I had a habit, for a while, of checking who had viewed my Instagram stories.

Specifically looking for particular names and patterns. Proof that people were interested in my life even when they weren’t reaching out. Evidence that I existed to them, essentially.

Yes, I know how that sounds and I knew it at the time. But for reasons of feeling low and unimportant, I did it anyway. What I was looking for couldn’t be found anywhere else in that moment, and the phone was available.

I don’t think this is unusual. I think most of us, at some point, have used our phones this way, to soothe something. To check whether we’re thought of, and find quiet proof that we are, in some mind somewhere, present.

The problem is that the phone is very bad at this job.

Sometimes the data is there, and someone viewed the story. Someone liked the post or opened the message. But data is not the thing we’re actually looking for, it’s a poor proxy.

A view count can’t produce that feeling. It only tells you someone’s thumb stopped scrolling. It doesn’t tell you what they were thinking or feeling when it did. The view or open isn’t evidence of the thing we’re using it as evidence for.

The checking doesn’t resolve the ache, though it might temporarily soothe it, the way scratching an itch does: briefly, and then not.

I’ve noticed this urge usually arises in a moment of particular aloneness. A time when someone I care about isn’t reachable or present, or at a distance I didn’t choose. And my nervous system, which is well practised at looking for signals, goes looking for them. The phone is just where the signals live now.

What’s helped is not trying to stop checking, because willpower fails when the ache is loudest. It’s noticing the impulse first and asking myself, ‘What am I actually looking for right now?’

Sometimes that pause and reflection is enough. Once we sit with it a moment, the phone becomes obviously inadequate for the job. This doesn’t necessarily mean we will put it down. But we do stop pretending it’s going to give us what we actually need.

The ache is real, and when it’s big, the checking is understandable. But the phone just can’t do the thing we’re asking it to do.

Three things to try.

1. Name it before we check.
The next time we feel the pull toward something specific on our phones, pause for ten seconds first, and name what we’re actually looking for, the feeling underneath. Just naming it makes a difference.

2. Watch what the checking produces.
If we have a habit of checking something or someone’s engagement, notice honestly what it produces. Temporary relief? More anxiety? Whatever it produces is information about whether the behaviour is serving us.

3. Try the other thing first.
Identify one thing that genuinely makes us feel less alone and more grounded. Try that before checking our phone the next time the impulse comes. It doesn’t have to work every time. Even just ‘some times’ is good progress.

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A friend mentioned in passing that they might skip their sister’s birthday dinner. They were tired, the week had been long, the drive was forty minutes each way. I could tell it had been sitting with them.

They weren’t asking what I thought, just thinking out loud.

I empathised, because I’ve been in that place where you’re trying to weigh what you want to do against what you know you probably ‘should’. Over the years, I’ve gone both ways on it. Shown up, and not shown up. The deciding factor, in more recent times, wasn’t how tired I actually was. It was whether I’d asked myself the right question before I responded to the invitation.

The question that shapes the answer

The question I’ve learned to ask involves a reversal of perspective: putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

I ask myself, if the situation were flipped and it was my birthday dinner, and my friend or sibling was the tired one with the forty-minute drive: would I want them to come?

The answer, for most of us, comes quickly. Yes, of course.

After this first question comes the more important one: am I the kind of person who shows up for the people I love, in the way I’d want them to show up for me?

This isn’t guilt, or a trap. It’s an opportunity to make a conscious choice about a principle, and then to let that principle do the work of guiding the decision. The tiredness becomes a logistics question we can plan around in advance, not the deciding factor on the day. We can rest around it.

That shift, from whether to how, is what a consciously chosen principle actually does. And it works in both directions, something I’ll come back to.

When the irritation is real too

My daughter plays netball most Sunday mornings. There’s another parent I see most weeks, someone I’ve gotten to know a bit over a season of sidelines and scoresheets. A few months ago, outside of that context, she reached out and asked if I’d be willing to read over a funding submission she’d been working on for a few months, that she was putting together for a community project. It wasn’t something I had any involvement in, and she needed it back within a couple of days.

My honest first reaction, if I’m being honest about it, was a familiar internal resistance. I had things of my own on, and the timing wasn’t great.

But before I responded, I reversed it.

If I’d spent the better part of three months on something, and needed someone with a fresh set of eyes to look it over before it went somewhere important, would I want someone to say yes? Without question. And to be seen as someone who could offer some value there is a compliment, too.

So the question then becomes, am I someone who shows up for people the way I’d want them to show up for me?

I read the submission that evening.

What I noticed doing it that way, is that the resistance didn’t disappear, as the timing challenge was still real. But it stopped being the deciding factor, because I’d already made the bigger decision. The principle was already in place, and that moment just asked me to honour it.

What this actually is

This isn’t about discovering who you are. Most of us have a reasonable sense of that already.

It’s about deciding, in advance of the response, which version of yourself you’re committing to: the one who defaults to what’s easiest in the moment, or the one who pauses to check whether that choice is consistent with something they’ve already decided.

Looking at things this way makes decisions easier. It removes us-at-that-moment from the centre of the decision. When we’re tired, or busy, or mildly irritated, we become the most important variable in our own reasoning.

The reversal helps us step outside ourselves to consider, if we weren’t the one being asked, what would we want? And from there, the question becomes whether we’re genuinely living with integrity toward our own stated principles, or only when it’s convenient.

The reversal works in the other direction too. The same question that asks whether we’re showing up also asks whether the people we’re turning up for extend the same consideration to us. If the honest answer, over time, is that they don’t, that’s information.

A principle isn’t a contract we keep regardless of what’s returned. It’s a reflection of who we want to be, and part of that is knowing when a relationship has quietly become one-sided. We don’t have to manufacture obligation toward people who have long since stopped applying the same standard to us.

Releasing ourselves from that isn’t a failure of principle, or selfishness. It’s how we protect the energy we need to show up well for the people and moments that are genuinely mutual.

Done consistently, this is how our decisions in ordinary moments become our character.

Who we are is a direct result of whether we make the forty-minute drive for someone who also cares about us, or read the submission for someone kind on a busy week, or the hundred other moments that feel small at the time, but actually show who we are.

