer) for and trying to assess in the background.

We’re not talking safe in an abstract sense such as in ‘is the world generally okay?’ Rather this type of safe is about the immediate, the physical, right-now sense.

“Is my body, in this moment, in this environment, okay?”

We’re rarely aware of this because, most of the time there’s nothing to report. But sometimes the scan brings up an uncertainty. It could be real and or it could be that our system has responded based on an old experience that triggers ‘danger’ in a situation that isn’t actually dangerous anymore.

However, once triggered it’s almost impossible to talk our nervous systems back down to a place of safety. It’s like, intellectually knowing my presentation will be fine, that my relationship is solid, that nothing terrible is about to happen today but somehow, I still feel my shallow breath, my tight chest, and the low-level alarm, that keeps me alert to the ‘danger’.

As we said in last week’s post, it’s certainly not irrational.

Basically, it’s the gap between our ‘primitive’ fight, flight or freeze centre that operates our threat detection system, and our more rational thinking brain. In fact, the amygdala (that ‘primitive’ point in the centre of the brain) receives information before our thinking brain. And as such the emotions are triggered before we can reasonably think about what just happened!

But here’s an important bit. We can actually take back control! We can send safety signals, small physical ones at first but as the nervous system receives enough of them, it will begin to update its assessment.

The nerve that connects everything

Let’s just take a closer look at what’s happening here.

The vagus nerve that runs from your brainstem all the way down your body connecting your heart, lungs, gut and other organs, plays a critical role in how your nervous systems shifts between states of alert and rest.

This process is a two-way channel. Through this nerve the brain sends information to the body, but equally the body also sends information up to the brain. It is the upward traffic that accounts for the majority of our inner communication. The vagus nerve then, is primarily providing bodily information about our heart rate, breath, gut state, muscle tension which is being sent up to the brain. So, the communication is less the verbal, worrying, narrative chatter and more about the physical hum underneath it.

Which means that what you do with your body has a direct impact on what your nervous system registers as true.

If your heart is racing and your shoulders are tensed up around your ears, your brain will act accordingly and vice versa.

So, small physical actions should be the first place to start to remedy this.

I’m sure we’ve all had those ‘in the head conversations’ that we’d rather not hear. And the more we try to still the chatter the louder it becomes. It is then, at this point, that we need to take physical action.

For example,

If you slow your exhale, the vagus nerve will carry that information upward. It’s received as data ‘Aha something has slowed down. Perhaps the threat has passed.’

You could hum quietly, which creates a vibration in your chest and throat, again a new message for the nervous system to ponder.

Put your feet flat on the floor and your nervous system gets a message of physical grounding, of weight, of contact, of presence in the now moment.

These aren’t tricks and they’re not wellness theatre.

They are inputs to a system that is genuinely able to listen and more importantly, to respond.

Why ‘performing’ calm makes things worse

There’s a particular kind of effort that goes into trying to seem calm when actually you’re not. The jaw held deliberately loose. The voice kept deliberately even. The breath that you’re consciously managing because you’re aware that it’s gone shallow.

The problem is that the effort of trying actually becomes a signal.

Occasionally if I’m finding it difficult to sleep, I listen to an audio and allow my jaw to loosen and my tongue to rest on the bottom of my mouth. And of course, the more I ‘try’ the more awake I feel!

I am working hard to lift something heavy, or I am working hard to suppress a feeling.

Effort is always read by our systems as activation. The very act of performing calm is, physiologically and it does the absolute opposite.

This is why when someone says, just relax it usually lands badly.

Relaxation can’t be a situation of ‘efforting’.

Cold water on your wrists is another good move. The sudden change in temperature gives your system something concrete to register, being present, physical, in the now.

Of course, these actions alone won’t dissolve a panic attack or resolve a genuinely threatening situation and that’s not really their purpose. The purpose is by doing something much smaller you are sending the nervous system enough data to begin to question whether full alert is still necessary.

What’s buried in all of this?

Here’s the thing that I found a little unsettling when I first encountered this.

If our nervous systems can be moved toward safety through small physical inputs, humming, breathing, cold water, ground contact, then does it follow that safety is something we can participate in. Not control, but rather influence.

And if that’s the case, then the question I ask is what have I (we) been doing instead?

My guess is that we’re really not so different. Most of us have spent years trying to think our way to calm. Trying to reason with the anxiety. Challenge our thoughts by asking whether our fear is proportionate. Enter more enhanced chatter!

These aren’t useless because our thinking brain has a role. But when the nervous system is activated, it’s not really a thinking problem. It’s often a body problem. And a body problem will need a body answer first.

It isn’t that we’ve been doing it wrong, the tools were always more accessible than we realised. We don’t need an app or a complicated breathing exercise we simply need to reach for the tools that are so much closer.

Our exhale. The floor under our feet. The hum which vibrates in our throat and chest. All of these present as data or signals to begin to soothe the nervous system.

What this looks like, practically

We don’t need to wait for a moment of crisis to practice any of this. In fact, the more we offer the nervous system these small safety signals in ordinary moments, the more accessible they become when we actually need them.

Before a difficult conversation, rather than rehearsing it in your head and therefore focusing on the chatter and effort, try two or three long exhales first. Let the out-breath run longer than the in-breath. You’re not trying to feel calm. You’re simply shifting the ratio.

When you notice the hum of anxiety, without any obvious source, try placing both feet flat on the floor and pressing them down gently. Notice the contact. That’s it. You’re not meditating. You’re just giving your nervous system different input to process.

None of these are cures. They are simply a few tools that are fully accessible to us when we need them.

A closing thought

Calm is not a performance. It’s not something the most stoic or the most zen among us have simply mastered through sheer willpower.

