The day tomato sauce exposed the truth
The first time I realized my nervous system was running my life, I was standing in a perfectly ordinary supermarket aisle, staring at a wall of tomato sauces.
Nothing dramatic had happened. No crisis, no argument, no looming deadline. Just jars, labels, and tinny background music. And yet my heart was pounding as if a lion had strolled in through the automatic doors. My vision narrowed. My shoulders climbed up by my ears. I remember thinking, almost clinically, This is ridiculous. It’s just pasta night.
But my body didn’t care about my logic. It had already decided: threat.
That’s the part most high performers underestimate. We think we’re steering with willpower and strategy, when in reality a 50,000‐year‐old survival program has its hands on the wheel. Your amygdala doesn’t see “modern life.” It sees tone of voice, uncertainty, social risk. And once it’s triggered, you’re no longer the architect of your response—you’re the passenger.
As Irena Golob, I’ve watched this play out in people who are genuinely competent: founders, nurses, parents, students, executives. The common thread isn’t weakness. It’s a system that learned, somewhere along the way, that “ordinary” equals “unsafe.”
The two‐second doorway you can’t access when you’re boiling
A few weeks after the supermarket episode, a client sat across from me on Zoom with a clenched jaw and that wired‐tired shine in her eyes.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “I meditate. I eat clean. I track my sleep. But one Slack notification and I’m gone. It’s like something hijacks me before I even know what I’m doing.”
I asked her to walk me through a recent moment. She described opening her laptop, seeing a terse message from her boss, and feeling her chest clamp down. Within seconds she was doom‐scrolling email, rewriting the same sentence five times, then snapping at her partner for asking a simple question.
“Where,” I asked, “was the moment you could have chosen something different?”
She frowned. “There wasn’t one. It just… happened.”
This is where I introduce what I call the two‐second doorway. Other teachers call it the pause: that small gap between stimulus and response—often no more than a breath—where your thinking brain can come back online before the alarm system runs the whole show.
Most people don’t miss the doorway because they’re undisciplined. They miss it because their nervous system is already hot. Think of stress like a volume knob, not an on/off switch. If you wake up at a 7/10—late screens, caffeine on an empty stomach, headlines before breakfast—it doesn’t take much to hit 9.
A ten‐second experiment that changed my state (not my schedule)
My turning point didn’t come from a grand retreat or a perfect morning routine. It came from a single, slightly awkward experiment in the middle of a very bad day.
I was between calls, behind schedule, when a message popped up that instantly spiked my system. Heat in my face. Tunnel vision. The urge to fire off a defensive reply.
Instead, I pushed my chair back, put my feet up against the wall, and did a physiological sigh: two short inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth.
Inhale–inhale–long exhale. Twice. About 10 seconds.
Nothing about the situation changed. The email was still there. The deadline was still real. But my internal landscape shifted by a few crucial degrees. My heart rate dropped. My shoulders softened. My vision literally widened—I could see more of the room again.
This is the quiet pivot: from “I am my reaction” to “I can influence my state.” I still had to respond, but now I was responding from a 5 instead of a 9—which meant I could be firm without being frantic.
Here’s the trap I see again and again in 2026: people try to solve nervous system problems with only cognitive tools.
- More information: another book, another podcast, another protocol
- More control: tighter calendars, stricter habits
- More self‐talk: “I’m calm” while the body screams “run”
The nervous system doesn’t speak English. It speaks breath, posture, light, movement, and sensation. Watch a dog after a scare: it shakes nose to tail to discharge arousal. Humans do it too—pacing, bouncing a leg, swaying in grief—unless we’ve trained ourselves to override it.
Recovery is the real performance skill
Here’s the paradox: the real gains—physical, mental, emotional—don’t happen in the sprint. They happen in the recovery.
Muscle is built when you rest, not when you lift. Learning consolidates when you sleep, not when you cram. Emotional resilience grows when your system can return to baseline after challenge, not when you white‐knuckle another 14‐hour day.
That “return” is your parasympathetic state: rest, digest, repair. It’s not laziness; it’s where adaptation happens. One sports physician told his athletes, “The workout isn’t over when you drop the weights; it’s over when your nervous system comes back down.” For knowledge workers, the meeting isn’t finished when the Zoom window closes. It’s finished when your breath and attention return to neutral.
If you want a simple place to start, choose one micro‐ritual and practice it daily:
- Before you reply: one physiological sigh
- When you get tunnel vision: look at something far away for 20–30 seconds to widen your visual field
- After a tense interaction: shake out your hands, roll your shoulders, or walk for 3 minutes
- Before sleep: dim lights and cut screens 30 minutes earlier
One catch: if you’ve lived at a 7–9 for years, dropping to a 3 can feel awful at first—restless, anxious, even panicky. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means your system is relearning calm. Go gently, and consult a qualified professional if anxiety, sleep issues, or trauma symptoms are persistent.
This is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for professional advice. Consult a qualified expert for personal guidance.
I share more practical regulation tools in my work and on my Website, but the heart of it is simple: rewiring happens in ordinary moments. In the aisle. Before the reply. After the meeting. One doorway, one breath, at a time.