The big choice of our principles comes first. The ordinary moments just ask us to follow through.

Three things to try.

1. Name one principle you want to commit to.
Something specific, not aspirational. Not ‘I want to be a better friend’ but ‘I show up for the people I love the way I’d want them to show up for me.’
The more concrete the commitment, the more useful it is when a moment arrives.

2. Run the reversal before you respond.
Next time a request or situation arrives that produces resistance, pause before answering. Flip the scenario and notice what you’d want. Then ask whether your response is consistent with that.

3. Separate the logistics from the decision.
Once the principle is named, treat the practical obstacles as logistics, not as the decision itself. Tiredness is a logistics question. Whether to go is already answered.

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There’s a version of waiting that is genuinely passive, where something is set down and perhaps forgotten about, and whether it comes back up stops mattering.

But there’s another kind, a harder kind of waiting, where it’s necessary and really difficult to ride out. The kind where we care very much, and are choosing every hour or so, not to do anything about it. Because we know that doing something active to reduce this kind of waiting isn’t the right move, and we’re holding to that knowledge while everything in us is saying otherwise.

This kind of waiting is exhausting, because sitting back takes more out of us than stepping up and acting on it would.

The kind that costs something

I have a dynamic in my life where this kind of waiting is necessary, and has been for a long while. The other person is choosing space and only engaging where engagement is unavoidable. The waiting and the space are not at all comfortable for me. My instinct is to reach, to explain, to clarify, to fix, to ask how they feel and what they’re thinking, and share my feelings and thoughts too. But the thing I have to do, over and over, is notice that instinct and choose not to follow it.

If you have a situation like this in your own life, you know the instinct comes from a real place. From love and care, and wanting things to be easier and more complete. But the kindest and most generous thing we can do is to stay in our own lane, be present and available, and trust them to find their own way through.

The difficulty is that this kind of waiting looks and feels like doing nothing. We’re living our ordinary life, going to work, eating dinner, reading or watching something at night, while quietly managing an enormous and overwhelming amount of internal noise.

It’s hard to sit with that level of hurt, discomfort and fear. But we need to do it, because the other person’s process matters more right now than our need to resolve the discomfort.

What we do instead

I’ve had to learn, slowly, that the impulse to reach under pressure is usually for me rather than the other person. Sometimes it’s anxiety wearing the costume of care. Sometimes the most caring thing is to sit still and wait.

This is a practised and difficult skill, and we often fall short along the way.

What helps is having somewhere to put the energy. Movement. Small tasks that belong entirely to our own lives. Conversations with people who are genuinely available. Investing time in our own interests. Anything that reminds us that we are people with hearts and thoughts and lives that exist independently of the thing or person we’re waiting on.

What doesn’t help is looking for evidence. Looking for signals that will tell us which way things are going, so we can stop waiting and start responding. This feels like information-gathering, but is usually just a way of side-stepping the hardness of not-knowing.

Sitting with the ambiguity and staying available, while continuing to live our own life, is the right thing. It’s just a shame it’s also the hardest.

What it actually is

Waiting is an act of faith. The kind of faith where we decide that the situation, the other person or thing, deserves more than forcing a resolution before it’s ready. We can’t rush what needs time to grow.

It does cost us a lot though. Real waiting asks us to feel something we don’t want to feel, and to accept something we feel could be better and different if we just did something about it.

On the other side of this waiting, if we come through, there’s something real either way. We didn’t collapse. We didn’t push. We held steady while something may or may not have been resolved.

That waiting with faith and grace is what steadiness actually looks and feels like. Messy on the inside, but building a capacity for calm with each occasion we’re asked to sit and wait.

Three things to try.

1. Name what you’re doing.
The next time you’re in a period of active waiting, try saying it plainly to yourself: I am doing a hard thing. I am choosing not to act when everything says to. Naming it as effort is more honest than treating it as passivity.

2. Check the impulse.
The next time you feel the urge to reach, check, or follow up on something that isn’t yours to push, pause for ten minutes first. The goal isn’t suppression. Just see whether the urge changes shape when you give it a moment.

3. Find your anchors.
Make a short list of things that are genuinely yours, regardless of how any particular situation resolves. Things that belong to you no matter what. Return to that list when the waiting gets loud.

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I nearly didn’t go.

There were nine of us heading out for coffee, or so the message thread said, and I was the holdout. I was at the end of a row of desks with things to do, and the pull was to stay there: I’m not in the mood, I’ll catch up another time, it’s only half an hour.

The eighth person to leave walked past my desk on the way out. They didn’t make a thing of it, just asked again, casually, on the way past.

I almost said no again. I’d said no to the first person who asked, had it ready to go again in a way that would be reasonable and not read as rejection. ‘I’m good, you guys go.’ I had fair and reasonable grounds for declining, all lined up like books on a shelf.

But underneath the reasons, something quieter was saying go. Steadily, the way a small gut feeling keeps popping up even when the other parts of you are talking over it.

My brain pushed back on my gut. You’re tired. You’ve got things to do. You’re not in the mood.

Go anyway, my gut said. Firmly, but kindly.

I very nearly gave in to the louder voice, because it had momentum and my gut was asking me to do something my mind didn’t want to do. Against my own resistance, I stood up and went.

It was a clear day, not too warm and not too cold. The coffee smell hit us as we walked in. The whole group seemed to have arrived at the same unspoken agreement: relax, talk about anything except work. Nobody mentioned the minestrone soup of projects we were all working on. Everyone was in the mindset to create exactly what we all needed, which I’m going to admit was something I needed too, even though I’d been about to skip it.

Half an hour later I was back at my desk. Something small had shifted, and I felt a bit more like a person. Less siloed and more part of something. I felt welcomed and embraced and seen. I hadn’t realised until right then that I wasn’t feeling those things beforehand. It was a little overwhelming to acknowledge.

The small yes matters more than we think.

That small yes is closer to the truth of how connection gets built than most of the bigger, more intentional things I tend to focus on.