It’s actually what happens when we provide our nervous system with enough evidence that the danger has passed, or maybe that it was never quite as imminent as it seemed.

One exhale, one moment of contact with the floor, one small vibration in your chest, at a time. Your nervous system is definitely listening. It just doesn’t speak the language of thoughts.

Have a great soothing day

Kathy 😘

So. About that audio.🎙️

If you were one of the few brave souls who clicked play on my post early on, you may have heard me umming, stumbling, a bit of knocking on wood, generally proving that hypnotherapists are not immune to nerves.

I sent out the unedited version by mistake.

The irony of a post about the power of sound being accompanied by the wrong audio is not lost on me. 😄

The correct version is now up, but rather than just quietly pretend it never happened, I thought I’d turn my little error into something useful.

Here’s the little trick I use when recording:

When I’m recording and I make a mistake, a stumble, a fluff, an “oh for goodness sake” moment, I simply tap the table a couple of times firmly before I repeat and carry on.

That tap creates a very visible spike in the audio waveform in Audacity.

So, when I go back to edit, instead of listening through the whole thing trying to find my mistakes, I just look for the spikes. They show up instantly. I cut just before the spike, trim the mistake, and carry on.

It simple and saves so much time. Rather than retake and retake, you simply carry on with the recording and hopefully son’t tip over the words too often.

It really does make the whole editing process far less painful.

So the lesson I’m taking from this week 😳

Even in audio production, it turns out the body knows before the mind catches up.

Always listen before you publish, even when you’re a hypnotherapist who knows the power of sound” 😊

See you in the next one.

Kathy ❤️

P.S. If you’re just starting out with recording your Substack posts, do try it. Your voice is part of your story. Mistakes, bloopers and all.

Here’s the audio if you prefer to listen?

Let me set the scene.

It’s somewhere around 1am. I’ve just finished an episode of The Night Agent, very America-centric but still gripping, tense, definitely not the kind of thing you should watch before bed.

I’ve also somehow eaten (don’t ask me how) a handful of Haribo, which, as any sugar-aware person knows, is basically handing your nervous system a major explosion of energy.

So, I’m wide awake and my brain has no intention of switching off.

Here’s the ironic part: I’m a hypnotherapist. I know exactly what’s happening physiologically.

The cortisol spike from the Netflix tension.

The blood sugar surge from the sweets.

The blue light suppressing my melatonin.

I know all of it and I still walked straight into the trap.

So, what did I do? I got up and made a hot vegetable Oxo drink (don’t judge me, I think it’s a British thing 😊). After my hot drink, I put on a hypnotherapy audio, specifically one that uses sound frequencies designed to gently guide the brain into a relaxed state.

And eventually, I drifted into a deep sleep.

Which brings me to a question I’ve been quietly turning over for a while now, both as someone who uses these tools and someone also, trained to understand them:

Does the Hz stuff actually work? Or is it the belief that it works?

What the science actually says

The theory behind frequency-based relaxation audio, often called brainwave entrainment isn’t made up.

Your brain genuinely does produce measurable electrical activity that varies depending on your mental state.

These are brainwaves, and they’re measured in Hertz:

• Delta (0.5–4 Hz) — deep sleep

• Theta (4–8 Hz) — drowsy, meditative states

• Alpha (8–12 Hz) — calm, relaxed wakefulness

• Beta (12–30 Hz) — alert, active thinking

When you’re stressed or overstimulated, say, after a late-night thriller and a major sugar boost, your brain tends to run high in Beta.

The idea behind tools like binaural beats or isochronic tones is that audio at specific frequencies can nudge your brain toward a more relaxed alpha or theta level. It is essentially coaxing your brain down from that heightened state. Which in fact it connects to an article I’ve written recently about the way the body often knows ‘stuff’ before the mind even catches up.

There are studies that support this.

EEG research has shown that brainwave entrainment can shift measurable electrical activity. There’s also evidence that certain calming sounds do in fact reduce cortisol levels.

But the effects themselves are generally quite modest, reasonably gradual, and can be highly variable between individuals. Beware the claims you’ll often see online ‘rewire your brain in 15 minutes!’ as these are significantly overstated.

So, do you think it’s just placebo?

Well, it’s here that I’d like to push back just a little on the way we usually frame this question.

The placebo effect is possibly one of the most fascinating and often under-appreciated, phenomena in all of human psychology.

When you really believe something will help you relax, your brain doesn’t just pretend to relax, it actually releases neuro-chemicals associated with relaxation. In which case it becomes a physiological response that is totally measurable.

In other words, you could argue that the belief itself produces the genuine physiological response.

If someone listens to a theta wave audio track, if they expect to feel calmer, and then do feel calmer, did it work?

I’d suggest definitely yes.

Regardless of whether the mechanism was the Hz frequencies specifically, or the ritual of lying down and putting on headphones, the expectation of relief, or some combination of all three, the actual outcome was very real.

I think this is also one of the things that CBT and hypnotherapy have in common. Both work partly through shifting what the mind expects and believes is possible. The “technology” is almost secondary to the therapeutic relationship and the client’s willingness to engage.

My honest take

As a therapeutic practitioner, and having used frequency-based audio for some time, here’s where I’ve landed:

I believe that the ritual of it all matters enormously.

Putting headphones on, closing your eyes, giving yourself permission to stop (or pause!) That alone is doing a lot of significant work. The audio therefore provides something to follow rather than allowing you to spin around. There is probably some genuine neurological effect from the frequencies themselves, even if it’s more subtle than advertised.

I have come to see and accept that its the belief that it will work, that might actually be the most powerful ingredient of all.

That doesn’t mean you should trust it less.

If anything, it’s provides us with a very clear and strong reminder of just how extraordinary and powerful our minds are.

