Hello Friends,
How are you feeling today?
Like, pause for a second. Put your hand on your belly if you need to, close your eyes and check in. How are you?
I feel like often times, we think of our life falling between an ON and an OFF button. We wake up in the mornings and we are ON and get going and feed the kids, feed ourselves, run out the door, go to work, go, go and go. Come home and go, go, and go some more. Cook dinner, help with homework, put away dishes, tuck the kids in.. go, go, go. Crash and go to bed: OFF.
Let me introduce you to another button you have and you don’t even think of using.
A PAUSE button.
No one knows that you have one, since they don’t know they have one either. And a fun fact is, you get to use it any time of the day you want and no one can tell you are using it. Only you get to use it. Whenever you want. As often as you want. All through out the day. It’s not an imaginary pause. It’s a measurable timed pause. Make it a whole minute if you want.
Even if you get 8 hours of sleep per day, you still have 960 minutes left to take mini pauses (or vacations like I call them). You can physically remove yourself from a place that is chaotic (kitchen at 7 am) go to your pantry or closet, take a full minute of breathing in and out. If you don’t know what to say when you are doing it, try this:
As you are breathing in, say: I’m breathing in. As you are breathing out, say: I’m breathing out. Look at your watch if you need to, or do it until your cup is full.
You can say a mantra if you like. But I’ve learned if you are new at this sort of thing, you need concrete guidance so try the above phrases to start out with.
Also, do it through out the day, not when you are about to lose your mind. Train yourself to PAUSE as you go about your day…
You think this seems a bit ridiculous and crazy? Well. Have you ever tried to calm a screaming toddler? Look them in the eye and say: take some deep breaths. And you hold their little hands, take those breaths with them as you look them in the eyes, and it calms YOU down!! Yep. Like magic.
You know the ‘breathe’ reminder on the apple watch that pops up and annoys you? That’s what it’s trying to force you to do. It’s science. Not science fiction.
But it’s so much better if you do it without a forced reminder.
I am asking you to try it for yourself today. If meditation and mindfulness sounds far off to you, I am here to tell you that if you don’t calm yourself down, you will come undone. You will unravel.
Then you try to cope with this stress with anything that will undo the unravelling…
Emotional Eating.
Abusing Alcohol.
Excessive shopping.
Emotional avoidance.
Social medial scanning on a loop.
Further Isolation.
All of this can lead to bitterness and a sense of emptiness with utter exhaustion.
Burn out (which happens to everyone, not just doctors). Leading to a circle of never ending self sabotage. That’s when you forget what self compassion and self love is all about. You are too far removed from it. You stop loving yourself.
I used to work as a night shift staff at an inpatient drug and alcohol facility when I was an undergrad in Spokane, Washington. Later on during the summer months, I worked as a receptionist at a medical weight loss clinic in a different town in Medical School. What struck me about these two jobs was that the people who were using drugs and alcohol and those using food were both numbing a feeling of constant disconnect to the person they had become.
Talking to them from a non-medical place at that stage of my life, made me realize the shared humanity of all of this…
We are constantly using our ON and OFF switch and since we don’t use a PAUSE button, we end up using our “coping skills” that won’t help anyone–the least of all ourselves.
You know the feeling you get when you think: I NEED a vacation! what you need is a PAUSE, but vacation is just a longer PAUSE…

When I worked as a Hospitalist years ago, It was so hard to pause. When I would take an actual vacation- it would take more than a day to switch into a pause mode. I remember how burned out I felt…
8 years later, pausing intentionally calms me down.
I try to pause to eat. Every single time. If you try that, you will find that you are eating to fuel your body and not to numb some feeling that comes from being ON all the time.
Another example of mindless eating is when you are post call. Remember the glazed donuts and eggs and bacon at 2 am? I went to medical school in Michigan. I remember those days like it was yesterday. I ate mindlessly while on call and post call, because I didn’t have a minute to pause…
Try to pause when you eat this week and see your relationship with food transform slowly.
So much love to you all🌺