We have a story about building a social life that involves grand gestures and deliberate effort. Joining a club, reaching out to a friend we’ve lost touch with, organising a dinner. These things matter and they also require energy, coordination, and a certain mental readiness. A lot of the time we don’t have those things, so we kick the can down the road, until we’re in a better headspace, or until things settle down.

Meanwhile, people keep walking past our desks, and friends go on eating dinner in their own homes rather than together.

The small yes is unglamorous. It’s going for coffee when we were going to stay behind. It’s stopping for a conversation in a corridor instead of keeping our heads down. It’s replying to the message that would be easy to leave on read. In many cases it can feel like just doing what we need to get through the day.

In truth though, this is how most real social worlds get made. The everyday building happens in small choices to be slightly more present than strictly necessary.

The friction sits in that word, ‘necessary’. In most of these moments, nobody’s requiring the half-hour coffee. Nobody will notice if we stay at our desks. The cost of the small no is usually invisible, which is exactly why we default to it without thinking.

I want to be honest about my own version of this. Most of the time, when I say no to the small thing, I tell myself it’s because I’m busy, or tired, or focused. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the real reason is actually that I don’t want to make the small effort. I’d rather conserve myself and stay inside the day I’d already constructed in my head. The story I tell about being busy is more flattering than the story about being worried my presence will become a regret others come to have.

The cost of the small no, when repeated, is real. It’s the gradual narrowing of a life, the slow reduction of ordinary contact, until the only meaningful relationships are the ones that involve scheduling and effort, and the spontaneous, easy, human stuff has quietly stopped happening.

More small yeses.

What I’ve been trying to do more of lately is lower the bar for saying yes to participation. Yes to a coffee and chat. Yes to sitting in the lunchroom with others. Yes to changing the evening’s plans from the lower-key comfort I had semi-prepared myself for, to what would offer more fun and connection.

The person who walked past my desk that day didn’t know they were doing me a favour. They were just heading for coffee with some others, but they changed my day and the couple of months since.

The butterfly effect of that possibly-casual re-invitation from them is that I now consciously embrace more spontaneity and a little less structured scheduling. It’s made a very big difference.

The small yes is usually right there. Most of the time we just need to say ‘yes’ before we talk ourselves out of it.

Three things to try.

1. Catch one small no this week.
Notice one moment where we default to skipping, staying, or leaving a message unread. Ask honestly whether the cost of the yes was actually as high as we were treating it.

2. Initiate first.
Identify someone in our orbit who tends to be the one making contact. Try going first, just once.

3. Start small, not big.
If we’re in a period of feeling less connected than we’d like, resist the pull toward a big gesture to fix it. One coffee. One conversation. One message. The accumulation matters more than any single moment.

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A couple of years ago I drafted an apology message three times in my Notes app, and didn’t send any of them.

The first version was too long. The second one started with an apology that wasn’t quite the apology I meant. The third one was shorter and better, but I closed the app anyway and went and made coffee, and by the time I’d finished the coffee, I’d talked myself out of sending it.

The thing I was trying to repair wasn’t a catastrophe. It was an unfortunate clash of events which meant I couldn’t attend something important despite RSVPing ‘yes’ and fully intending to go.

Something family-related came up the day before and I was needed elsewhere. Unfortunate, and the way life sometimes goes.
Time passed… six weeks, possibly eight. I’d lost count and allowed myself to forget, which says something else about my effort to acknowledge the impact.

There’s probably one of these situations sitting somewhere in most people’s lives right now.

Something that didn’t happen, or did and wasn’t what was hoped, or we let someone down, or lost our steadiness with someone we love. Where the moment passed and life continued, and a slight carefulness moved in afterwards. A topic that without discussing it, we’ve silently agreed to leave alone.

These quiet, unrepaired things are often more costly than the dramatic ones, because they’re easy to step around and not touch. And where acknowledgement and repair don’t follow a bump, resentment always builds, even if we’re not consciously aware of it.

What it actually costs.

The unrepaired thing doesn’t disappear. It becomes part of the architecture of the relationship we have with that person.

It creates a slight wariness, a small no-go zone, a pattern of moving carefully around something neither person has raised. Over time, these accumulate and the relationship gradually narrows.

There’s an internal cost too, because carrying an unrepaired thing takes energy. Not a lot, but ongoing. A background task we’ve avoided that occasionally surfaces as a flash of discomfort, sitting there using mental resources we could deploy elsewhere.

The conversation, when we finally have it, often takes about ten minutes if we both enter it openly and listen kindly. But the carefulness has been there for months. Take the hard step and save yourself time lost to pretending or ignoring.

What actually makes it hard.

The real barrier is usually one of three things.

1. Not knowing how to start. The conversation has been unaddressed long enough that going back feels like a big move.

2. Fear of the response. The unspoken thing has existed in ambiguity. Naming it risks a response we’re not ready for.

3. The quiet hope things have resolved themselves. Time has passed and things seem ok on the surface. And we think maybe going back would just reopen something that’s actually closed.

That last one is the most appealing and usually the least accurate, and often the most damaging.

Surface level ok is not the same as repaired and ‘good again’. The carefulness is still there, and we can feel it if we look.

What finally moved it.

The thing that moved me was something smaller and more annoying.

I was having a conversation unrelated to that, and I caught myself editing a sentence on the way out of my mouth. Removing a half-honest opinion because it touched, very lightly, on the territory of the thing still sitting between me and the other person. The edit took less than a second and I almost didn’t notice it.

But I did notice it. And once I’d noticed it, I noticed I’d been doing it for weeks. I was already shrinking the relationship to protect myself from a conversation I hadn’t had yet.

I went back to it that evening. Not by message in the end, even though I’d drafted one. By voice note, of all things, because writing it kept making it worse and I needed the unrehearsed version.

I didn’t get the opening right. I started with context I didn’t need to give, then doubled back, then said the thing I’d actually wanted to say, which was that I hadn’t handled it well and I’d been sitting with that.

The reply came an hour later. It was short and warm, and the carefulness was gone.

The first sentence, the one I’d rehearsed for weeks, wasn’t the best version, but it is the one that matters, because it was the one I actually expressed. Took a step forward instead of standing still. A clumsy expression of something real is worth far more than a polished sentence we never say.