Last night, a hot drink and an entrainment audio got me back to sleep after Netflix and my Haribo did their best to keep me wired.

Was it the Hz? The warmth of the drink? The familiar voice on the recording? The fact that I finally stopped watching Netflix?

Probably all of it.

And honestly? That feels like enough.

Kathy❤️

I’d love to know your experience, have you ever used binaural beats, hypnotherapy audio, or similar tools? Did they work for you, and do you think it matters why? Drop a comment below.

🎧 Prefer to listen? You can hear me read this post using the audio above

This week I missed Monday. A long flight to China and a frankly impressive amount of jet lag saw to that. But here we are, and we're continuing our exploration of 'the pause' and 'presence', and now turning to the role our brains play in what can sometimes feel like a blurred line between the physical and the emotional.

There’s a particular kind of Sunday feeling that many of us know but rarely talk about.

It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It generally arrives around late afternoon as a low weight settling in the chest, a restlessness that you can’t quite put your finger on, or a sudden urge to scroll or snack or find something, anything, to do with your hands.

The weekend isn’t quite over. Nothing bad has happened. And yet, somehow, your body is already beginning to brace.

Or perhaps it’s something different for you. As you walk into a meeting you’ve been in a hundred times before, you notice your jaw is clenched, your shoulders are somewhere up near your ears, and your stomach has quietly tightened. You weren’t consciously thinking about it, and yet your body was already there.

It’s not weakness, or irrationality. It’s your nervous system acting exactly the way it was designed to. For us, really understanding this is what changes everything about how we relate in these moments.

The brain that acts before it thinks

Here’s something that tends to surprise people.

The part of the brain responsible for detecting threat is significantly faster than the part responsible for conscious thought.

Think of it like this.

Our nervous systems are like a ‘constantly on surveillance system’. They scan our environments, our bodies, and our social contexts for signals of safety or danger. This happens well below our main level of awareness.

By the time a thought forms in our minds …I’m anxious about tomorrow… our physical bodies have already been responding to that information for a while. So, our thoughts are often a delayed translation of something the body already knew.

This is why sometimes you can walk into a room and immediately feel uncomfortable even before you consciously register, why.

In short, your nervous system isn’t being dramatic, it’s being extremely efficient.

What interoception actually means

Interoception is the word we use for our ability to sense the internal state of our bodies. You may have heard of proprioception, which is our sense of where our body is in space. Interoception goes deeper.

It’s the felt sense of your heartbeat, your breath, the tension in your gut, the weight behind your sternum.

We tend to think of our senses always as pointing outward such as our sight, sound, smell. But we also have an entire sensory system that points inward, relaying information from our organs and tissues up to the brain.

Your heart has sensory neurons and so does our gut.

There’s a reason we speak of a ‘gut feeling’ or a ‘heartache’. These aren’t just poetic expressions, they’re imprecise translations of genuinely physical experience.

This is where I’ve found the work of Dr Jill Bolte Taylor to be so compelling in my therapeutic and hypnotherapy practice. Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996, and spent the four hours it took to fully unfold observing, with professional precision, exactly what was happening to her own mind.

What she discovered from the inside is something most of us never get to witness so directly. The brain receives information in a specific sequence, and thinking actually comes last!

Sensory information is processed first by the emotional centres of the brain, specifically the amygdalae, before it ever reaches the thinking cortex.

Taylor describes the amygdala’s primary job as a moment-to-moment threat assessment, essentially asking, ‘…am I safe right now?’

This happens incredibly fast, and mostly without our conscious involvement.

The thinking brain then, the part that narrates, analyses, and plans, only receives the information after the emotional system has already had its say.

Taylor also describes the right hemisphere as taking in all sensory information simultaneously, that’s sound, sensation, temperature, movement, and assembles it into what she calls ‘…a collage of the present moment…’

It is experiential before it is conceptual.

It feels before it thinks.

What this means in practice is that your felt sense of a room, a relationship, a Sunday afternoon is operating at a level you don’t have direct access to.

By the time we recognise that ‘uneasy’ feeling, our nervous system has already been running that assessment for some time.

The gap between signal and story

This is where things get really interesting, and also where a great deal of our own suffering tends to live.

The body sends a signal.

The brain needs to interpret it.

The brain, being a prediction machine, shaped by everything you’ve ever experienced, will often reach for the most familiar interpretation. Which may not always be the most accurate one.

So, a tight chest + sense of unease = something is wrong with me, with my life, with the future.

The signal was definitely real but the interpretation may not be.

That tight chest might be early information about something genuinely worth attending to. But it might also be a nervous system that learned, a long time ago, that Sunday evenings meant a tough week was on its way.

It might be your or my body associating certain environments or people with past stress, and is doing its job, perhaps a little overzealously, of keeping us well prepared.

The problem isn’t the signal. It becomes a problem only when we skip straight from signal to catastrophic story, without pausing in the space between.

Try this scenario:

I feel uneasy becomes something is wrong,

which becomes something’s wrong with me,

which then becomes it’s always going to feel like this.

We’ve left the physical information behind and immediately opted for the mind’s worst-case construction.

Listening without catastrophising

So how do we actually use what our body is telling us, without being swept into the stories it can generate?

The first, and often the hardest step, is to simply notice the signal before naming it.

Not, I’m anxious. Instead name it, there is tightening in my chest… my breath has become shallower… there’s something happening in my stomach.

This sounds so simple. But we’ve become very conditioned to skip directly to interpretation. So consciously creating a pause between the sensation and the story is where all the useful information lives.

When you can actually locate the feeling in your body more specifically, rather than just generally, a few things begin to happen.

You’ve implicitly reminded yourself that this is a physical event, not an objective truth about the world.

You’ve engaged the part of the brain that observes rather than reacts, which, in itself tends to reduce the intensity of the alarm.