Good people know this and allow for us to stumble a bit in delivery, because the substance is the real bit. They forgive the pause where we doubled back, the tone that was a bit less measured than we wanted it to be, the voice note that was probably too long. They allow for human missteps because they recognise the care and intention underneath it, and they welcome it.

Moving toward repair, even awkwardly, is better than moving nowhere.

Three things to try.

1. Name it to yourself first.
Before going back to someone, reflect objectively on what actually happened. Not your version of events, but the impact to them, irrespective of what your intention was. What did the other person likely experience? What was left unacknowledged? Write it down if it helps.

2. Find the first sentence, then stop polishing it.
The hardest part of a delayed repair is starting. The first sentence doesn’t need to be the best version, it just needs to be one we’ll actually say. Some examples to try: ‘I’ve been thinking about something that happened’, or ‘I don’t think I handled something well and I’d like to go back to it.’ One sentence. The rest will follow.

3. If they’re not ready.
Sometimes we go back and the other person isn’t in a place to receive it. The offer of repair has value even if it’s not immediately accepted. Leave the door open without pushing it. Sometimes repair happens in stages, and the first step is simply letting the other person know we’re willing to take one.

I started doing stand-up in 2016, which was the same year my marriage ended and I had a breakdown.

I didn’t walk onto a stage because I was in good shape, but because I wanted to talk about the funny things as well as the hard things, and I needed somewhere that combination of honesty and stubborn hope might be welcomed.

I found it. And I found a new love for life that would sustain me through some hard times.

What I didn’t expect though, was how much it would teach me about the thing I was also trying to learn in therapy (which I value enormously, continue to do, and am not about to poo on).

There’s something being on the stage with your stories and feelings does, that I haven’t found anywhere else.

And that is how to truly and sincerely be present, by learning how to stay in my body and not fly away with my fears when things get uncomfortable.

The room always knows.

The first thing performing teaches us is that an audience is an instrument we cannot deceive.

Most audiences are genuinely generous and want us to do well. That’s true regardless of whether it’s on a stage, behind a rostrum at a conference, or at the front of a meeting room. Sure, there’s the occasional jerk who feels differently, but they’re fewer in number than we might expect.

Audiences are sensitive to authenticity, and they register inauthenticity fast.

We very quickly learn the difference between being present and just pretending to be. Performed presence, where someone has learned their lines and delivers them according to their own pace and not in tune with the audience vibe, is slightly too smooth, slightly managed, the edges too clean. And it feels fake.

Genuine presence is different. It allows us to be a bit uncertain, and to pause while what we’ve just said permeates and the audience settles again.

It allows us to ad lib a little, to go off on a tangent we feel emerging, and end up somewhere unexpected. When we’re fully present and responding to how people are receiving us, the room relaxes. People lean in and they want more of us.

I try and bring this to my professional work in both communications and mental health training. The people we talk to in the work we do are reading us more accurately than we know, and they can tell whether the signal is honest, or if you’re trying to pull one over them. And I love that.

Recovery, with commentary.

The second thing performing taught me is how to recover when I stumble, which I do, for I am but a mere human.

Things go wrong on stage, and regularly. I might lose the thread of a story, or skip over a section accidentally and have to quickly think on my feet about how to narratively time travel back and then time travel forwards again to catch up (as happened a couple of times in my recent shows at the Adelaide Fringe festival).

Sometimes an anecdote or joke is met with silence. Or I forget, mid-sentence, where I was going.

I’ve found that naming the stumble honestly tends to work better than rushing past it or pretending it didn’t happen.

‘That was so funny in my head, I’ll work on delivering it better tomorrow, and thank you for unintentionally giving me that direct feedback’ with a wry and honest smile.

The audience relaxes. The self-consciousness in the room dissolves. Because the performer just did the human thing: acknowledged what’s actually happening.

This is what recovery looks like in ordinary life too.

It’s rarely a smooth comeback. And self-flagellation is damaging and distancing.

We can just acknowledge that something didn’t go as planned, and that’s ok, so let’s continue. The honesty is far more settling and lets people breathe and smile, perhaps even give you the laugh you didn’t get a moment earlier.

Presence without performance.

The third thing is discovering that the goal on stage is never to appear calm… it’s to be present enough that calm becomes completely unnecessary.

When we’re genuinely present and connected with the audience, paying attention to them and where they’re at instead of our own internal management, something shifts. The self-consciousness recedes, the gap closes.

This is what I try to bring into my professional work. Putting attention outward towards the room I’m in, the people in it, how they’re receiving me, and what they’re showing in their face and body language.

Focussing on what’s actually happening, rather than what I wish was happening.

It doesn’t always work, and some days I’m managing rather than being fully present. But I know the difference now, and I know which one serves me and others better.

That knowledge came from the stage as much as anywhere else, and I love that I get to keep learning, connecting, and growing through doing something I really enjoy.

Three things to try.

1. Read the room before you try to change it.

Before your next significant conversation, spend sixty seconds attending to the people in it. Not preparing your opening. Just noticing: what’s the energy here? Who seems tense? Who seems open? Let what you notice decide how you begin.

2. Name the stumble.

Next time something goes a bit wobbly in a conversation, own it. ‘That sounded a bit different to what I meant it to’, or ‘I thought that’d make a better impression, sorry’. The less we armour over the stumble, the more human the exchange becomes.

3. Focus your attention outward.

In your next longish conversation, notice a moment where you’re tempted to monitor how you’re coming across, and redirect that attention to the other person (or people). What are their faces and body language saying? What are they not quite saying? Presence isn’t a feeling we generate. It’s attention we direct.

My jaw was clenched for about three months before I noticed it.

A low, persistent tightness I’d gotten so used to that I’d stopped registering it. The tightness had become the normal level of how things felt.

I was in a period of high pressure at work. Functioning fine by most external measures. Showing up, producing, staying professional. What I wasn’t doing was listening to the thing my body had been trying to tell me for weeks.

By the time I finally paid attention, the jaw had been joined by a tightness across the chest, a slightly elevated pace in everything I did, and a quality in meetings that someone close to me eventually named, carefully, as ‘harder to reach than usual.’

Why we stop listening.

Most of us don’t decide to ignore signals from our bodies. We just get busy, and the signals get quieter, and we stop checking. And that’s where we can run into problems.

Our stress response moves faster than conscious thought. The muscle tension, the shallow breathing, the elevated heart rate, all of it arrives before awareness does. By the time we register ‘I’m stressed’, our body has already been carrying it for some time.

Which means it isn’t weakness to notice, as it’s data. And ignoring it doesn’t make us more professional or capable or tough. It actually means we’re making decisions, running meetings, and managing people on incomplete information. Which is poor business practice, in any other context.

What it costs, and where.

What unprocessed stress does to the people around us was part of an earlier issue:

Calm, mostly.

The weather in the room

I’ve started doing a test on myself. Not often, just when I remember to…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · JC Clapham

The short version: they feel it before you do, and they start self-editing. The team member who holds back the question. The colleague who reads the room and decides today isn’t the day. That’s not their problem to manage, it’s ours.

What that earlier piece didn’t get into is where the problem actually starts. Not in the room, but in the body, weeks before we walk in.

The good news is that the body is also where it’s most fixable, and much earlier in the chain than we might think.

This is how.

A body-first check.

This doesn’t require a retreat, a meditation app, or a significant chunk of time. It’s just 30 seconds of honest attention, and then one small physical act.

The attention is a quick internal review: is my jaw clenched or loose, are my shoulders up or down, is my chest tight or open, is my breath shallow or full?

We’re just noticing, not fixing, because this is data collection. We can’t adjust what we haven’t acknowledged.

Then, the small physical act we do next is a breath.

Two short inhales through the nose, followed by one long slow exhale through the mouth, for ten seconds all up.

Most people feel a shift straight away. It’s a helpful interruption, which is often enough to change how you feel walking into the next meeting or conversation.

Doing this before something significant costs nothing at all, and takes so little time. But done consistently, it changes the quality of your presence in ways people feel before they can explain them.

The jaw tension took me three months to become aware of.

That’s how good we get at ignoring the signal. And we wouldn’t make decisions in any other context without checking the instruments first. This is just learning to include ourselves in that practice.

The checking, adjusting, and relaxing of my jaw took me thirty seconds.

The gap between those two numbers is embarrassingly enormous.
But you don’t let it be that big for you.

Three things to try.

1. Run the check.
Before a significant conversation or meeting today or tomorrow, do a quick sweep.
Jaw: clenched or loose?
Shoulders: up or down?
Chest: tight or open?
Breath: shallow or full?
Just noticing it for now.

2. Try the reset breath.
When you do notice tension:
Two short inhales through the nose (a small sniff, then a deeper one), followed by one long slow exhale through the mouth.
Repeated for ten seconds. Most people feel a shift straight away.

3. Find the pattern.
Identify one physical thing you do when you’re under pressure.
Raised shoulder, clenched jaw, held breath.
Once a day, deliberately release it to interrupt the loop.
The body, given the chance, will take the cue from there.

At some point during a difficult stretch a few years back, I stopped making plans.

I didn’t cancel everything or announce I was withdrawing. I just quietly stopped initiating, stopped booking things, kept saying ‘maybe’ to invitations until maybe became ‘no’. I told myself I was managing priorities, being realistic, not getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t notice I’d done it until a friend asked if I was okay, and I realised I’d been isolating for months.

That particular habit, putting yourself on hold until something else is sorted out, is so common and so quiet that most of us don’t recognise it while we’re doing it.

At the time, it feels like sensible triage. But underneath it’s usually something else: a belief that life, properly enjoyed and fully inhabited, is something that happens after.

After the thing is dealt with.
After the relationship repairs.
After the situation settles.

After.

The problem is that ‘after’ rarely arrives the way we imagine it. And while we’re waiting, we’re not the only ones who notice we’ve stepped away.

Postponement as a way of staying in it.

Postponement, in its quieter form, is a way of staying connected with the difficult thing. By treating it as so significant that life itself must wait, we give the situation a kind of power. There’s something in the postponement that says: I am not moving on.

Carrying on, by contrast, can feel like a betrayal. Like you’re saying the thing doesn’t matter, like you’re getting ahead of yourself.

But carrying on is not the same as giving up. It’s not pretending things are fine. It’s choosing to remain alive in your own life while the difficult thing is still there.

That’s not avoidance. That’s steadiness.

The people close to us feel it too.

When we’re in holding mode, not quite present but not quite absent either, the people around us pick up on it. Not always consciously. They feel it in the quality of our attention, in the flatness behind the functioning, in the sense that we’re somewhere else even when we’re in the room.

And often, without being told anything, they feel subtly responsible. They infer that things must be serious. They start treading carefully. They carry a small weight they didn’t ask for and don’t know how to put down.

So when we carry on, when we make a plan and keep it, or laugh at something that’s actually funny, or show up with our attention actually here, we’re not just doing something for ourselves. We’re releasing the people around us from something they’ve been quietly holding.

What it actually looks like.

It’s not performing happiness. It doesn’t require pretending. It’s smaller and quieter than that.

It looks like making a plan for next weekend. Going to see something you’ve been meaning to see. Laughing at something that’s actually funny. Cooking a proper meal. Having a conversation that has nothing to do with the difficult thing.

In December 2022, a relationship had ended a little while earlier and I was not in good shape. A friend had invited me to their annual pre-Christmas dinner, a big warm gathering of people who mostly knew each other well. I spent the entire day trying to talk myself out of going.

The story I was telling myself was specific: that I was a pity invite, that I’d be the sad person everyone had to be careful around, that showing up in that state, to something that festive, would make me a burden and the evening worse.

The generous interpretation of this is that I was being considerate. The honest one is that I was considering using it as a reason to stay home, with my sadness for company.

At some point in the late afternoon, I gave myself a pep talk, made a dessert, put on a good shirt, packed some non-alcoholic beers, and went. I nearly turned around several times on the drive. But I kept going, got there, and… had a nice kind of fun.

I met people I hadn’t met before.
I laughed at things that were actually funny, said some things that made others laugh.
I ate well and felt, for a few hours, like a person who was still part of things. Nobody was careful around me, and nobody needed to be.