And you’ve created a space to ask, what might this actually be about?

That last question really matters.

Sometimes the Sunday dread is legitimate anticipatory information, there’s something at work that genuinely needs attention, and your body is quietly nudging you towards it.

But sometimes it really could be old patterning from a time when Sunday evenings reliably preceded something particularly challenging.

It could also be simply tiredness, narrated by a weary brain, as a strong foreboding.

You can’t know unless you pause long enough to ask.

Our bodies aren’t the enemy of reason

We live with a cultural tendency to position bodily sensation as the ‘irrational thing’ that reason must override.

Don’t be so emotional.

It’s just a feeling.

Think it through.

This turns out not to be quite right.

Research has found that people with damage to the parts of the brain that process emotion often struggle to make even basic decisions. This is not because they’re too emotional, but because they can no longer access the bodily felt-sense that helps us navigate these kind of complex situations.

The body’s signals are not noise in the system. They’re important data.

I think about my own experience here.

There have been periods when I was very much living in my head, analysing, planning, trying to think my way through everything, while entirely missing what my body had been trying to tell me for months. It’s usually only in hindsight that I could see how clear the signals were.

But the goal isn’t to silence the body, nor to be controlled by it.

What we need is to develop a relationship with it.

We need to learn about our own patterns, to recognise which sensations tend to mean what, to catch the moment between signal and story often enough that we get some real choice in what happens next.

This is a practice, not an insight. It’s built over time, in small moments, when you notice the tension before a call, when you feel the tightening at a family dinner, when the Sunday feeling arrives and you put down your phone. Just stay with it for a minute. Be curious, rather than frightened.

What to do with this, practically

None of this requires an expensive retreat or any kind of specialist training.

These are a few of our simple starting points:

1. Notice the sensation before you name it. When you feel something physical tied to stress or unease, try to stop and describe it before you interpret it. Where is it? What does it feel like? Is it moving or still? Does it have a temperature, a texture, a weight? You’re not analysing, you’re just observing.

2. Find the gap, however small, between sensation and thought. You may find that the sensation is actually quite neutral until the mind arrives with its chatter and commentary. Or that the sensation itself contains something useful, once the commentary quiets enough to hear it.

3. Ask, is this new information, or simply old patterning? Sometimes the body is responding to what’s actually happening right now. But remember, sometimes it’s running a very old programme. Both matter, but they call for very different responses.

4. Let the feeling be present without feeding it or fighting it. A lot of the suffering around anxiety comes from battling the sensation, which serves to amplify it. An equal amount can also come from diving into the story it generates, which again, escalates it further. Simply allowing the sensation to be present, without either warring with it or narrating it into catastrophe is often the most effective thing you can do.

A thought in closing

Your body is not trying to ruin your Sunday. It isn’t catastrophising for sport. It’s doing what millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned it to do,

Notice-signal-prepare

The question is whether you can slow down enough to receive the signal before your mind converts it into a verdict.

That vague unease at four o’clock on a Sunday might be your nervous system telling you something genuinely real. Or it might be the echo of a version of you who once had good reason to dread Mondays, and that programme is still running out of habit.

Either way, it starts with the same simple act of noticing what’s happening in your body before you decide what it means.

Our bodies know before we do. Our work is learning to listen without letting it write the whole story.

No doubt somewhere this week, you probably experienced one or two difficulties that became challenging feelings, and maybe you held on to them longer than really needed. Not because you’re weak, or broken, or stuck. Simply because you’re human, and your mind was doing what our minds do, trying to make sense of things, turning the feeling over, looking for an explanation, a reason, an exit.

But feelings aren’t necessarily problems to be solved. We can think of them being more like waves.

Some are gentle like a soft ripple that you barely notice before it’s gone.

Some are strong and determined, rolling in with real force, demanding your full attention.

And other are wild. They build and crash. They take your breath away. They make you feel the need to hold on tight.

And yet interestingly, every single one passes.

Neuroscience confirms that this raw ‘physical sensation’ of an emotion, if left alone without us adding our story layers on top, will move through our bodies in around 90 seconds.

What allows those giant waves of emotion to grip us longer is usually our own minds that reach back in and replay the situation, rehearsing or retelling it.

So, let’s try an experiment.

Maybe this weekend, if some challenge arises and brings with it a storm of emotion, see if you can simply let it be a wave. See if you can recognise, without judgement, that it’s not something to fix. Not something to explain.

Set your clock (we all have those funny old smart phones!) and just sit with it for 90 seconds and allow it to pass.

You might be surprised how quickly it does, when you stop trying to make it stop or stop rehashing it.

Have a wonderful gentle weekend.

Kathy ❤️

Here’s something that genuinely changed how I sit with some of my most challenging emotions and it should be noted that this didn’t come rom a mindfulness or therapeutic work, rather it came from neuroscience.

So pause for a moment and consider any emotion, in its pure physiological form, lasts approximately 90 seconds.

That’s it.

A wave of anger, a grip of anxiety, a surge of dread, if left alone, without allowing our minds add unnecessary commentary, the actual chemistry will clear our bodies in about a minute and a half.

So why then does it so often feel like it hangs around for hours, days, or even weeks?

The answer is that generally we feed it!

We replay conversations. We rehearse the worst outcomes. We tell ourselves the story of why this feeling is justified, inevitable, or permanent. And in doing so, we constantly re-trigger the cycle over and over again, etching a deep groove into the vinyl, all the while believing the original feeling is still running, rather than we are constantly dredging it up.

This isn’t a criticism of how we cope. Under consistent stress, this is almost automatic. The part of the brain responsible for nuance, perspective and creative thinking goes partly ‘offline’, and we’re left in a state akin to survival mode. We scan for threat, brace for impact!