That friendship has since faded, the way some do. But something from that evening stayed. A small piece of evidence that I could show up before I was ready, and that doing so was exactly what would help me feel ready next time.

The difficult thing was still there on the drive home. But I was better able to observe it and not be captured by it. I arrived home, to the still-present challenge, slightly differently than I’d left.

That’s what carrying on actually is: not triumph, and not pretending.
Just returning to your own life before the difficult thing gives you permission to.

Three things to try.

1. Book the thing.
Identify one thing you’ve been postponing until things feel more settled.
Book it, plan it, or do it this week.
You don’t have to feel ready. The point is returning to your own life before it’s resolved.

2. Notice the difference between functioning and being present.
Functioning is going through the motions. Present means your attention is actually here: in the conversation, in the meal, in the walk.
Pick one moment today and try to be in it, rather than get through it.

3. Take stock at the end of the week.
Ask: what did I do this week that was just for me, or just for the pleasure of it?
If the answer is nothing, that’s information.
Carry on. Not because things are sorted, but because you’re still here.

There’s a particular kind of distress that feels completely present-tense, and isn’t. But we mistake it for the present.

Something happens: someone doesn’t respond when we expected them to, or we get deprioritised in a small but noticeable way, or there’s a silence where we thought there’d be a sound. And our nervous system doesn’t just register it and move on… it floods us.

Our chest might tighten, thoughts race, adrenaline pumping.

Already three steps ahead. Building a case about what this means, what it says, and what comes next.

From the outside, this can look like an overreaction. From the inside, it can feel like an accurate reading of the situation.

That gap is the problem.

What I’ve learned through therapy, study, and paying attention to myself when I’d rather look away, is that the intensity of the flood is hardly ever about the thing that just happened.

Most of the time, it’s really about everything that came before it. Previous times that felt similar, and which our body and mind tell us is happening again.

Old wounds leave bruises. New events can match those previous wounds closely enough to set the same alarm off. And the alarm doesn’t care about the difference between then and now, it just fires. That’s its job: to warn us that something we didn’t like might be happening again.

In that moment, it can feel like you’re drowning in three centimetres of water.

Why turning outward doesn’t help.

For a long time, my response to this was to do what the alarm told me to: monitor. Wait, scan for signals, look for evidence that the thing I feared was either happening or not.

The problem is that when we’re looking outward for confirmation that something is wrong now, just like it was in the past, we’re running the alarm whether we need to or not.

We stay in the heightened state and tend to interpret everything through the same fearful lens, which means we’re not actually reading the present situation at all. We’re just finding the past in it.

There was a period not long ago when someone close to me went quiet in a way that felt familiar. Not a fight, not a clear thing I could point to. Just a shift in temperature. A message left on read, a plan that didn’t come together. And something in me responded as though I already knew exactly what it meant, as though the situation had already been decided and I was just waiting for confirmation.

I began composing responses to things that hadn’t been said yet. Already defensive, already hurt, already somewhere ahead of the actual moment.

What was actually happening was ordinary, as it turned out. Life, tiredness, bad timing. But my alarm had matched the bruise of something older, and I was already halfway through a reaction to that older thing before the present one had even been resolved.

The gap between what was happening and what I was feeling was enormous, and I only noticed it when I put the phone down and went and did something else.

What tends to help, I’ve found, is that moment of deliberate stepping back. Not analysing the situation, not building a case. Just noticing that the alarm has fired, and asking whether it’s responding to right now, or to something older.

What turning inward actually looks like.

What I’ve been trying to do instead, and this is genuinely a practice and not a resolution, is turn back toward myself.

I’ve started taking 20 minutes. To do something I was going to do before the alarm went off. Not to distract, and not to prove a point.

But because we tend to feel more settled when we’re living our own lives with some intention, rather than waiting for external confirmation that things are fine. When I do what I said I’d do, something small but real registers: I can rely on myself. That accumulates, slowly, into something that outside signals can’t completely undo.

The walk. The study time. The meal we actually cook instead of ordering in, or not eating. The message we write to someone we love. The book we open, even for twenty minutes.

These are not fillers while we wait to feel better… they are what better is made of.

The other thing that helps, and this one is smaller but I’ve found it true: a phrase short enough to say in a breath.

I’m here.

Not as an affirmation in the poster-on-the-wall sense. Just felt. And said while I do something physical: feet on the floor, a long exhale, the moment of moving from one room to another. Over time, the two things bind together and the phrase starts to work faster.

The flood still comes, as old injuries don’t disappear because we’ve named them.

But our response can change and reflect the present rather than the past. And for anyone who’s been flooded, that’s safety and calm.

Three things to try.

1. Don’t get sideswiped.

   Next time you notice the flood starting, before you reach for the phone or start composing a message in your head, do one small thing you were already planning to do that day first. See what it does to the feeling.

2. Try the phrase “I’m here.”

   Just quietly, to yourself, attached to something physical: the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning, or a long breath before you walk into a room. I’m here. See how it feels.

3. Map it.

   Think back to the last time you were flooded by something that probably didn’t deserve the intensity. Not to relitigate it, but to ask: what did the situation remind you of? What older version of this have you lived before?
   See if you can name it. Knowing where the alarm was built doesn’t stop it firing, but it does make the noise a little less convincing.

Shrinking back can feel safe. In the moment, it can even feel right.

We let something pass. We soften what we were about to say. We adjust ourselves to keep things smooth.

Individually, these choices make sense. We care about the person in front of us, and we don’t want to create tension where there doesn’t need to be any.

But there’s a cost to this that’s easy to miss.

Each time we edit ourselves out of an interaction, we remove something real. And without something real, there’s less to actually connect with.

Closeness doesn’t come from things being smooth. It comes from there being something real to meet.

A thought that hasn’t been watered down.
A preference that actually belongs to us.
A limit that hasn’t been quietly erased.

When those things are missing, the interaction still works, but it feels thinner. We’re there, but not fully.

A quiet distance.

Over time, that gap can become noticeable, and it often feels like a quiet distance. We can see it in small, ordinary moments.

We’re sitting with someone and they suggest a plan we don’t really want. We hear ourselves say yes anyway.