The feeling becomes almost like a weather continuum rather than just a passing storm.

But a world of new possibilities open up when we finally grasp this. We begin to notice the difference between the feeling itself, and the thought that follows it. Not always immediately. But gradually, we can start to ask, with real curiosity, is this still the original wave, or am I actually keeping it going?

You don’t need to stop the feeling, it’s there and it’s real, what you must do is stop adding to it.

That’s a very different kind of effort.

And it’s also a much gentler one.

A question for this week

This week, if/when you notice a difficult feeling, try gently asking: how long has this actually been running? You might be surprised by your answer.

Have a great week

Kathy 😘

Welcome to the Year of the Horse!

Gong xi fa cai.

The horse represents forward movement.

Strength without noise.

Energy without chaos.

Pace without panic.

It doesn’t apologise for its power.

It doesn’t rush to prove anything.

It simply moves.

Steady when needed.

Fast when required.

Always aware of direction.

This is a time for that kind of movement.

Where we stop hesitating.

Where we trust our own rhythm.

Where we move because we’re ready, not because we’re pushed.

Let’s ride with the wind and enjoy the energy that comes in the Year of the Horse.

Kathy❤️

Well, very strangely, here I am posting midweek, having missed my usual beginning-of-week rhythm.

That wasn’t the plan.

But hey ho! Life shifts. Structure loosens. Deadlines reappear.

I’m enjoying the freedom of just being and, if I’m honest, I’ve certainly stretched that freedom a little further than was wise. Now the rhythm is tightening again.

And oddly, it feels a little bit adventurous, for me

However, in my previous post we moved from pause to presence.

But what happens next?

In conversations with colleagues recently, something keeps surfacing.

When we slow down enough to become present, something else begins to stir.

Visibility.

Not the social media kind. Not performance. Not branding.

The kind that allows you to be seen before your thoughts are perfected.

The kind that says:

this is where I am, this is how I’m arriving in this moment.

We humans are extraordinary. We juggle deadlines, relationships, responsibilities, shifting technology, unpredictable news cycles… and still we create, connect, repair, rebuild.

None of this is small.

And here’s what I’m beginning to see.

We spend a lot of time worrying about who we are. Our roles. Our history. Our labels.

We pay attention to where we are. The circumstances. The deadlines. The season of life.

But rarely do we pause long enough to connect with how we are.

“How we are” is alive. It’s vital. It’s inward, and it outwardly illuminates our visibility in the world.

It’s the tone we bring into a room. The steadiness we hold under pressure. The energy we offer.

And when we root ourselves there, visibility shifts.

It’s no longer about proving something.

It’s far more like inhabiting or owning - ourselves.

If, presence is noticing, then visibility is allowing.

So, presence can never be an end point.

It is simply the doorway to being more fully here, in real time, without waiting to be flawless.

Halfway through this week is good enough for me and allows me to ask myself:

This is how I’m showing up

It’s not who am I trying to be.

And that in itself feels like freedom.

Kathy ❤️

By the end of the week, many of us don’t feel stressed exactly.

We feel slightly… absent. Not necessarily overwhelmed. Just not fully here.

We’ve been managing, responding, thinking ahead. Doing what needs to be done. And somewhere in that process, w’ve drifted a little from ourselves.

Last week I shared a short pause (audio). It wasn’t a productivity tool or a way to calm ourselves it was simply a moment of relief. A brief interruption in the constant ‘managing’ so many of us do all the time.

Without doubt a pause creates a space.

But what often happens next is this:

we stop… and then immediately start again, filling the space we just created!

So today I want to offer the natural next step.

Presence.

Presence isn’t about being serene, centred, or especially mindful. It isn’t something you achieve or perform. It’s something you allow.

Presence is simply letting yourself arrive where you already are.

A Gentle ‘Arriving” Practice

This will take about three minutes, so you can do it wherever you are.

1. Let your body settle

If you can, place your feet on the floor. Notice the support beneath you. The chair, the ground, the weight of your body being held

You don’t need to relax. Just notice that you’re supported.

2. Orient to your surroundings

Let your eyes move slowly, then name, quietly or out loud:

· three things you can see

· two sounds you can hear

· one physical sensation you can feel clearly

Nothing special is required. Ordinary is perfect.

3. Ask one gentle question

Then, without analysing or answering properly, ask yourself:

What feels most real for me right now?

Not what should matter. Not what’s next. Just what’s real.

Let whatever comes up be enough.

That’s the practice.

No fixing. No insight required.

No expected outcome.

Allowing Ourselves to Arrive

When we stop managing the moment and allow ourselves to arrive, we will experience subtle shifts.

We move from effort into presence.

From monitoring ourselves to inhabiting ourselves.

And from there, a little more internal space returns. A sense or feeling of being here rather than slightly ahead of ourselves.

If you tried the pause last week, this is a natural continuation.

Pause creates a space.

Presence allows us inhabit it.

Presence isn’t about being calm or focused.

It’s about being here enough to notice yourself again.

And when we’re here, something interesting becomes possible.

A Question to Consider Over the Weekend

As you move through the next couple of days, you might notice moments where you feel slightly absent or on autopilot.

When that happens, gently ask:

Have I arrived where I am?

You’ll know by the reduction in tension and the absence of urgency rather than the presence of calm.

Nothing more is required.

Have a gentle weekend.

There’s a moment many people recognise:

you’re stuck on a decision, or can’t see your way through something, and the answer feels like it should be obvious. So you sit down. You focus. You think harder.

And it doesn’t help.

Not because you’re not smart enough or trying hard enough, rather it’s because the problem isn’t cognitive., it’s an issue of capacity.