We have a different opinion in a conversation, but it feels easier to nod and move on.

We start to say something honest, then stop halfway through because it feels inconvenient.

Nothing breaks in these moments. The interaction stays comfortable, and on the surface, everything is fine. But it can also feel slightly thinner.

If we repeat that pattern often enough, something starts to shift internally. It becomes harder to tell what we actually think or want, because we’re used to letting those things go before they fully form.

We get very good at reading the room and responding to what’s around us. At the same time, we can lose some connection to what we’re bringing in.

This is where relationships can start to feel a bit flat and like they’re lacking depth. It can be confusing because there’s no obvious problem to point to. Everything looks functional, but it doesn’t feel as full, or deep, as it could.

Pausing instead of disappearing.

What seems to make a difference isn’t suddenly saying everything that comes to mind or forcing ourselves to be more assertive. It’s quieter than that.

It’s noticing the exact moment where we’re about to step back from ourselves, and staying there a little longer.

Letting a thought exist for a second longer before we edit it.
Letting a preference be spoken without immediately softening it.
Letting a limit be understood before we remove it.

This isn’t about pushing our thoughts onto other people, or making every interaction heavier. It’s about staying part of what’s happening. Because when we do that, something tends to shift.

The moment might feel slightly less smooth, but it becomes more real. There’s more to respond to, more to understand, and more of us to actually meet.

This is where depth tends to come from. Not constant agreement and perfection, but the presence of something real on both sides.

Making ourselves smaller doesn’t actually make things easier in the way we hope. It makes them simpler on the surface, but thinner underneath.

Over time, that trade-off becomes harder to ignore.

Three things to try.

1. Notice when you’re about to pull back
   Catch one moment where you’re about to go quiet or let something slide just to keep things easy.

2. Pause, don’t disappear
   Take a moment to gather your thoughts if you need to, but stay in it. Don’t step back from yourself altogether.

3. Say one small, honest thing
   Share something you’d usually keep to yourself, in your own way and in your own time. Nothing big, just something real.

I want to tell you about the worst apology I ever gave…

It lasted about twelve minutes. By the end of it, I had covered:

• What had been going on for me at the time

• Why I said what I did

• What I’d actually meant by the thing I said

• What I thought had been misunderstood, and

• Some broader context the other person may not have known.

I finished feeling like I’d been quite thorough and all would therefore be resolved.

But the other person looked like they’d just sat through a press conference about someone else’s feelings. It wasn’t an apology… it was a broadcast.

The hard thing I had to acknowledge was that I’d meant well but had come up short. I genuinely wanted them to understand, but as I learned, understanding isn’t what an apology or repair requires. Acknowledgement is.

Why we explain instead of apologise and repair.

Our inclination to explain comes from a real place, usually from caring about how we’re perceived and a belief that if the other person had the full picture, things would resolve.

But, explanation before acknowledgement shifts the focus from their experience to ours. It makes the apology about us, and not the other person. We may not intend it that way, but that’s how another person usually receives it.

Explaining is a lot easier than real accountability and ownership. It keeps us in the role of narrator, which is much easier than being the person who caused an impact. Even when we dress it up as openness, explanation is a form of self-protection and a barrier to repairing.

I have been that person many times. Protecting myself more than opening myself.

What repair actually sounds like.

Healthy repair can be short and straightforward, because when we are genuinely taking responsibility, there isn’t that much to say: I see what happened, I understand the impact, and I’m not going to defend it.

It might sound like:

• ‘I can see that was off. I’m sorry.’

• ‘That came out harder than I meant it to, and I understand how that impacted you.’

• ‘I made that about my intentions, not the impact on you.’

Genuine acknowledgement is what opens the door and creates space for a fuller conversation to hear the other person’s experience, share context, and build understanding. This can only happen after the impact on someone is acknowledged. Not before.

The hardest part?

Sitting with being misunderstood for a little longer than feels comfortable.

That’s what acknowledging our impact before explaining our intention involves. It’s hard to get used to, but it’s powerful.

Fifteen years of public speaking and a decade of performing have shown me that people very quickly work out whether we’re trying to convince them, or genuinely having a discussion.

The growth opportunity for us is to get better at trusting that there will be room for the fuller discussion later, once the person in front of us feels like a person rather than an audience.

I still get this wrong at times, more than I wish. It is hard, but it works.

Three things to try.

1. Next time you need to repair from something, set a rule for yourself: your first response can be no more than two sentences. Acknowledgement only, without explaining context and intention. See what happens when you stop there.

2. Notice the moment the urge to explain arrives. It’s usually physical, a kind of pressure, pulling us toward speech. When you feel it, pause. Ask: is what I want to say for them to feel heard, or for me to feel better?

3. Think of a repair attempt you made recently that didn’t work. Where did the explanation start? What would it have sounded like if you’d stopped two sentences earlier?

Urgency is a feeling that disguises itself as a fact.

When we feel urgent, really urgent - the kind that tightens the chest and speeds up the speech, it doesn’t feel like an emotional state. It feels like an accurate reading of the situation. It feels like: this actually is time-sensitive, this actually does need to be dealt with now, there actually isn’t room to slow down.

Sometimes that’s true, as genuine urgency exists. Some situations require quick action, and there’s nothing wrong with moving fast when the moment calls for it.

But a lot of the urgency most of us carry day to day, with the restlessness and the sense of always being slightly behind, isn’t a response to actual emergency.

It’s a habit. A resting state. A way of being that we’ve carried for so long it no longer feels like a choice.

And habits, unlike genuine emergencies, spread.

Urgency is contagious.

When we operate at pace, talking fast, moving fast, thinking three steps ahead of every conversation, the people around us feel it. Not as pressure, necessarily. Not consciously. But they feel it in the rhythm of the exchange, in the sense that there isn’t quite enough room, in the quiet conclusion that this probably isn’t the moment to bring up the slower, harder things.

I’ve worked in communications for a long time, and in that world pace is often treated as a virtue. Quick turnaround, sharp thinking, always across it. And those things are genuinely useful. But I’ve also sat in enough meetings and had enough honest feedback over enough years to know that pace without presence has a cost. The person who seems to have already formed the view before the conversation is finished, can make other people feel like they’re there to confirm a decision rather than contribute to one.