When you’re already carrying significant cognitive load, managing competing demands, holding multiple threads, staying responsive across a variety of contexts, your system is working really, really close to the edge. So adding more ‘effort’ at this point isn’t going to bring back clarity. On the contrary it will increase demand.

Thinking harder v thinking better.

This is a strategy that works when you have capacity but quite simply fails when you don’t.

An example that we have probably all experienced is when you open an email:

You read it and read it again. The content is straightforward, the decision isn’t complex, but you can’t quite work out how to respond. So you read it a third time and a fourth. The words start to blur and you still don’t know what to say.

Or perhaps you sit down to make a decision, something that earlier in the day felt manageable but now your mind goes blank. The same few options circle back without resolution. You tell yourself to just choose, but your choosing mechanisms feel far off and unavailable.

I used to think these were moments where my capacity to make sound decisions had become totally broken! But really these aren’t moments of indecision.

They’re moments where the capacity to process, weigh, and select has been reduced by the weight of demands already in play.

What makes this difficult to recognise is that cognitive effort would normally work.

When you have the internal resources to support it, thinking harder does actually clarify. It sorts and it resolves. But cognitive effort itself has a cost.

Like when having too many apps open on your laptop requires a lot of bandwidth, the same is true of your cognitive load! If that load/bandwidth it becomes overloaded, it results in fatigue and with that fatigue, comes a narrowing.

Your range of options become smaller. Your ability to hold perspective is reduced. The very thing you’re trying to access, clear thought, gets further out of reach the harder you try to grasp it.

This is actually a very predictable response when you’re operating at the edge of your capacity. Your system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do under load, it’s conserving, protecting and narrowing.

You haven’t lost access permanently. You’ve lost access temporarily, because the demand is too high for the available resource.

Which means rather than a ‘think harder solution’, it’s better to simply reduce demand by pausing.

And, we do that quite simply by consciously creating conditions where your system can restore its own capacity.

Pause isn’t a technique, it’s simply a conscious reduction in load.

And when the load is reduced, access begins to return. Not always immediately. Not in ways you can force.

But reliably enough to notice that when we stop ‘efforting’ we start to pause and when we pause those narrowed down channels open up once more.

If this resonates and you’d like a short, guided pause to reduce demand rather than regulate it, there’s a brief audio available here:

It’s optional of course, and the principle still holds without it.

Have a great day

Kathy ❤️

Earlier this week I wrote about agency not as a mindset, but as a capacity. Something that narrows or expands depending on the internal conditions we’re in.

I’d like to stay with that idea a moment longer, but in a slightly quieter way.

Even when we’ve understood that agency follows capacity, there’s still a question we often skip over:

How do we create even a little more capacity, when life is already so full?

It’s not by thinking harder. Not by analysing ourselves more carefully.

And certainly not by fixing anything.

Very often, it begins with something far simpler.

It starts with a pause. One that’s long enough for the system to realise it is not under immediate demand.

We saw in my previous post, when the pressure is constant, our choice shrinks. When it eases, even for a brief moment, choice begins to quietly return.

It’s not about calming down or “doing regulation”.

It’s about giving our nervous systems enough space to re-open our field of options.

It might look like a moment of:

• noticing your feet on the floor before replying to a message

• letting an out-breath soften a fraction more than usual

• or allowing yourself a moment where nothing needs to be decided

It’s about small moments. Moments like these don’t need to solve anything, but they do something perhaps more important.

They restore our access. Our access to perspective, reflection, and to the sense that you have more than one way forward.

As a little experiment, I’ve recorded a short breathing pause you can use if it feels helpful.

It’s not a technique, and there really isn’t anything to get right.

It’s simply a few moments of space, of pause, with no requirement to change how you feel.

You can listen here. Or not. Either way is fine.

For now, consider this your permission slip to pause, because your system needs it so choice can return.

Have a great weekend.

Kathy ❤️

Our sense of agency is often framed as a mindset issue.

It’s presented as something we either possess or lack. Something perhaps, we should summon through effort, discipline, or better decisions.

But in practice, agency is not really a matter of attitude.

It’s far more a matter of capacity. And from a therapeutic perspective, this capacity is inseparable from the nervous system.

Perhaps more specifically it’s about how well our systems are regulated through the vagus nerve, which plays a key role in signalling safety, threat, and connection throughout the body.

When our system senses safety, we have complete access to reflection, flexibility, and choice. However, if it senses ongoing threat or overload, its’ priority shifts to protection, and the space for deliberate choice begins to seriously contract.

This is not abstract theory. It’s something I see repeatedly in stress-related work.

As pressure accumulates, what gets ‘lost’ isn’t insight or intelligence; it’s quite simply our ability to access the internal conditions that make well considered choices and decisions possible.

When we find ourselves under sustained stress, our ability to choose deliberately ‘shrinks’ because our system is under enormous pressure or overwhelm.

This is also where a lot of the conversations about stress go wrong.

We talk about resilience, productivity, or self-management, while overlooking what prolonged strain actually does to the human physiological system.

When stress becomes chronic, choice narrows. Not dramatically but quietly.

When that happens, we naturally default to what feels safest or most familiar. We also start to react rather than reflect. We do whatever we need to do to keeps things moving, rather than what feels most aligned, which is not a failure of character. It is simply a very predictable system response.

I’ve been revisiting work by the neuroanatomist/scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, and am currently enjoying her 2021 publication Whole Brain Living, which follows on from her original book and amazing TED Talk My Stroke of Insight. Jill describes what happens when a stroke, her own massive stroke in fact, causes large parts of the brain responsible for areas such as language, planning, and decision-making to go offline.

What struck me wasn’t only the extremity of that experience, but the clarity offered by Jill as she recounts the events of the morning of her stroke, and her much later insights into the workings of the brain in particular where she says

“…peace is just a thought away…”

I hasten to add, you clearly do not need a stroke for these capacities to become unavailable!