I’ve been that person. The urgency wasn’t false. I genuinely felt the pressure of the clock, the project, the competing priorities. But the effect of it in the room was real, and it wasn’t helpful.

In my work in mental health training, I’ve sat with people who were burning through their own resources and those of everyone around them, all in the name of getting things done. The urgency felt necessary to them. To the people beside them, it felt like a wall.

The difference between fast and urgent.

Fast isn’t the problem. Fast, when it comes from clarity and competence, is often an asset.

Urgent is different. Urgent comes from anxiety rather than clarity. It has a slightly pressured quality, an edge to it that makes other people feel they need to keep up or get out of the way.

I can tell if I’m doing this by examining whether I’m actually listening in the conversation, or just waiting for enough information to act. When I’m genuinely present, I’m curious. When I’m urgent, I’m efficient.

A good pause isn’t about slowing down for the sake of it. It’s about checking which mode we’re actually in, and whether the situation actually calls for it.

What a good pause actually is.

A pause doesn’t have to be long. A genuine pause is usually five or ten seconds. Most people, once they stop being afraid of silence, find it much shorter than they expected.

It signals to the person you’re with that you heard them. That what they said was worth a moment. That you’re not just processing their words absent-mindedly.

The response that comes after a good pause is more useful than the one that fires off the back of urgency. You don’t have to feel calm to pause. You just do it.

Three things to try.

1. In your next significant conversation, try the one-breath rule: before you respond to anything, take one full breath. Notice what changes in what you say next.

2. At some point today, when you feel the pull of urgency, ask yourself: is this an emergency, or a habit?
If you can’t immediately name what would go wrong if you waited five minutes, it’s probably a habit.

3. Pick a regular meeting or conversation where you tend to move fast. In that one context only, try going second instead of first. Let someone else open. See what you learn from waiting.

I’ve started doing a test on myself. Not often, just when I remember to.

Before I walk into a room, before I sit down at the table or arrive at my desk or get in the car with someone, I ask:

What am I bringing with me right now?

Not what I’m feeling. What I’m radiating.

Because there’s a difference. Feelings are internal, they’re yours. But mood (or ‘vibe’) has a way of escaping. It gets into the temperature of a room. It changes the way people sit, the speed at which they talk, what they decide to say and what they quietly decide to leave out.

Most of us know this in theory. We’ve been in rooms with someone who’s clearly carrying something. They have the tense jaw, offer clipped answers, and exude a kind of tightness in the air around them, and we’ve felt ourselves adjust to be little more careful. A little more contained. And shared less of ourselves and our good ideas. If we’re honest, we know we’ve been that person, too.

That’s why it’s really helpful to start noticing what we bring with us into a space or interaction.

The static we don’t know we’re broadcasting

The most damaging way we conduct ourselves isn’t through the visible stuff: the raised voice or the door closed too firmly, those are obvious. People know what happened. They can name it, address it, move past it.

The costly version is quieter. It’s the ambient signal we send when we’re stressed but holding it together. When we’re kind of present but not really. When we’re answering questions but not quite listening to them.

I’ve spent a number of years running a mental health training organisation, working with people in workplaces and community settings who were carrying enormous weight and genuinely believed they were hiding it.

The research is clear on this, and my experience confirmed it repeatedly: we are far less opaque than we think we are.

The people around us, especially those who know us well, are reading signals we aren’t aware we’re sending. They may not be able to name exactly what they’re picking up, but they feel it, and they respond to it.

During a particular period at work many years ago I was managing a lot of pressure all at once: workplace issues, a project that wasn’t landing, some big things going on at home. I thought I was handling it because I was getting things done by turning up and being professional.

What I didn’t know until someone told me, carefully, was that people had stopped coming to me with things. Not because I’d been unkind. Just because I’d been slightly unreachable, a degree or two colder than usual, and that was enough. They’d quietly decided this wasn’t the moment.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly. I’d just been broadcasting weather I didn’t know I was sending.

What other people are doing with our signal

What tends to happen in families, in workplaces, in any space where people have ongoing relationships, is people respond to our signal, and they calibrate.

We notice patterns. We learn, often without ever consciously deciding to, that some moods are safe to interrupt and some aren’t. That when someone goes quiet in a particular way, it’s better to give them space. That certain topics are easier to raise on certain days.

This calibration is adaptive. It’s how humans protect ourselves in close quarters. But it also means that the people nearest to us are spending real cognitive and emotional energy reading us, tracking us, adjusting to us.

That’s a tax. A quiet one paid in small amounts, but cumulative.

And the thing about a tax like that is people don’t usually tell us they’re paying it. They just get slightly tired. Slightly more distant. Slightly less likely to bring us the things that matter.

The question that changes things

I’m not suggesting we should perform calmness we don’t feel. Performed calm is its own kind of static. People can feel the effort underneath it, and it’s unsettling in a different way.

What I’ve learned through years of working in this space, and from the slower work of paying attention to my own patterns, is that the goal isn’t to hide the weather. It’s to know what we’re walking in with.

What I’m suggesting is a brief moment of honest self-assessment before we enter shared space:

What’s actually going on for me right now,
and is any of it going to leak into this room uninvited?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and that’s fine. We can name it:

‘I’m a bit flat today, nothing to do with you.’

That one sentence does more to protect the people around you than a half-hour of careful management.

Other times, the noticing is enough. Just registering that we’re carrying something can create a small but real separation between what we’re feeling and how we move.

We don’t have to fix our weather. We just have to know what we’re taking with us into a space or interaction.

Three things to try

1. Before you enter a shared space today (home, work, a call, a car), pause for ten seconds and ask: what am I bringing in with me right now? You’re not trying to change anything. Just notice.

2. If you’re carrying something that might affect others, name it out loud in one sentence. Not to explain or process it, just to externalise it. ‘I’m a bit stretched today.’ That’s enough.

3. At the end of the day, think of one room you were in. What was the temperature when you left it? Not a judgement, just a data point. Start building the habit of looking.