But, under sustained stress and overwhelm, the same systems can temporarily go ‘offline’ although perhaps in less dramatic or visible ways. We find our perspectives tend to narrow. Our range of choice contracts. Our ability to pause, reflect, or respond deliberately becomes much harder to access.

In Whole Brain Living, Taylor extends this insight, showing how different brain networks come ‘online’ and ‘offline’ depending on internal and external conditions.

If we can choose to see our own sense of agency, through this lens, it is therefore not a fixed trait, but rather it can be described as being ‘state-dependent’.

Most of us already understand this idea in everyday terms.

We know what it means for something to be online or offline. When a device is offline, it isn’t broken, it is simply that its functions are not available at that time or until a required reconnection occurs.

The brain works in much the same way.

Under pressure, certain capacities can appear to go offline. Not permanently, but more functionally. Our systems are so clever they switch priorities and focus on protection and efficiency over integration and perspective.

Seen this way, agency isn’t something we lose, it’s something we cannot, for a temporary period, actually access.

And this is why chronic stress feels so totally disempowering. Because our capacity to choose has narrowed so greatly.

It is also why strengthening agency is not about pushing harder.

What restores agency is not willpower.

It is space.

Space to pause without consequence.

Space to notice without immediately responding.

Space for different parts of the system to come back into relationship again.

This is where regulation matters.

It’s not just a technique for calming down or a response to crisis, but it’s a way of restoring the conditions in which choice once again becomes possible.

Regulation doesn’t remove stress from our lives, rather, it restores enough internal steadiness for our perspective to return.

Agency follows capacity. And capacity grows when pressure eases, even slightly.

I’ve been reflecting and noting where over recent weeks, or even months, where I feel that my own choices may have narrowed.

Instead of trying to correct it, as it’s been and gone and is now lost in yesterday, I’m now trying to practise creating sufficient steadiness to enable choice.

Strengthening agency therefore doesn’t begin with better decisions, it begins with supporting the system that makes decision possible.

And that feels like a more honest place to start.

A piece I read this week stayed with me.

Edith Chislett, in her Substack Thought Circles, recently wrote about how we quickly rush to fill silence with certainty, and how easily our curiosity, and sometimes stillness, becomes lost in that move.

It’s felt really close to what I’ve noticed this week, which has been one that feels particularly full.

I had a long meeting that, while strange, was totally productive, but it lingered as I mulled over it longer than expected.

There was a moment this week when the world looked as though it might lurch into something truly horrendous, and then… suddenly it didn’t.

The headlines are still really messy, but for now, it’s a little less incendiary.

Nothing is really resolved.

Nothing is really “better”.

But it has brought about a pause in the noise.

As Edith points out, it’s striking how quickly we try to fill that pause.

We fill it with thinking, reading, bracing. Almost as if calm is something we can only allow in once we think everything is safe and settled.

But here’s the thing, calm doesn’t really show up that way, does it?

Mostly it shows up quietly, kind of in between events. Maybe after a difficult conversation or something similar.

And this is where regulation matters most.

It doesn’t have to be a response to crisis, rather it can become a way of staying present in the in-between.

The uncertain middle ground where life hasn’t quite stabilised, but hasn’t really collapsed either.

This is the place I’m aiming to stay in.

I’m not fixing. Not scanning for the next threat.

I’m simply noticing my footing.

As the weekend arrives, I’m holding a simple question in. mind:

What does it look like to stay oriented when nothing is demanding urgency?

If the world ramps up again next week, I am trusting that this grounding will still count.

And if it doesn’t, perhaps the real work is simply allowing ourselves to rest without justification.

Have a great weekend!

Kathy ❤️

There’s a particular atmosphere in the air at the moment.

Not just political tension or bad news, but something somewhat more visceral.

It’s a strong sense of bullying power.

Of institutions being mocked.

Of force being paraded rather than restrained.

Images of intimidation.

Language designed to dominate rather than lead.

Even if none of this touches your daily life directly, your nervous system will still notice.

That’s because the human system is wired to track predictability, and fairness, because these are the things that make our own worlds, inner and outer, feel safe. When those signals wobble, the body responds long before our rational minds catch up.

Many of us today are trying to stay regulated in a world that feels profoundly unregulated.

And that’s not a personal failing.

It’s what happens when power becomes erratic, aggressive, or performative.

When leaders posture instead of stabilise.

When cruelty is excused as strength.

When might starts masquerading as right.

Our system reads this as big time threat.

And interestingly this isn’t always as sharp fear. More often it shows up as a low, constant hum. Tight shoulders. Shallow breath. Irritability. Fatigue. A sense of being permanently on edge. Or sometimes the opposite, a kind of numbed withdrawal.

This isn’t weakness. It’s actually biology.

But, what often follows, though, is a quiet turning inward.

I should be coping better.

I’m overreacting.

I just need to toughen up.

But regulation isn’t about pretending that everything is fine. And it’s not about disengaging, checking out, or becoming apathetic.

Regulation is about staying oriented at a time when the world is disorienting.

This distinction matters a lot, especially when it comes to the news.

There’s a difference between being informed and being saturated.

Many of us have slipped into a pattern where ‘keeping up’ quietly becomes nervous system overload, where outrage replaces understanding and urgency pushes clarity to aside.

Personally, I’ve had to take serious action. Regulation now includes choosing when and how long I engage with the news. Not avoiding it but using it far more intentionally. Enough to stay oriented, but not so much that I become absorbed, agitated, or frozen.

What does that look like in practice?

For me, it’s checking one trusted source once a day, usually in the morning, after my ‘start the day routines’ are done and I feel strong and focused. This is when I feel I have the capacity to metabolise what I’m reading.

I try not to go into this last thing at night and I’m learning to shift from checking throughout the day. Not while scrolling in bed or while standing in queues – I now play a silly card games instead!

I set a loose time boundary: twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Enough to understand what’s happening, but not enough to drown in it.

Some days I’ve started to skip it altogether. Not because I don’t care, but because I’m already at capacity and more information isn’t going to make me any more informed, it will just have the effect of destabilising me.

Informed, rather than obsessed.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. When our nervous systems are constantly hijacked, we don’t become more engaged, we actually become easier to manipulate.

We lose discernment.

We lose our capacity to choose where our attention and energy go.

Staying regulated isn’t indulgent. It’s protective and practical.

It certainly means making a few deliberate shifts.

Reducing exposure without denying reality.

Coming back to the body through breath, movement, and rhythm, because regulation is physiological before it’s psychological.

And choosing one place where I still have influence. My work. My words. My presence.

Agency grows locally. It always has.

When the world feels vast and chaotic, agency doesn’t come from trying to fix everything at once. It comes from choosing one small place where you still have influence and acting there.

One conversation where you choose presence over reactivity.

One boundary you uphold even when it feels trivial.

One moment where you pause instead of compulsively refresh the news.

Local agency really isn’t about solving global crises, it’s far more about maintaining our capacity to respond rather than collapse. And that capacity, sustained over time, is what will enable us to show up for the work that actually matters.

When the world feels hostile, regulation becomes an ethical act.

It allows us to remain human in environments that reward reactivity.

To stay compassionate without becoming porous.

To respond rather than react.

To meet life where it is, without being consumed by it.

This is work I return to again and again. Not because I’ve mastered it, but because it’s necessary.

If you’re feeling unsettled, tense, or oddly exhausted by the current climate, you’re not broken or alone.

You’re responding appropriately to a world that has forgotten how to self-regulate.

And choosing to steady yourself within it may be one of the most quietly radical things you can do right now.

This isn’t about mastery. It’s about returning to what works, again and again, because the conditions keep changing. And, because steadying ourselves in unsteady times isn’t a one-time choice, it’s a practice we have to choose again and again, even when (especially when) it feels impossible.

❤️

When life feels uncertain, so many of us tend to default to ‘management’.

We plan. We restructure. We try to fix what feels off or quietly distance ourselves from it. And when that doesn’t work, we distract by staying busy, and/or scrolling. We hope things will resolve themselves without asking too much of us.

This isn’t a personal failing.

It’s a nervous system response to threat.

Managing, fixing, and avoiding can have a wonderful sense of being productive, even responsible. However, on closer examination what these things actually do is keep us ever so slightly removed from what’s happening.

Meeting life is something else entirely.

Meeting life isn’t about doing something to our circumstances.

It’s about how we stand in relation to them.

It’s orientation, not outcome.

In my therapeutic and spiritual practice, this distinction really matters. I see it again and again, in myself as much as in others. The impulse to fix or escape often arrives not because something is wrong or not aligned, but because something has begun to feel unsafe.

That doesn’t mean we become passive.

And it certainly doesn’t mean we even have to like what’s happening.

What is does mean is that we need to give ourselves permission to stay present, in the moment, without immediately bracing, judging, or strategising our way out.

So, here’s a ‘what if’ reframe.

What if safety doesn’t come from control, but from contact?

From meeting what’s here with a little more steadiness.

A little more curiosity.

And a little less self-attack.

This year, instead of asking what needs fixing or changing, I’m experimenting with a different question:

How am I meeting my life today?

Some days the answer is generous.

Other days it’s tight, impatient, or weary.

Both still count.

It’s about showing up without turning away.

And for now, that feels like a good enough place to begin.

I’m curious whether this distinction resonates for you too. Where do you notice yourself trying to manage life, rather than meet it?

The start of this year hasn’t been my normal smooth and exciting time, Christmas followed by fun new year and my birthday, normally all newness and excitement.

In fact it’s been a lot more like learning to drive and do hill starts in an old manual car! Stall, lurch, and a sudden jump forward.

It’s that slightly panicked moment where you wonder if everyone behind you is really judging your entire life!

But for me this year, 2026 has been a stop and start affair where I feel that recent events in me and my partner’s lives have brought us both to a sudden and very unexpected stand still.

Life can change in the blink of an eye and it’s taken a fair amount of effort to recalibrate and begin to navigate 2026 with an element of confidence again!

But, thankfully we’re able to draw on our therapeutic practises and also on our Buddhist philosophies - nothing like practise what you preach😉.

For New Year we don’t make ‘resolutions’. We make determinations.

The former is more akin to control and about fixing something, whereas the latter is about transformation; kind of

‘…how will I meet my life this year?’

‘…what qualities will I strengthen as I navigate this new year...?

They’re less about forcing change and more about the how we meet whatever shows up.

For me one of my core determinations is pretty simple:

‘…to wake each day with gratitude rather than that familiar inner refrain of my life isn’t working or this is all too difficult.

I’m not opting for fake positivity or spiritual bypassing.

I’m just making a conscious choice to begin each day from a point of appreciation rather than resistance.

My guess is that some mornings that gratitude is going to be big and obvious. Other days it’s probably microscopic.

But, whatever the case, this determination can help me pause rather than spiralling.

Our determinations aren’t about perfection they’re about direction.

So, today this is me checking in, easing the clutch, finding the bite point again, and moving forward a little more steadily.

I decided to write not because everything is sorted, but because it isn’t - it’s all about that ‘good enough’ and about showing up.

And while some days I still feel like I’ve stalled the engine yet again, but you know what, I still kangaroo forward again. Not always elegantly, but definitely in the right direction!

Welcome to 2026 everyone!